Hey guys, hope you are all well. Just wanted to put up a little post on one of the things I was thinking about today. So for better or worse I spend a lot of my day thinking of ways I’d develop ideas and take things further. One of those big ideas is the development of my company R16 Media which I hope to take the web design industry to another level. To do this I would have to take on staff and that got me thinking about employment hours and the way people work. (yes, I really do think about this stuff on a saturday!)

Anyway I’m reading Tim Ferris’s book ‘the four hour work week’ at the moment and one of his theories is that people shouldn’t work the 9-5, mainly because that would add up to more than 4 hours a week but also because they may not be everyone’s most productive hours. This brings me to my first point, why make your staff work set hours, if they’re good at their job and don’t need every hour god sends to do it why reward them with more work. Equally if they prefer to work into the evening and sleep late in the mornings, why not just let them, obviously this depends on your industry but I know it mine aslong as we meet with staff regularly it’s no problem to let them work when they like. Trust your employees and they’ll give you their best.

My second point is how a number of companies are reducing their staff’s ‘work’ by 20%. Google is the prime example of this with their 20% self research time which allows engineers to spend one day a week working on whatever they like. This has spawned products such as Gmail and Google Reader so it clearly works, there are more examples of Google’s 20% time philosophy here.

A further example is the web and conference company Carsonified who take every friday off.

Carsonified are a greatly successful company (and so are Google if you haven’t heard) this four day week thing doesn’t seem to be a fluke. The simple reason I believe is if you employee the right type of people they won’t be able to NOT work on cool new stuff, they enjoy what they do and will want to work what is their ‘day off’ or ‘research day’, obviously they will use this day how they like but just having a little trust in your employees and giving them a little more free rein could give your business some brilliant ideas, remember it’s your employees who know most about how to make your business better and more successful.

OK I’m done for now – Trust your staff and don’t micromanage. Let me know your opinions. Night.