With Flextime, Bosses Prefer Early Birds to Night Owls
by Christopher M. Barnes, Kai Chi Yam and Ryan Fehr
12:00 PM May 13, 2014 - Harvard Business Review
Flextime programs have never been more popular than they are today. Google
allows many employees to set their own hours. At Microsoft, many employees can
choose when to start their day, as long as itfs between 9am and 11am. At the
gBig Fourh auditing firm KPMG, some 70
percent of employees work flexible hours.
Employees love these programs because they help them avoid compromises
between home and at work. Yes, there are often boundaries within which a work
day must begin and end, and at least some chunk of core hours that remain common
across employees. But within those constraints, workers can schedule their
office hours around the various other demands on their time, giving them greater
control over their lives and allowing them to accomplish more. And because
employees love the programs, companies have learned to love them, too. Research
shows that in general, flexible work practices
lead to increased productivity, higher job satisfaction, and decreased turnover
intentions.
Yet the question lingers of whether employees who take advantage of flexible
work policies incur career penalties for doing so. As noted in a
recent paper by Lisa Leslie and colleagues, the evidence is mixed.
Their research explored a potential reason for the widely varying
outcomes: managers might look upon flextime favorably when they perceive a
worker is using it to achieve higher productivity, and unfavorably when they
perceive it being used to accommodate personal-life demands. Leslie et al.
make the case that depending on what the manager attributes the flextime use to,
the employee may be either rewarded or penalized.
We looked at another possible explanation for why some flextime-using
employees and not others would experience negative career outcomes. Perhaps, we
hypothesized, it matters in which direction an employee shifts hours.
People seem to have a tendency to celebrate early-risers. Witness the enduring
popularity of aphorisms like Ben Franklinfs gearly to bed, early to rise,
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wiseh or, in China, ga dayfs planning should
be done in the morning.h In the eyes of managers with power over careers, are
employees who choose later start times stereotyped as less conscientious, and
given poorer performance evaluations on average? Do the glarksh on a team hold a
hidden edge over the gowlsh?
We began our research by testing whether such a stereotype actually exists.
We designed a laboratory experiment to discover the degree to which people made
a natural implicit (that is, nonconscious) connection between words associated
with morning (such as gsunriseh) or evening (such as gsunseth) and words
associated with conscientiousness (such as gindustriousnessh). Across 120
participants, we found that on average people do make a greater natural implicit
association between morning and conscientiousness.
With the general stereotype established, we went on to explore its impact in
actual work settings, and on ratings provided by real supervisors. The
field study we conducted tested the hypothesis that supervisor ratings of
conscientiousness and performance would be associated with the timing of an
employeefs work day. The hypothesis was supported. Across 149
employee-supervisor dyads, even after statistically controlling for total work
hours, employees who started work earlier in the day were rated by their
supervisors as more conscientious, and thus received higher performance
ratings.
We conducted another laboratory experiment to test the same hypotheses in a
more tightly controlled setting. We put participants in the role of being a
supervisor, and asked them to rate the performance of a fictitious employee. We
gave a performance profile to the supervisors, which was constant across
everyone. However, in the gmorningh condition we indicated that the fictional
employee tended to work from 7am to 3pm, and in the geveningh condition we
indicated that the fictional employee tended to work from 11am to 7pm.
Everything else about the fictional employee and performance profile was
identical across the conditions. Across 141 participants, we found that the
research participants gave higher ratings of conscientiousness and performance
to the 7am-3pm employees than to the 11am-7pm employees.
Thus, in three separate studies, we found evidence of a natural stereotype at
work: Compared to people who choose to work earlier in the day, people who
choose to work later in the day are implicitly assumed to be less conscientious
and less effective in their jobs. But an additional finding must also be noted.
In both the field study and the lab experiment, the effects were strongest for
employees who had supervisors who were larks, and disappeared for employees who
had supervisors who were night owls. (For those interested in further detail on
the studies, our formal paper will be published later this year in the Journal
of Applied Psychology.)
Of course, the implications of this research are not pretty. It seems likely
that some employees are experiencing a decrement in their performance ratings
that is not based on anything having to do with their actual performance.
Organizations may be inadvertently punishing the employees who use flextime to
start and finish working later in the day. And as accumulated poor performance
ratings have detrimental effects on career advancement, this could partly
explain why we often see flextime utilization having negative effects on
employee careers.
The important implication is that senior managers must intervene in some way
to keep supervisors from essentially punishing employees for using the very
flextime policies their organizations endorse. Rather, they should be doing the
opposite; if they encourage the use of flextime, they will produce the benefits
noted by previous research. As with other areas of unintentional but proven
bias, the advice is to increase managersf awareness of their tendency to
stereotype and why it is invalid. They must be continually reminded to recognize
their cognitive tendencies and adjust for them. Managers must be
especially diligent in rating the performance of employees based on objective
standards, and not allowing implicit prejudices – such as their morning bias –
to color their assessments.
Meanwhile, what is the individual employee to do? One message workers could
take from this research is that, if they have the opportunity to use flextime,
they might be better served by using it to move their schedules early in the day
rather than later in the day. However, we would hesitate to recommend this,
since a trend in that direction can only heighten the penalties for their
colleagues whose lives outside work make the earlier hours difficult. More
productively, they can raise the subject of hours and timing with their
supervisors, and help make explicit the understanding that start time is
immaterial.
One way or another, team leaders must come to accept that the people who use
flextime to start their day late are not necessarily lazier than their
early-bird colleagues. Otherwise, flextime policies that could serve both
employees and employers well will become known, and avoided, as routes to
dead-end careers.
Christopher M. Barnes is an assistant professor of management at the
University of Washington's Foster School of Business. He worked in the Fatigue
Countermeasures branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory before pursuing his
PhD in Organizational Behavior at Michigan State University.
Kai Chi Yam is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior in the
University of Washingtonfs Foster School of Business. His research focuses
primarily on behavioral ethics in organizations.
Ryan Fehr is an assistant professor of management at the University of
Washingtonfs Foster School of Business. His MA and PhD in Organizational
Psychology are from the University of Maryland. His research focuses primarily
on ethics, forgiveness, and gratitude in organizations.