Sam Fisher: Patch breaks an indicator of workplace flexibility

Smokos have evolved. Photo / Richard Robinson

Opinion

It is encouraging how the world's problems can be solved over morning smoko.

Recently I dropped in to see some ex-colleagues for a cuppa discussing what often comes up at work - jobs somewhere else. The chat was soon dominated by recent ads promoting jobs with flexible working conditions and what this really meant.

My observation was that offices are family-friendly until you bring in your family.

The way to test the resolve of your employers is to bring in toddlers and let them run around the office for half an hour.

One of the team remarked that in his experience the only time jobs are flexible is before you've signed the contract.

We agreed that opportunities for flexibility in modern workplaces have never been greater.

With new technology, why do staff need to go to the office, particularly now phones are smarter than their operators and we have satellite video-conference facilities?

Today you have clever computer applications that post your SWOT analysis and ill-conceived circle diagram in real-time to the Invercargill office.

Not that anyone has an office in Invercargill any more.

Another factor that supports making working more flexible is that people don't produce anything.

I regularly ask when in groups of people if anyone actually "does" something, and usually the answer is no.

Some say they do, but lawyers and accountants can be eliminated immediately, in more than one sense, unless they save refugees.

Selling things is a long way from creating anything.

Management, marketing, office and sales work doesn't count.

Most workers in offices answer emails and go to meetings all day.

The last time half our workforce actually made something was in woodwork at school.

I did meet a factory worker and a builder at a gathering once but they felt very out of place and soon left.

Without any actual real outputs it seems possible to better organise 40 hours of not doing anything.

The smoko working group suggested different summer and winter hours.

Employees should be allowed to work fewer hours in winter, say an hour a day off, as beds are much toastier in the middle of the year.

Unfortunately we couldn't agree that the time would be made up in summer.

Flexitime works as long as it means starting and finishing whenever it suits.

This has real promise as a family-friendly policy - and provides opportunities to use that toasty bed to start a family.

We invented the "patch break", replacing smoking breaks so you still could pop out 10 times a day.

During a patch break, employees could refit nicotine patches and change gum while still retaining the mental health and networking benefits of smoking.

The concept that workers should be able to work in time with their body clocks was also mentioned.

The conclusion was that night owls are discriminated against by modern offices. If you like to work at 9 in the evening, why do you need to be up and at work at 8am (or "stupid o'clock" as we were referring to it)?

This would never improve until the Human Rights Commission prevents early-morning Nazis running our workplaces.

We were just getting on to the flexibility of having whanau support in the office, or specifically, "why couldn't girlfriends be allowed to come in and hang out", when the meeting was cut short.

The others had to return to having meetings and staring at their computer screens, and one of them had a performance review.

Then the phone went and I had to rush to my computer to do an all-night report, for delivery at 8am.

I might need to take another look at those job ads promising flexible conditions and family-friendly offices.