Every day at work, at home, at leisure, hardly an hour goes by without a comment or two about time: I don’t have time to get everything done; we ran out of time; I’d love to do that but I am busy then – or less frequently, I was so absorbed that time just flew by. Time has become the ultimate scarce resource; and we use financial words to describe it. We budget time, invest time, allocate time and waste time. And like money, we always seem to wish we had more of it.
At first, many Books@Work companies and participants are skeptical about losing an hour from their work day to discuss literature. A sales manager from a large manufacturing company could not fathom how a literature discussion would create value in a schedule that kept him constantly on the road. But Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk surfaced a tension within his team about whether they needed to work on flights when traveling together or if they could decide to take time for themselves. The book gave them permission to explore and resolve the tension.
Image from: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY via WikiArt.org
The group focused on the power of “sitting in the window seat,” of taking the time (as the author did when reflecting on the death of her father) to think, refresh and restore. The window seat became a shared (and continually used) metaphor among the team for taking the time to “look at the world” or to “take your time.” A participant who works on the floor at a fast-growing distribution center, described similar time pressures that his team faces. He said, “Everybody works a lot of hours. It’s hard to get them to invest. I’m losing that hour of work, which is going to push us behind.” But after three years of book discussions, he has discovered, “I need that hour off the floor to just regenerate almost. All day I haven’t had time to come and shut everything down. It’s a refresher for me. The [discussion] makes me more efficient.”
In a recent book on time and learning, social philosopher Michel Alhadeff-Jones asserts that when institutions move beyond conventional views of work time, they can create new rhythms of activity and stronger social ties that “extend margins of freedom and agency.” He suggests the value of “imaginary time” in which social interactions that are released from rigid time structures unleash new levels of individual and collective empowerment. Books@Work participants have said as much – and more.
One executive who has brought the program to every level of the company said, “[Since we started Books@Work], we’re much more efficient in the use of our time. I would say the engagement’s better. The team is more used to engaging on issues that we typically would avoid. We would maintain some level of pseudo community in the spirit of efficiency, but now we tackle the elephant in the room a little bit easier. That’s been a welcome surprise for us.”
The pace of life inside and outside of work often precludes the slow time required for reading and shared reflection. Many participants express genuine delight to slow down, read and share ideas with colleagues – and find that doing so allows them to more quickly tackle workplace issues. “It’s focus and speed of execution,” one manufacturing executive said. “Now that we’ve used the platform to make mental models more explicit, we can get right at the issue that may be sensitive.” Bringing these experiences into the workplace adds a human dimension to work that changes the quality of relationships beyond the time invested. And that’s worth making time for.
Image: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia /
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