From ‘Great Resignation’ to ‘microshifting’: The new spin on 9-to-5 work schedules
NEW YORK—Before the house is humming and her teenagers ask her to whip up breakfast or chauffeur them to school, Jen Meegan reads her company emails and revisits ideas she drafted the night before.
She works for an hour or so, then after the school run, shops for groceries or gets gas before returning to focus deeply on her job as head writer and cofounder of Sheer Havoc, a creative services agency.
And so goes the rhythm of her day: working in targeted chunks for a few hours, breaking for an hour or two to tend to family and personal needs and repeating the pattern until she finishes her work late at night.
Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labor fits around and between nonwork responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.
“Sometimes the break’s when most of the work will get done in your head, because you’re not sitting in front of a laptop just staring at a screen going, ‘I can’t come up with anything,’” Meegan says.
The practice is growing in popularity among workers and gaining acceptance in some organizations as a way to improve work-life balance. The remote and hybrid arrangements that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic left some people aching for time to care for others or themselves once return-to-office mandates were issued.
“As more managers and more organizations get better adept at giving a little bit of autonomy, this is becoming not only a little more popular, but it also gives employees the motivation and almost the license to ask for this,” says Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business.
Boosting creativity and productivity
While some independent contractors say they’ve been microshifting for years, the term is catching on among people holding down jobs that traditionally require set, contiguous hours.
Proponents argue that working in increments boosts productivity by giving the brain breaks. Taking walks or attending a child’s school function can be reinvigorating for people who get drained from sitting at a desk or looking at a computer screen, supporters say.
“From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks,” Rockmann says. “When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.”
Impact on relationships
Effective teams are committed to working together collaboratively, but “the whole idea of microshifting is taking care of yourself,” Rockmann says. “It’s not that taking care of yourself is bad. It places the emphasis on the individual, not the relationships.”
Pranav Dalal, founder and CEO of California-based remote staffing firm Office Beacon, manages employees in India, the Philippines, Mexico and South Africa.
“It’s happening without a policy and without me saying it, and those are in positions where they’re more managerial positions,” he says. “I don’t really question it because I know that people are getting their work done at those levels.”
As a single father, Dalal says he understands. But there are times when people take it too far. When one team member routinely showed up late to in-person work events because they were tending to personal business, it created problems, so Dalal let that employee go.
“As an employer, it definitely is a big shift for companies. And the shift is, essentially, can you deliver the same quality service, reliably, when there’s microshifting happening?”
