To Increase Productivity, Give Your Employees Freedom

Allow employees to partially control their work schedule and to take breaks when needed

The following is adapted from The Problem Isn’t Their Paycheck.

Let’s say you have two employees. Employee A works 365 days a year but produces only $100 of net profit for your business. Employee B works just one day a year, but on that day they produce $1 million of net profit for your business. Which employee would you choose?

The obvious—and overly simplified—answer is employee B. Why? Because it’s not about the hours the employee works; it’s about the production of those hours.

Now, this example is extreme, but it illustrates an important point: how many hours your employees work is not as important as how much work they produce in those hours. 

If you want your employees producing more work in their hours, you need to give them freedom. With freedom, employees have the control to work in whatever way is most productive for them. In this article, I’ll explain how you can increase your productivity by giving your employees the freedom to at least partially control their own work schedule and to take breaks when needed.

Harvard Business Review concluded that very few people can be in a state of high concentration for more than four or five days in a row. On top of that, in this study, they said that the human brain has a hard time sustaining more than four or five extremely productive hours in a day.

Everybody thinks they have to work forty hours a week, but the study shows that you have a limited number of peak performance hours in a week—and it’s not forty. The whole idea that we’re supposed to work forty hours a week was created during the manufacturing era, around how the machine manufacturing process worked. The man who came up with the forty-hour workweek analyzed his machinery and determined that they operated most efficiently at approximately forty hours per week. So this schedule was never created for humans or how we are designed to work most effectively.

According to David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work, we get just six peak performance hours in an entire week. Beyond that, we get four to five hours a day of productive time, no more than four or five days a week. To expect more than that is unrealistic.

These studies serve to debunk the mentality of the work, work, work, grind, grind, grind mentality. Do people have the ability to work and grind and go hard for certain lengths of time? Of course. You’ve probably done it yourself. But it’s not sustainable. Most of that grinding and working has been drudgery—not your extremely productive peak performance.

Understanding this truth is just step one. Part of the freedom that people need in order to be their most productive is the freedom to choose when it’s best for them to tap into their peak performance.

You can give people the freedom to have that really productive time in the four or five hours that work best for them. Give them the freedom to find their circadian rhythm, whether they’re most productive in the morning, middle of the day, or later in the afternoon. We’re all wired differently.

Some people think you have to wake up at 4:30 a.m., when the sun’s still down, to get anything done. That’s exactly the opposite of me. I wake up about 8 a.m. every day. Some people would think that I’m lazy, but my peak performance hours are in the evenings after my kids are in bed.

I have the freedom to do that because I own my own business. So how cool would it be if your employees had the freedom to be able to find their own peak performance time? Now, I’m not saying you have to give all your employees complete autonomy to work anytime within the twenty-four-hour day. At the very least, though, you should allow them to gain an understanding of when they are most productive within the workday or within their scheduled hours—and then give them the freedom to choose to do their most important work during that time.

When I worked in a sea of cubicles as a credit card collector, I would often have very emotional phone calls with people. I remember a big win, when somebody paid in full. It was a great call, but it took a lot out of me to engage with this person, work hard with them, and essentially make the sale happen.

After that, I couldn’t just go on to the next call. I needed a break to renew myself and ensure I could be my best on the next call. But I looked at my watch and saw that my next break wasn’t scheduled for forty-seven minutes. My manager had zero leeway for unscheduled breaks, so I pretended that I had to go to the bathroom just so I could splash water on my face and breathe for a bit.

Think about that: In order to continue producing at a high level, I knew that I needed to refresh. But my manager didn’t allow me the freedom to do that, so I was forced to compromise my integrity and say that I needed to use the restroom, just so I could continue to operate at the level I expected of myself. How short-sighted is that?

You might think that employees who take the shortest breaks are the most productive, but that isn’t true. There was a study done that required people to take a break every twenty minutes. And it wasn’t just to stop working for a minute or look up from their task. No, every twenty minutes they had to get on their personal social media, watch a video they wanted to watch unrelated to their work, or use their work computer for personal use.

The study found that the number of minutes those employees spent working in a day went down, which makes sense. More breaks means less production time on the clock…but the amount they were able to produce dramatically increased. Because they were able to raise the level of production per minute, they were able to produce more in a single day—even when the total work time was reduced. Starting to make sense now?

Another study done by Happify, which appears in the book The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, shows that allowing employees to take breaks whenever they want—no scheduled lunches, just eating whenever they want to eat, taking a break whenever they need one—leads to a 30 percent higher level of focus when they are working. The brain activity of the study participants was higher, which led to increased efficiency. They had over 50 percent higher levels of creativity, which means they were better able to solve problems. And they were 46 percent less likely to call in sick or miss work.

If you give your employees more freedom, they can be more productive. You can be more productive as well, because you will no longer be spending your time tracking when your employees clock in and out and when they take breaks.

Human beings are not machines. We work better—and are happier—when given the autonomy to control our own time. Start giving your employees more freedom, and see productivity rise.

For more advice on productivity and freedom, you can find The Problem Isn’t Their Paycheck on Amazon.