Brandon Tries Things

When I refer to “work” in this post, I’m referring to what most of us here in the United States do from Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm.

Some of us may be lucky enough to have a job that really fills the needs we carry as social, purpose driven creatures. A job that answers some deeper calling, or a job that is genuinely fun or keeps us interacting with those we like. These jobs are gems. Diamonds in the rough. In our hyper-consumerist, exploitative job economy, it’s not easy to find jobs like these.

I would say most of us rush off to work in the morning because if we don’t, at the end of the month we won’t be able to pay our bills. This really limits our availability to search out what job suits us and fills those needs I mentioned. Also, most jobs are designed to squeeze out as much of our productivity and time as is allowed with no regard human needs. This leaves a huge portion of our nation’s population feeling drained, taken advantage of, disillusioned, and unhappy at the end of a work week, and by Sunday afternoon, we’re dreading the necessary return to that grind we already know is bringing us down.

There has to be some better way!

I have been thinking on this topic lately and have a few thoughts and ideas (not fully flushed out) I want to put down in writing. Just getting it out there helps me process things myself.

Idea : A New Form of Workplace Design

I’m coming at these ideas with the basic assumption that on the whole, most people want to help others if given the opportunity. I’m an optimist, I think when given the opportunity to help or not help someone else, with all else equal, people choose to help.

Obviously all things aren’t equal in our capitalist world, and businesses are incentivized to prioritize money over all else, but I really think it’s not one or the other here. We can design a system that both allows for productivity, profits, and growth (more on growth in another post), while also prioritizing the needs, wants, and desires of the workers propping up the system.

Here is my idea: Redefine what 8 hours of work looks like.

When factoring in sleeping, commuting, eating, and all the other miscellaneous parts of the day that suck up our time, we’re on the clock for over half our waking hours, for 5 of the 7 days of the week. This is a huge part of our lives.

It used to be more common that many our social and interpersonal needs could be met while at work, during these 40 hours a week. More and more, companies have fine tuned their approach to the workplace to maximize our productivity at the expense of everything else, including these social interactions that played a key part in meeting our basic needs. The workplace in 2026 does not at all lend itself to taking time away from our spreadsheets and powerpoints to have the small interactions necessary to keep this need met.

And my radical idea is that this makes us worse employees! In the effort to push productivity to the extreme, we’ve taken something away that we didn’t realize was essential, because it’s not something that shows up directly on the balance sheet. It’s our well-being. And if companies and organizations really care about the well-being of their employees (which they all say they do) then we need to be doing more to redesign what work looks like in order to show employees that they care.

A quarter of our day should be spent doing activities unrelated to our “work”, but related to building social ties among co-workers and the nearby community.

This idea originally came to me back in March, but just yesterday I read an article about care centers for seniors in Japan hiring body builders to boost the workforce as the country’s population ages. Part of the contract for these workers is that 6 hours a day is spent in care activities with seniors, while they must also spend 2 hours a day working out. What a perfect solution. Find an activity that these workers want to do (work out) and make that a mandatory part of the work day. Gym memberships were covered by the employer so the expense of this part of the work day is fully paid for by the employer. I don’t know, but I’m willing to guess that during those 6 hours these workers are more engaged than workers that slog away at the same work for 8 hours straight.

How about we mandate that at least two hours of our workday be spent doing something that we are passionate about, interested in, or fulfills a need that is currently not being met. A key component would be that these activities must be paid for by the employer. This is not a “perk” that in reality is another place to spend money during the day, it is a dedicated effort to alleviate the stresses of daily work while building cohesion among co-workers and the community at large.

A small list of activity ideas that workers could engage in: yoga class, lunch with a co-worker, book club, theater group, basketball league, trivia event, going for a swim or run, acting club, bouldering, going for a walk.

Yes it is an investment by the organization to provide the upfront cost for these activities, but the downstream impact is much larger than any hit to the bottom line. Let’s say a company allows each employee around $100-$200 per week to put toward these activities. This should be plenty to cover modest lunches, monthly gym memberships, or league dues. And let’s say this organization has 100 employees.

That is spending an extra $520,000 – $1,040,000 per year directly toward benefiting the well-being of those employees. I’ve worked for some organizations where that might be the salary of a few people. I firmly believe that benefits would outweigh any negatives from this plan. Not to mention that this would directly benefit the nearby community of local businesses.

You could fine-tune this plan and be specific about how far away from work you can engage in these activities, or if certain types of organizations would be restricted. As an organization it may benefit you to support the local businesses within a 2 mile radius of the work-place. This would keep employees close to work while encouraging them to explore and patronize local businesses that otherwise may not receive this support.

You could also refine the plan to require that employees engage in these activities with at least one co-worker. You could argue that as the organization I want these 2 hours a day to contribute to building something beneficial to the org. Maybe I don’t want Linda leaving work 2 hours early and grabbing fast food on her commute back home, but rather I want Linda to find a peer or colleague to go to lunch with. Or a yoga class. Or a book club. This would build the social connection between Linda and her co-worker, which does have lasting impacts once both workers return to their daily “work”.

Please, if you are a business leader out there looking for radical new ways to care for your employees, try this method. This is the kind of thing that will never be tested because no one is willing to be the first. Be the first! And share what happens within your org.

Key tenets of this idea

1. A quarter of our day should be spent doing activities unrelated to our “work”, but related to building social ties among co-workers and the nearby community.
2. These 2 hours a day (for a normal 8 hour workday) should be spent doing activities that fulfill our human needs. Social, physical, spiritual, emotional, it cannot be an empty activity like spending those 2 hours scrolling on our phones.
3. These activities should be spent with at least one co-worker at least 3-4 of our workdays per week. This builds social connections with others in our workplace so we can bring these connections back to the other 6 hours of our workday.
4. These activities must be paid for by the organization.
5. These activities must be proximate to the organization, we want to support the local economy so let’s patronize businesses, groups, leagues, and individuals working and living nearby.
6. It must be mandatory. Your performance engaging in worthwhile activities should be scrutinized as closely as your “work”. You are not completing your work in a given day if you’re not engaging in these outside, social activities.