Saturday 7 April 2018
My trial period of
working 4½ days per week will be up at the end of this month (see my previous
post on Occupational Health) and I need to decide what to do next.
I have a meeting with
HR booked in a couple of weeks’ time and it seems to me I have three choices to
discuss with them:
1)
Continue
the same arrangement, probably for another three months
2)
Reduce
further to say a four-day week
3)
Return to
full time
The obvious choice is
the first one. But I have an issue with
it.
When it works, it’s
great – for example, yesterday (Friday), I downed tools at lunchtime, caught up with an old friend for lunch, then caught up with another friend in the early evening and so by the time I got home, I was exhausted, but was also nicely relaxed for the weekend. The
problem is that I frequently make up for not working on Friday afternoon by
working on Friday evening and at the weekend. On average I work perhaps only an
hour or two less each week. So I’m clocking say 5% less hours for 10% less pay.
Is this a question of
discipline? Of laying down the law that I do not work between Friday lunchtime
and Monday morning? Is it an issue of making colleagues and clients more aware
of my situation? Of better delegation?
To some extent, yes to
all of these things, but there is a more fundamental problem.
The challenge is that
I’m not paid by the hour. Because I work for a Professional Services company,
I’m paid for my performance in other ways. There are quantitative measures like
how much sales revenue I generate and how much I bill of my own time over the
course of the year. And there are more qualitative
expectations like developing our staff, building an industry network, and demonstrating
future potential.
So, when a request
from a client comes in on Friday morning to prepare a proposal by Monday or
Tuesday, as happened recently, it’s not in my own interest to say “sorry I only
work a half day on Fridays and I don’t work weekends - can you wait until
Wednesday?” Are clients being unreasonable? Perhaps. But they also pay for my
salary as well as the nice building I work in and many other things. And they
can easily take their business to a willing competitor.
There is a fourth
option: change job function to something more predictable. But, fatigue aside, I do still enjoy
much of what I do and I’m not quite ready to give it up yet.
The conclusion I am
coming to is to go with the third option, namely revert back to full time. Given
that I still do more or less the same hours as I used to, I may as well get
paid for them.
But what I am going to do, is still take the odd
Friday afternoon off when I feel the need, either as holiday or as time in lieu
for the extra hours I put in anyway. And
I’m going to be more consistent about working from home at least one day per
week.
At some point I will
need to cut back further on my workload, to a four-day week. When that happens, I
will need to be stricter about not making up the lost hours and be clearer
about having lower annual performance.
But for now, I feel I
should make hay while the sun shines. I
suspect the time will come when the extra money that I can still earn now will
come in very handy.
Meanwhile, it’s now Saturday afternoon and I have a stack of emails from Friday to get through
– time to log on to my work computer…
