If 'bare minimum Monday' is the answer, what's the question?

‘Bare minimum Monday’ could be coming to a team near you. 

How do you feel about that?

Personally, I don’t like it. It feels like another structure to put onto people, whether it works for them or not. For me, Mondays are great for getting back into work mode after a weekend break. Doing the bare minimum would feel like stalling for the sake of it.

It also feels like, or sounds like, shirking. This is at risk of getting employers' backs up and feeds the view that people are looking for ways to get away with being paid to do nothing. Still, it’s emerging as a trend for a reason. 

It’s because people are getting increasingly desperate for more autonomy over their time, not just their workplace. 

Flex has become myopic in the last few years, only really considering the ability to work from home. We’ve neglected the idea that people also want some choices about their hours and days of work. ‘Bare minimum Monday’ is an expression of this desire for more control over our time and a reassertion of our boundaries between work and home.

The growing popularity of the 4 Day Week globally is evidence that people need more autonomy over their time. Many of us have more life to handle than is comfortable to fit around the margins of a full time job. 

If ‘bare minimum Monday’ is the answer, what’s the question? 

I think it’s, “How can we have more choices about when we do our work?” 

To avoid jumping into premature solutions, we need different and better ways of answering this question through richer, broader conversations at work. 

We need ways for teams to come together and decide what's possible. It starts with mapping out the work I need to do and who else is depending on me. That way we can represent the interests of other people and our work commitments, ahead of any changes or experiments, such as ‘bare minimum Monday’.

Once that clarity over the work commitments is in place, we can get as creative as we like. Mondays might be the worst possible day to dial it back, but at least we've all seen that and agreed before assuming this can be my day to catch up on life admin. 

The question of autonomy over our time also highlights a much bigger, structural issue. That we are bound by the ‘hours for money’ exchange at the heart of every employment agreement. 

Many teams I work with now openly acknowledge that the work can be done in bursts of productive activity. Some weeks 40 hours are needed. Other weeks, they're not. 

It is also becoming hard to determine what is work and what is not. When people listen to a work-related podcast or audiobook while they’re walking the dog and have one of their best ever ‘aha’ moments, is that work? Is that leisure? Most people now don’t really care and yet our employment structure doesn’t fit that reality. It's the nature of the work. Yet, we are still artificially bound by the hours we're expected to work. 

Ultimately, we need broader employment legislation that reflects our new reality. Money for work outcomes might be a better exchange for many jobs, rather than hours worked. Then we can have much more autonomy over our time, without the need to jump into a trend like ‘bare minimum Monday’.