When 22-year-old Roisin Gray asked about the finishing time for the day, her colleagues in the office simply laughed.
Now, a week into her new job, she is getting used to choosing the hours she works and even how much leave she takes.
“My friends can’t get their heads around how we work,” she says. “But, as I don’t have someone watching over me all the time, I just get on with it. It means I want to work harder.”
She works at Paycircle, a payroll software provider to small businesses, which is one of a rising number of firms with a liberal attitude to working practices.
In fact, they are so flexible, you could call them yoga employers.
Questions persist about such an approach: How successful can it be? Is it open to abuse by staff? Are bosses actually using it as a smokescreen to ensure staff are never off duty?
Binding trust
Paycircle and its umbrella company Optimal Compliance have 15 staff, four of whom are women, with an average age of 27, excluding the founders.
There is no company handbook, the job interview process usually involves the whole team and holiday entitlement is entirely self-controlled. Flexibility extends to hours and attendance at the office in Ascot or the “company apartment” in London.
“It is based on trust and maturity. Colleagues are trusted to get the work done and there is respect, so you do not let down the other 14 people,” says co-founder Catherine Pinkney, an evangelist for non-traditional working.
“We are not totally hippyish. This is not a playground. We work to tight deadlines.”
Staff are expected to attend a Monday morning meeting, but then work when and where they please.
One software engineer divides his time between the UK and Italy. Others spend more time near the office where they can find the company payment card for use in team coffee rounds or trips to the pub.
Ms Pinkney says only one employee in eight years has been told to go after a “loss of respect”. He “could not grasp the culture”, she says.
The current crop of young staff appear to support the system.
James Edwards, 30, says he “no longer thinks about working hours”. Yazmin Cooper, 22, says the work-life freedom can only be matched by self-employment.
“My worst nightmare is to go back to a traditional corporate, with a uniform and no mobile phones,” she says.
That phone, and a laptop, allows such a flexible approach to function. Staff are connected via a chat app and many check emails and other messages during the evenings and weekends.
Therein lies an apparent danger in this way of working – an inability to switch off. Staff may be allowed to take a week’s holiday at a day’s notice, but they are also expected to ensure things operate smoothly without them.
There is no requirement to logon from the beach, but at times it may be a necessity. After all, pay rewards are based, in part, on the amount of responsibility individual members of staff take on for themselves. They also receive a slice of the company’s profits every three months.
From: BBC News