When works best for you?

The answer to this week’s title question is much the same as last week’s – ‘it all depends on the person and the task’!

Last time, I was looking at a couple of the ways our workspaces impact on conflict – either positively or negatively.  This time, it’s all about time.

In last week’s post, I quoted American Social Theorist, Jeremy Rifkin, as saying:

‘Space and time have been annihilated in the digital age’ –

And went on to tell you why I disagreed with him re space.  Spoiler alert!:

I disagree with him re time as well.

As with space, I understand his thinking.  As I say on the show, ‘we can cross time-zones in a click – and we can stretch and compress our own time – and even move it around to suit ourselves’; but rather than heading for extinction, temporal barriers, like the physical variety, are alive and evolving.

I’m writing this on Thursday 22nd May 2025 – and just yesterday, I came across a practical example of time creating conflict at work.  In fact, it’s an example of time and space conspiring to create division.

A report by the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership at King’s College London:

‘Return-to-office mandates: what is at stake for workers, companies, and gender equality?’  f

Says that only 42% of staff would comply with a demand by their employer, for them to go back into the office fulltime.  That’s down 10% since 2022.

Yes, that’s primarily about where people feel works best for them – but it’s also about how they spend their time.  Currently, the majority of ‘office’ staff who work from home are doing it as part of a hybrid arrangement.  How much flexibility that gives each person obviously depends on their:

·         industry,

·         particular employer and

·         role;

but an RTO mandate does mean some loss of autonomy, because:

·         they have to be in the same place at the same time every day (rather than, perhaps, having some say in which days/times they’re in the office) and

·         a portion of their time every day has to be spent on commuting.

With so many employers wanting all their staff back in the office, all the time – and increasing numbers of staff (40% in 2022 – up to 50% in 2025) saying they’d look for another job, rather than be forced into that situation – this is going to be a rich source of conflict for some time to come.  I’ll certainly come back to it – in the not too distant future.

I can’t promise anything yet, but I am hoping to look at that in more detail on the pod in the near future.

For now, here are five tips to help you avoid some other time traps:

1 ‘Sleep is your superpower’,

That’s the title of a TED talk by Prof. Matt Walker – billed as ‘the world’s No. 1 sleep expert’.

He points out that sleep is an investment.  My own view is that it’s the biggest time investment we can make in our conversations.  (If that sounds mad, listen to the show and I think you’ll see what I’m saying).

2 Sometimes, silence really is golden:

I could also use a regular phrase here:

‘Just because we can doesn’t always mean we should’.

One thing which stops a lot of us sleeping properly is our ‘always on’ work culture.  Because, technically, tech lets us work anytime, I know plenty of people send emails etc either very late at night, or very early in the morning – disrupting their own and, potentially, their recipient’s sleep. 

No, I know we don’t actually have to jump on every message the moment it lands – but if you don’t have ‘bedtime mode’ on your phone and it starts flashing and pinging at you, it can be quite difficult to resist, can’t it?  FoMO is a powerful draw!

Of course you can’t tell your team when to go to sleep and when to wake up; but you can help them – and yourself – by having a policy of no work communication between certain times.  There may be exceptions, of course, but for most of us, it’s about culture, rather than real need.

Since 2017, workers in French companies employing more than fifty people have had the legal ‘right to disconnect’.  The law was brought in because it was felt the expectation to deal with work-related communication out of hours meant staff weren’t being paid fairly for overtime (over and above the thirty-five-hour working week, which has been in place in the country since 2000).  The legislation was boosted by evidence that this kind of unofficial overtime creates personal issues, such as stress – aggravated by compromised sleep – which increases the risk of conflict with colleagues and customers/clients etc.

3 Perception begins with perspective:

Yes, that comes up nearly every time – because it applies across the whole context of communication.

On the first show in this series, Julian Treasure described silence as ‘a beautiful sound’.  He was talking about the physical kind – the absence of sound, or perhaps, a peaceful natural soundscape.

Communication silence is more complex.  As I said earlier, it can be golden – but in other circumstances, it can appear to come in a range of ‘colours’, depending on who’s ‘looking at’ it – and when.  It’s actually neutral – I call it ‘the beigest of the beige!’.  So other ‘colours’ can very easily be overlaid on to it.  In plain English – everyone interprets it subjectively.

One of the most common causes of, or aggravating factors in conflicts with customers/clients is having to wait too long for a response.  There are very often practical reasons for that – including:

·         Not enough staff or

·         good, old-fashioned lack of an efficient process!;

but an often overlooked aspect is conflicting time-perception – created by different perspectives.

Our individual perception of time is down to that slippery trickster I’ve mentioned before – the human memory system!  We all know ‘time flies when we’re having fun!’, or when we’re just rushing around, trying to keep up with life; and it drags when we’re bored – or when we’re waiting for something – and the more important that ‘something’ is to us, the longer it takes!

The challenge is that our own very subjective perception of time tends to shape our view of the whole situation.  I was quite tempted to head this:

‘I’m not telepathic!’

Because so many of us fall into the trap of forgetting our opposite number may have a different take on things – while at the same time assuming they’ll know what’s going on at our end!  For example:

When we’re busy, it’s easy to forget we’d promised to call a client ‘next week’ - until they get fed up and remind us, in no uncertain terms, that ‘next week’ was actually last month!  For us, the time has flown; but for them, at the end of the silent line, the same time has dragged.

4 Managing expectations helps you manage conflict:

We tend to talk about managing expectations in the context of customer/client service, don’t we; but it’s equally important in any relationship – personal as well as professional.

Here comes a blindingly obvious statement:

It all starts with awareness – of the true state of your own work time. 

It’s so easy to assume we have more availability than we have – and that we’re better at managing our time than we actually are.  This week’s pod tip comes from a business owner who, at the time of our conversation (December 2012), had acknowledged his temporal working environment was becoming untenable and was weighing up options for changing it.

Once you know where you are on that score, always aim to under-promise and over-deliver.  If you think you can get back to me by Monday, tell me ‘Friday’ – then if you manage Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, although you’re late from your perspective, you’re early from mine – and I’m happy!; and if things do take longer than you expected, keep in touch!  You only have to look at the current problems M&S are having, to see how important regular updates are.

5 Not all time-shifting is created equal:

I talk about four different types of technological time-shifting:

Overt single shifting – everybody knows that either the sender or recipient of a message isn’t physically doing their part when they appear to be – listeners to one of my radio series could only listen at a fixed time, but they knew the shows were pre-recorded.

Overt double shifting – this is what happens with my pods – we’re both well aware that I send my message at the time which best suits me and you receive it at the time which best suits you.

Covert single shifting – listeners to my first radio series could only listen when the shows were broadcast – and they were given to understand those shows were all live.  On the latest pod, I confess the truth about that …

Finally:

Covert double shifting – that would have happened if, for example, one of those, er, ‘live’ radio shows of mine, which I thought was only available at the scheduled time, had been recorded by a listener, to pick up later.  Then we would both have been pulling the wool over each other’s ears!

None of those modes are limited to sound and vision.  They can all apply to any time-shifted communication.

The benefits of an overt shift generally outweigh the risks; but if you’re shifting covertly, remember, you can lose people’s trust if you’re caught out.

We’ll talk more about trust in an upcoming programme – speaking of which:

The next show is the penultimate in the first series of the podcast (I’m already planning the second).  As this week’s episode went up a day late (due to personal reasons), next Monday is a Bank Holiday and I need to change the plan for Episode 10 (because a guest has had to pull out), Episode 9 will appear at the beginning of June (if anything changes on that I will, of course, let you know – after everything I’ve just said, I’d have serious egg on face if I didn’t, wouldn’t I?!)

In the meantime, as always, if you need help with any aspect of conflict management at work, come and talk to me!  All my details are on the website –

http://www.savvybusinessresolutions.com