What is full time anyway?

Photo by Rodolfo Clix.

"Here's the plan. For the next while, we're going to keep getting paid full time, but we're not going to work full time. We'll take a major hit to our productivity and we're just going to adapt to that."

This happened on our Monday team call, in April of 2020. It was clear that schools weren't going back. It was clear that nothing was going back. Not for a long time. And we were working it all through.

We stared down the company's finances as a team. All our work up until March 2020 had been in-person. When the lockdowns hit, we called two clients with signed contracts and offered to rip up their paper. It was the right thing to do, but it meant that our little business now had $0 coming in. With rent, and bills, and payroll still going out.

We figured out how many months we would be able to run on savings, and how we could stretch that. We talked about how to build new programs with kids at home. Exhausted. With no time to think. With no idea what would come next.

It was one of the scariest decisions we'd made as a company, and also one of the clearest. It wasn't possible to work full time and parent full time and survive a pandemic full time. Work was the thing that could give.

In those early days, we probably got about an hour of work in per day. A scattered, depleted hour, after the kids were asleep. And now, more than a year on, with kids in virtual school, we're still not back to full time.

Your hiring pipeline is changing

We're coming out of a period where no one's work life was "normal." No normal offices, no normal hours. No normal vacations. No normal boundaries. And what we see everywhere we look these days is that there is no one, normal way that people feel about coming back.

This shift is so profound that Apple employees are speaking up against a partial return to the office. If that doesn't seem profound to you, you don't know Apple employees. Apple is famous for the rigidity of its workplace expectations. And the employees who sign up for it understand that rigidity as the price of admission for getting to work at Apple. Even post-Jobs, post-screaming at rooms full of people, it is not a corporate culture that invites employees to question an executive decision that's already been made.

So maybe their letter is a dead end. And maybe there will soon be a bunch of Apple employees back on the market. But Apple isn't alone in this.

Right now, every company is trying to figure out their return-to-office, fully-remote, or hybrid strategy. And while those approaches have implications for the people working there today, nowhere is the conversation hotter than around what it means for prospective hires.

The companies who are fully remote have an advantage. Their talent pool is bigger. Folks who left the city and found they liked life in the burbs or the sticks. Employees who moved somewhere tropical and want to keep surfing on their lunch breaks. Or people who simply put down a long commute and found they had more time for the things they enjoy.

"We can hire people anywhere in the world and pay them a competitive salary." This a strong value proposition and it's a defensible moat.

Good news for the fully remote group. But what about the rest of us?

There's no talent shortage

You wouldn't know it to read the handwringing headlines. The ones talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs being added to the US economy but going unfilled. Or the ones about fast food joints with no one to sling french fries. Won't somebody please think of the poor potatoes? All salted and shimmery with no one there to scoop them. It's a travesty, really.

This is nonsense. That it's easily politicized nonsense gives it legs and staying power as a narrative. But it's not new nonsense. As people who work with bosses all day, every day, we hear a lot about talent shortages. How impossible it is to hire senior engineering talent. Or marketing talent building D2C brands with recurring revenue. Startup leaders lamenting how all the "good people" get snapped up by the big tech companies. Followed by nonprofit folks upset about how all the "good people" get snapped up by startups.

It's appealing. You don't have control over a talent shortage. There's a passivity baked into the phrase. The talent. We are short on it. What's to be done?

If an employee told you something mission critical was impossible. But it was essential for the business continuing to operate. You already know what you'd tell them.

"Figure it out." And you might make a pained expression. Or rub your temples.

You're gonna have to picture us making that pained expression. Yes, it's hard. But it's not impossible. And if it were any other challenge, you'd get moving on it.

Look for the surplus

The pandemic disproportionately impacted women's careers. There are endless reports about the generational setbacks for women at work. Particularly mid-career and senior women. Especially when they have young kids at home. Especially if they are Black.

How can we have both a talent shortage and a surplus of skilled and seasoned employees?

We're coming back to work different than we left it. Parents of young kids may not be able to slot right back into a 40-hour in-person work week. That likely wasn't working for them before the panini. But if you can meet folks where they are, you get access a phenomenal talent pool that others will miss.

"We don't burn you out" is a moat. Especially if you have receipts.

We have core hours that align to the local school schedule.

We have a robust parental leave program.

We offer benefits to employees at 20+ hours.

Our benefits cover orthodonture.

These are things that any employer, faced with a talent shortage, could do. But most won't. That's not a talent shortage. That's an inefficient talent market and an opportunity for anyone willing to get creative.

Maybe you feel like your business can't do it. Maybe you feel like, even with seasoned talent, reduced or inconsistent hours won't cut it. Maybe you worry that sounds good in a newsletter but would never fly in real life.

Maybe.

But after that team meeting we had last year? In our own reduced and inconsistent hours, we built our first fully online management program. Today, Blueprint is the most successful product we've ever brought to market. And we didn't burn our team out in the process. We know it's possible because we did it. And protecting that energy gave us the room to write this little newsletter. Which, thanks to you all showing up every other Wednesday to read it, is now going through final polish as our second book.

We know. It'll be hard for a lot of organizations to shed the one-size-fits-all model of productivity. 5 days a week. 8 hours a day. In an open-concept office. And we have been incredibly fortunate in ways that don't scale. We aren't promising this approach will work for your business, or pretending this is easier than it is.

But if you said the words talent shortage anytime in the last month, then you've acknowledged your business is failing to bring in the talent you need. People who are right there, waiting to do phenomenal, focused work for any organization able to consume it. So what do you have to lose?

- Melissa and Johnathan