Have you heard of micro shifting? Well, micro shifting describes the practice of breaking the traditional eight hour workday into small flexible bursts of work, micro shifts, if you will. And these get distributed across the day or even into the evening or late at night, depending on when you work your best.

So for example, somebody might work from 6:30 to 9:00 clock in the morning and then take their kids to school and hit the gym, and then work again from 11:30 to 3:00pm, then break for errands or maybe caregiving for those same school age kids and then finish up their work day, say at 8, from 8 to 10pm. It's a natural evolution of asynchronous work and flex time, but less formal, like there's no set hours to it and people get to flex, flex and micro burst work whenever they want to. So it's highly individual and very situational.

And in this episode of the podcast, you're going to learn why micro shifting, this flexible burst style of working that many people who work from home are using, only succeeds when it's intentionally designed, clearly communicated and built on a foundation of trust. It absolutely can work, but you need those three components in order for it to work.

According to a study from OWL Labs, this structured approach to flexible working, where employees work again in these short nonlinear blocks based on their personal energy, their responsibilities, their productivity patterns, what time of day they work best, that sort of thing. And they surveyed, owl Labs surveyed 2,000 U.S. workers, and in that survey they found that 63% of workers think that employers should have better strategies and increased flexibility for employees who are managing their time between work and other responsibilities.

So 63% of workers think that their employers need to do a better job at this. And so let's dive into what it is, how it emerged, why we're calling it that, and how we can make it work better. So again, why did it emerge? Of course, the hybrid work that came post pandemic and people who during the pandemic and during those work from home orders were forced to do a combination of their job and caregiving and their household responsibilities and all the things sort of all mashed together. So people kind of got used to it. So some people like that flexibility.

There are other people who like to micro shift because they work better at different times of the day. Maybe they work really well first thing in the morning and then they work, have another great burst of energy and creativity late in the evening. So again, it could work to their cognitive rhythms. It's also about autonomy and people feeling that they have control and freedom over their own time. Now let's look at what makes micro shifting appealing. And then we'll look at some of the challenges and then we'll look at, and dive deep into if you are going to do this, or perhaps it's already happening in your organization, how can it be better structured? How can it be by design instead of by accident? Because there are some problems that go along with it, especially when it is by accident and not by design. Okay, so first let's dive into what makes it appealing.

Well, it allows people to work when they're at their best. And when they're at their best, again, could be when their cognitive load is or when their cognition is sharper based on cognitive load factors and a variety of different things. So it allows people to work when they're at their best. It reflects reality because life does not neatly fit into a 9 to 5 schedule. Even something as simple as like going to the doctor instead of taking a couple of hours of paid time off to go to the doctor. Well, what if you just instead did micro shifting so that in those couple of hours while you were driving to your doctor's appointment, at your doctor's appointment, and driving home from your doctor's appointment, you made up those hours later in the day and then you didn't have to take that as PTO. It can also reduce burnout and increase job satisfaction when it's designed intentionally and when it's executed well within the organization. So at its best, micro shifting can humanize work. It gives people agency over their time and energy.

So let's dive more deeply into some of these pros before we go into the cons. So first of all, it aligns with people's natural energy cycles. I bet if I asked you, like, are you a morning person or an evening person or a mid afternoon person? I mean, you know, you know when you're at your best. So when people can work when they're cognitively at their sharpest, rather than forcing productivity during those low energy hours, it's going to make a difference not only to the work that gets produced, but also how people feel when they're producing that work. Now, Daniel Pink wrote, he's written a number of different books, but he wrote a book called When. And in that book he presents some really powerful research where he summarizes some different chronobiology studies that support the idea that when people work absolutely impacts their performance. So if you're a morning person and you get the opportunity to, let's say, wake up at 5am, get a quick workout in and then be at your desk by six. If that's when you work your best, your work is probably going to be better.

Again, this is what the research suggests and you're going to enjoy doing it more and you're going to feel that certain sense of satisfaction. So alignment with people's natural energy cycles. The second thing that it has going for it is improved well being and reduced burnout. Again, when it is designed intentionally so micro shifting can allow for self care, it can allow for family responsibilities, whether that means caring for younger people, caring for older people. It can also aid in recovery breaks during the day. Because if you're doing deeply focused work, that can be mentally exhausting. And so then taking a micro break to go for a walk or hit the gym or run some errands that don't require much cognitive load can really help employees avoid exhaustion. And it can also because they're balancing their work and their professional life throughout the day.

It can also lower resentment towards rigid, you know, having a butt, having your butt in your seat at, you know, certain times of the day, like a standard 9 to 5 or 8 to 5. So it improves well being and reduces burnout again if done effectively. And there is increased autonomy and trust because people are in charge of their own schedule. So when managed well, micro shifting signals trust between the employer and the employee, reinforcing psychological safety. Like we're not going to, or we're, we're going to give you the space to get your work done, we're going to trust that you're getting your work done and we're not going to take you to task on, you know, where were you exactly at 2:00?

That's also going to reinforce accountability rather than surveillance and micromanagement because it's really more about managing by results instead of managing by, you know, time of butts in seats. And then it will offer better global collaboration for those of you who are working across time zones or if your organization works across time zones, whether that be with your clients or, or whether that be with other counterparts who work for your same organization but just in different locations, that distributed micro shifting might naturally extend the organization's awake time or your ability to collaborate with people in a, a different time zone.

And I can just give you a for, for instance and this is way, way pre pandemic. This goes back about 15 years ago when my husband was working for a global technology firm and the business partners that he was working with most regularly were in. He was doing, you know, a good chunk of his work in the morning, but then he was saving, say, three, four hours of work to the evening. So he might then work again from 7 until 11pm, finishing up his workday when the folks in India were in the office. Now, because technology there was different than it was here, people didn't necessarily have reliable Internet access in their home. And so he could really only collaborate with them when they were in the office. And so that meant him shifting his work, work time to be when they were in the office. So again, it does yield better global collaboration when you have that flexibility to be able to work either early, early in the morning or late at night when you've got those business partners who are in different parts of the country.

Okay, so obviously, and clearly there are some benefits to this, but without solid design, micro shifting becomes disorienting for teams, frustrating for leaders, and there's a whole host of issues that go along with it. Now, let's look at some of those cons. So, first of all, let's go to cognition. So I know I was talking about, you know, it's great to be able to have some of those mental brain breaks throughout the day. Well, depending on how you're breaking up your day, you could be fragmenting your focus. So cognitive science shows that it takes 20 to 30 minutes to reach that deep focus state again after you've been interrupted. So if you're doing focus work and you're deeply connected to it, and then you have to, like, stop and go get the kids from the bus stop, or, you know, take a kid to a doctor's appointment or maybe take yourself to a doctor's appointment and then you come back. Well, if you are doing that deeply focused work, it can again take you 20 to 30 minutes to get back to that point where you are deeply focused and all of the pieces are coming together in your brain.

Now, I remember this so distinctly from writing my dissertation. Now, again, gosh, that was like more than 20 years ago. Practice, oh, God, like 25 years ago, dating myself here. But when I was writing my dissertation, I could think faster than I could type. And I might have like two or three paragraphs composed in my head, and it was just a matter of typing them out as fast as I could before I lost that train of thought or that idea. And God forbid my dog need to go out and, you know, be let outside while I was in the midst of a big, you know, thought like that and having a big idea and having to, like, even something as simple as stand up, walk away from my desk, let you know, open the sliding glass door so the dog can get out. I would potentially lose sometimes hours of work when that happened. So micro shifting, if unstructured, can trap workers into this perpetual, like, ramp up, get back into that deep, focused state.

So if you're not doing it effectively, if you're not doing it by design, you could have fragmentation of focus instead of better focus. There can be absolutely chaos in terms of coordination. So when people on teams are micro shifting without being in lockstep with one another, either communicating it or knowing that other people are doing it, teams will lose their rhythm. So when everybody's availability differs and you're not sure when you can have meetings, and you're like searching people's schedules to try to find times, or just assuming that everybody's gonna be available at 3 o' clock on a Tuesday, and you send the meeting notice for three o' clock on a Tuesday and a half, the people don't come. That's what we're talking about. So it can make scheduling meetings difficult, it can make various parts of handing projects off to one to other members of the project team, and just make collaboration in general difficult, leading to longer feedback loops, longer cycles of getting work done. So it can result in chaos of coordination and schedules. Now, again, if not done well, it can lead to the third downfall, which is erosion of your boundaries.

So when work is seeping into every hour of the day and during your off time, people might feel like they're always working, feel like they're always on, even when they're not. So just that psychological presence of work never ends. There's always one more email. There's always, you know, another beep, a ding, another team's message or slack message popping up. And so again, if you're not tightly managing your boundaries, it can have more of a burnout impact on you than actually the, the pro that we talked about before, which was making the improved, you know, improved wellbeing. So it can have the opposite effect if you're not managing it well. And then the fourth thing is that there can be trust issues. So if you are micro shifting without telling anyone or someone on your team is micro shifting without telling anyone, then it's gonna look like you're going rogue and that it's not gonna show up as micro shifting to your colleagues if you're not online all the time during traditional hours.

And micro shifting has, or flex time or whatever you want to call it, has not been something that's been discussed and designed in your organization. Your peers, your manager, even your clients might think you're slacking throughout the workday. So it can truly lead to some disastrous trust issues if it has not been planned, discussed and you know, carefully implemented. So again, let me draw your attention. So, now we're going to talk about like how to design it intentionally and how to design it in a way that makes it work. Now again, I want to draw your attention back to that. Our Lab study with 63% of workers thinking that employ should be doing a better job at having strategies and flexibility baked into their organizations so that people can better manage their time between their home time or their personal time and their work time. So if we take this on from a UX thinking standpoint, micro shifting really is a user driven adaptation.

So this isn't something that organizations came up with. This is something that employees have come up with to make their balancing their personal responsibilities and their work responsibilities work better. So people are designing their work around their lives and their lives around their work, but without having a system that has been actually designed for it. And this mismatch creates friction again, it creates friction that can erode trust. It creates friction that can make it not work for people. So the problem isn't necessarily the micro shifting itself. It's that most organizations just have not intentionally designed for it. So if we want to design for micro shifting, it means clear communication on the protocols.

What is an acceptable level of response time? Are there specific times of the day that we're not going to allow micro shifting? And we're going to say we have these standard hours. Maybe it's like noon to 3pm, not even a huge window, but just a small amount of time that every day, or maybe it's even certain days of the week that we know that other people will be available, whether that be for quick questions for one on ones for scheduled meetings, team meetings and the like. Like, we need to be really transparent and honest with our trans. With our availability indicators. So whether that is red, yellow, green on teams or online offline on Slack or whatever tools you're using, people need to be honest about them. Now if you, if you're a longtime listener of the podcast, I'm sure you've heard me talk about mouse jigglers. So I'm holding a mouse here in my hand. But the mouse jiggler is a little platform that you set your mouse on that moves your mouse around the screen when you are at the gym or when you are whatever we have to do away with that kind of stuff.

If we are going to take on micro shifting in an ethical, responsible way that's going to build trust and promote collaboration across the team, we have to be transparent about when we are available and working and when we are not. So if you're using teams, then you want to be red when you're away and like absolutely be red when you're away. There's no, no, there's no faking it like you're at the doctor or you're present with your children. You're caregiving. Whatever it is, you're at the gym, be at the gym. If you're helping your kids with your home with their homework, be helping them with their homework. Don't be also sort of half kind of maybe working. Okay, we need to shift our performance metrics.

So it really does need to be outcomes over hours, but there also needs to be some balance because we can't have somebody who's just like absolutely brilliant at their job and they can do 40 hours of work in like, you know, three hours in a week. So we need to have some performance metrics that are based in actually getting work done, not necessarily in time in seat, but we also do need to, again, we need to balance that because availability is a thing. Because of your own availability to other people is what helps them get their work done. Because you have certain subject matter expertise and people need to be able to reach you for that. So even if you could get all of your work done, the, you know, results that would deem you effective in your job in just a handful of hours each week, well, first of all, I would ask you to then push back on your organization to get more responsibility. Hopefully that more responsibility comes with a higher, higher wages as well. Because if you are now able to get all of your work done in just a very, very short amount of time, it's time for you to get some, some more work or more responsibility in your organization. But again, part of your role is not just you getting your work done, but is available for your colleagues, for your boss, for your clients and so on.

So we really do need to think in a balanced approach about those performance metrics. It's not about butts in seats, it's about availability of you and it's about you doing your contribution. And then we need to make sure that we're designing workflows that really do support asynchronous collaboration. So share docs, sending a loom update or you know, recording those. And if you're not familiar with Loom, it's just a video recording thing. So you can record a short video message for somebody or a little training tutorial, or walk somebody through a standard operating procedure or something like that, or you know, slack threads, team threads, those sorts of things as opposed to live meetings. So when we have those systems optimized and our way of working optimized, it can really make a difference.

So let's dive into what would be some design principles that you should follow if you want to take on micro shifting in your organization. So when we put this through the UX thinking lens or perspective, again we're going to find that micro shifting is that user driven adaptation because the users came up with it. And there are some just brilliant things when users come up with, you know, the idea. There's a lot of buy in. Yeah, it's really easy to get buy in. Buy in's already there. Okay, so it's a user driven adaptation and people have redesigned their own experience of work because this, the old system didn't fit or the system that they were forced to live within during the pandemic had some good upside and they're trying to still capitalize on that upside.

But the problem is the way we have designed work, the way we design our organizations has not kept up or caught up. And again, this was foisted upon us during the pandemic. Now it's time to think about doing this on purpose by design. And if you want to do it on purpose by design, then you kind of get, I mean the strategy is, is micro shifting. But then we gotta get tactical and we have to really, really design it. So let me give you five design principles for micro shifting. If you wanna take this on in your organization. Here are your five design principles.

First, make the invisible visible. We have to be able to see each other's availability. So we need to use shared calendars, status indicators, standard response times to things. Maybe your standard response time is, you know, maybe it's 24 hours for certain types of things. Maybe it is. Maybe you flag your emails differently, if it's an email or, or you tag your Slack messages or things differently when you need a faster response time. But having those response times standardized, having shared calendars, making sure that people know who's working when absolutely will make the difference between having this work or not. Because if I know that you're micro shifting and I'm micro shifting and I can see what your availability is, then I'm not going to get frustrated.

If at 3 o' clock in the afternoon I can't reach you because I know you're micro shifting, if I know you're a parent, I'm probably, I'm probably thinking you're like, like, you know, hanging out with your kid or helping them with homework or picking them up from school or coaching their soccer team or who knows what it is you're doing. But if I know that's what you're doing, then I'm not gonna be frustrated with you. So we have to make the invisible, that is when you're not working visible to others. And we have to, again, we have to take all the sneakiness out of it. We're just gonna be straight with one another and it's gonna be completely apparent. All right, then step two, your next design principle here is to design your communication intentionally. So what is useful for asynchronous updates? When do you need to have people like together and synchronous in a meeting? When should it be a written recap? When should it be a video update? When do we need to schedule those overlap hours so that we can have that synchronous communication and those, those conversations and meetings? So we need to design our communication intentionally.

Again, whether it's asynchronous synchronous, how we're using our different communication platforms across the company, we absolutely have to design that intentionally. And that might mean adopting some norms that maybe aren't your favorite. Okay. And this would be a trade off in terms of I want to do micro shifting. Maybe you don't like unannounced teams calls, but maybe that's one of the intentionally designed communication norms that we call each other on teams when we have a quick question during those synchronous hours. And so instead of saying like, nope, I don't take those teams calls, you're going to have to suck it up, buttercup, and take those teams calls, you know, on the spot. And believe me, it's not really that hard for those of you who don't like doing it. You know, we used to use the good old telephone back in the day and people answered it when it rang.

But again, there may be some trade offs. So you may say, yeah, I really want micro shifting. I really don't like to take those teams calls unannounced. But okay, in order to make micro shifting work, I will deal with that. Okay? So again, you might not like everything that comes out of it, but you really do have to get on board with it. Okay, from the third thing that we need to design into this is how we're measuring outcomes. So we need to not be, you know, so concerned about butts in seats and exactly how many hours somebody is working each week. We need to be more focused on the outcomes and how do we measure those outcomes, how do, how does somebody know when they're successful? How do we know when the work is getting done? So we need to be really explicit about that and we need to design that and, and make sure everybody is absolutely aware of what constitutes work getting done, what constitutes work getting done well, and, and so forth.

And then our fourth thing to design around is to build trust before flexibility. So we have to have those strong trusting relationships before we start to micro shift. Because if people are micro shifting and we don't trust them, then we're going to be entirely suspicious when they are away from their desk doing something else. So that trust needs to come first, flexibility comes second. So if trust is lacking in those relationships, there's things you can do to shore up trust, get to know people, find out what makes them tick, meet with them with no agenda. There's lots and lots of different ways that you can get to know people and build a trusting relationship first. But the trust has to be there. It is not going to organically evolve in a micro shifting culture.

Okay? And then the last thing, the last design principle for making micro shifting work in yourn is to create team level agreements. So and, and those team level agreements go back to several of the things we've just been talking here about in these design principles. So let's just say for example, some of that normative behavior is we're going to be, everybody's going to be online between noon and three. Okay. Then that gets codified, it gets written into a team level agreement and whatever other pieces of micro shifting are going to go into that maybe it's people's, maybe you have a relatively set micro shifting schedule and you're going to publish that. Whatever it is, you need to make sure that that is team level. Everybody knows that. Everybody signed off on it.

Okay? So that's what I mean by creating team level agreements. And I would say share those team level agreements with your clients as well. The accounting firm that I used to use had people in different parts of the world. And so each person's name on our, on Slack, because that's how I communicated with them most frequently on Slack, behind their name or as part of their name. It said the hours that they worked in which time zones so, and Several of them were micro shift. They worked from like 8am to noon in central time. And then they worked again, you know, like, I don't know, 2 to 6am in the morning or something like that. Just, you know, and they were asleep from, or it was their personal time or whatever from like my time, noon, until what would be my middle of the night.

Because they were in a different part of the world. But I could see and know exactly what kind of response time I would get from them because it was right there in their name on Slack. So it said like first, last and then the hours that they worked. Okay, so, so let's wrap this up. Micro shifting is not inherently good or bad. It's just poorly designed in most organizations because users started it, employees started it and didn't tell anyone. So it can work really well in your organization. The teams that will thrive in micro shifting are the ones who are going to design for it and they will design flexibility into it.

They will communicate with precision with one another and they will lead from a place of trust and they will contribute to one another from a place of trust. So if micro shifting is something that would make your work life balance better, or if you're in HR or leadership and you might think, and you think it might be an attractive benefit to help to, you know, attract and retain talent in your organization, then absolutely go for it. But do the things that we just talked about here. Do those five things. Design for it.

Here, let me just quick, quickly recap them for you again one last time. Make the invisible visible. So use shared calendars. Be online when you're supposed to be online. Be away when you're supposed to be away. Design your communication intentionally. So when it's an asynchronous thing that you know it's asynchronous. Use technology well for your communication. Measure outcomes, not just hours butt on seats. So figure out what your performance metrics are and then manage to those. Build trust before flexibility.

You have to have those trusting relationships in place first in order for this to work. And then create those team level agreements where you're codifying all the things that we just talked about. All right, so again, it may be an attractive benefit to help and retain talent. It may be something that really works for you personally in managing your work life and your personal life. Go for it, but design it with integrity, with guard rails, with intention. Now if you or your team is already micro shifting and you haven't designed it, you know, on purpose, I want to know, are you just dealing with it? Are you suspicious about other people or do you think that they're really working when they're away from their desk? Do you think that others are micro shifting and you know, and what's your experience of yourself after listening to this episode? Do you think maybe you need to bring this to the rest of your team, to your manager, maybe even to your clients, and have that explicit conversation about it? Hit me up over on social media and let me know what you're thinking about it. You can find my social media handles over on the show notes page for this episode and this.

And you can find those @janelanderson.com/242 for episode 242. We'll catch you next week, my friends.