Having said that, us and the rest of the world experienced profound changes during the covid-19 pandemic. And part of what happened was that we realised that our world of work didn’t need to grind to a halt if we didn’t go into the office every day. It didn’t end if we didn’t start our workday exactly at 9am and finished it exactly at 5:30pm. We were all stuck at home and juggling all our responsibilities all at once with basically zero control over our schedules and therefore no ability to enforce the erstwhile iron-clad rule of work.

Since then, there’s been a quiet revolution happening which only came to light recently on our team chat. On any given day on this chat, you may find serious business things, cat photos, work-related memes and articles we’ve read and found interesting. It was Sheena, our Head of Culture, who shared this article about ‘chronoworking’ on our chat after having learnt about it from Janet, our Director of Transformation. The concept is radical in its simplicity / obviousness: to do you your best work, work during your natural, peak energy hours.

It turns out all of us have over the span of our careers developed tactics to embrace our natural energy flows and rhythms so that we can do our best at work - we just didn’t know it. We thought it was a wonderful moment of serendipity, so we decided to share our experience with you in the hopes that it will encourage more organisations and more people to re-imagine the 9 to 5.