The Future of Work is Biohacking

Making work work for us: Changing workplace dynamics by building a corporate culture based on our natural productivity cycles.

When it comes to work, I am not a morning person.

In fact, I’ve been secretly waiting to step into what I call my “old people” era – going to bed by or before 10pm and miraculously waking up at 6am unaided. It has happened to a lot of my friends but as I enter my 38th year, it has yet to happen to me.

If I were to believe society, I would be a misfit; someone who is probably not the most intelligent or efficient member in a workplace. It is commonly believed that the only people who are superior at their craft or at contributing to society at large are those who are early risers and have most of their daily obligations finished by lunch. Not only does society idolize early risers, but we build entire workplace systems around them, with the hope that somehow elements of their work ethic will find its way into our DNA making us more productive and successful individuals.

And then there’s me.

A person whose brain doesn’t truly begin to function until around 10am unless hard pressed for a deadline. As far as I know, I’ve been this way all my life and have found ways to work around it in college and in the corporate world. The work around? I prove that I am smart and fully capable and then I begin to show up at a time that works best for me. Have my bosses and teachers always liked it? Probably not. But have I proven that I’m just as great of a worker/student (if not better) than others? Absolutely.

I have had a relatively successful career with bosses who love me, and have promoted me often. Today, I run my own company and have the ability to not have to worry about when I’m starting my day. But for this to be true must mean that I am an anomaly, because how can it be possible that someone who works in corporate American is able to do so successfully outside of expected workplace time structures?

To put it simply- the traditional workplace time structure is flawed.

Not only is it flawed but it is, in my opinion, becoming increasingly irrelevant. As more people from diverse backgrounds enter the corporate workspace (something we could not do when these norms were first created), I believe we owe it to ourselves to really ask what truly is the measure of productivity today, how will it evolve for tomorrow and how can we reimagine better ways of working for all?

The pandemic has changed everything. The success of remote work made us question the future of the workplace and now we are beginning rethink the amount of days we spend at desks and in office spaces. The rise in quitting has also pushed us to examine what true workplace happiness is as companies struggle to retain a workforce that no longer feels the need to ascribe to antiquated ways of working. Despite these new evolutions in thinking, I believe there is a need to go even further.

It is incredibly ironic that we take so many Myers Brigg-like tests to determine how we operate in life and in the workplace when there is inherently a deeper, potentially less subjective way for us to determine and predict workplace productivity.

What if, during the recruitment and hiring process we were able to submit personal profiles built on specific biological and environmental factors that shed light on the most optimal ways of working? Ideally, these profiles would be able to create a systemic approach to understanding our unique circadian and ultradian rhythms in conjunction with our overall lifestyle, habits and environmental factors. If done correctly, such a profile could allow corporations to build truly diverse and optimal departments based on factors that go beyond expertise and capability. Companies could factor in individuals’ propensity to work more cohesively with team members who either share or complement their most optimal states of productivity.

Essentially, it would allow us to work in our most natural states and potentially create a happier, more connected workplace environment with unparallel productivity outputs.

So how, in theory could this work?

First let’s understand the importance of these input factors. While our circadian rhythm helps the body detect day and night on a 24hour cycle, our ultradian rhythm works on much shorter frequencies, typically between 90 and 120 minutes of time. This rhythm manages our cycles of “energy production, output, and recovery”. Together, these rhythms “dictate our important bodily processes like sleep, hormone secretion, and metabolism” which affect energy levels at work.

Factoring in the evolution of one’s lifestyle and environment overtime is just as important to consider. These inputs can help create a more qualitative (and therefore more holistic) system of measurement that takes into account how different stressors and factors in our lives may impact the amount of rest we get and balance we are able achieve- all elements that can impact our circadian and ultradian rhythms.

An individual living in a quiet suburban community for example, may have a different relationship with rest and relaxation than someone living in a busy metropolitan area. At the same time, if that individual has small children, and the person in the metropolitan area lives alone, this can also impact how much rest they attain or how much stress they encounter on a daily basis. Other factors like commute time, food insecurity, overall lifestyle and social habits can also add color to this equation.

So how can a formula that takes into account our circadian rhythm, our ultradian rhythm, our lifestyle and environmental factors change the way we think about work? If we can identify the factors that impact productivity states while acknowledging the timeframe patterns that enable more productive outcomes, we can create a workplace environment that works with, instead of against employees’ natural productivity cycle.

For the ultradian rhythm specifically, every 90 to 120 minutes our bodies have periods of energy and alertness followed by fatigue. It is within these peaks that we are able to get the most work done. When we are in the low points, however we find ourselves unknowingly enacting stress hormones to push against our body’s natural rhythm in order to accomplish key work tasks outside of our normal productivity window.

What if, across my career, instead of me trying to force my workstyle into a predetermined workplace schedule, I was able to work as I work today? If there were other colleagues whose work productivity preferences had them starting earlier in the day, a team member like myself, whose work productivity preferences would have me starting later in the day, could come into a project or workflow that they had already begun and finish it later in the evening. Or, if I was matched with other colleagues who had similar productivity timeframes, we could more predictably plan to have meetings in the periods where productivity routinely lagged the most, to help move the day along until it began to peak again.

This kind of categorization pairing could work across teams and within them while serving as a predictor and determinant of organizational productivity. The ability to take such an assessment over time helps take into account how individuals mature, or shift their priorities as they age, therefore potentially shifting the way they may desire to work. If prospective employees can reassess themselves as their lifestyles change, they may be able to be better matched in the long run with teams and job functions that truly serve who they are.

The watchout.

As a person of color I would be remiss to not acknowledge the elephant in the room. With science and categorization comes a slew of unconscious (or conscious) bias factors that an assessment like this would need to remain vigilant about mitigating.

There would need to be an ethics system in place to avoid practitioners of such a tool slipping into anything that resembles the harmful practice of eugenics where generalizations were made about different racial groups and genders and used to paint them as inferior. Given the history of how the world works, the emergence of hierarchical productivity groups and categories would likely be inevitable, however, knowing this from the beginning could help us create a more equitable means of data collection and reporting. This way we could avoid unintentionally negatively impacting whole groups of people in ways that can’t fully be imagined in this moment (affordability and access to such a test, bias in the results, indicators more prominent with POCs, discrimination based on those indicators, lack of cultural intelligence and nuance for specific indicators etc.…) especially as, with every innovation comes unforeseen problems that typically impact people of color.

Getting this right could fully change our relationship with work and how we think of the workplace. If we were to make work, work for us, it would start by making space for it in our lives in a way that feels more organic and authentic to who we are. Instead of making work the capitalist chore that it is, it can feel more like a part of our natural existence if we are able to do it in our most optimal states of productivity.