It’s a brave employee who makes the case for working less to their manager.
It takes an inordinate amount of corporate courage because many managers are wedded to the idea that time spent at your desk is time well spent. But, as we’ve written before, an expanding body of research shows that letting employees unplug from time to time can pay off. And organizations are acting on these findings to experiment with more flexible and forward-thinking people practices.
So maybe instead of embracing employee engagement models, we should consider employee disengagement models.
This is the idea behind Dr. David Rock’s, NLI’s Co-founder and CEO, latest article on Forbes. In it, David makes the brain-based case for working less to achieve more. He explores why work is largely about control and relevance to most people, what the research on working less shows, and what the logistics of disengagement would look like.
David suggests that we can make a number of adjustments—both to our daily schedules and to our organizational cultures—to enable people to work less but achieve more.
It’s all part of building a better normal, and more human organizations.
