Time Bonuses

What if we hung our "Gone Fishin'" signs before the end of the year?

“This is how we do it… (this is how we do it) Sha la la la la la lo…”

Sometimes the 90’s Montell Jordan song pops in my head when I think about the extremely standardized ways of “doing business”. Annual strategic planning. Quarterly reporting. Compensation packages. Because it’s all so… the same.

Sometimes I dream about different ways of structuring business that might be better for us humans. Here’s one such dream, and maybe you can tell me if…

1. you know anyone doing it and/or

2. you find a hole in the theory and how you would patch that hole and/or

3. how you would make it a cooler idea!

Here goes: ANNUAL COMPANY RETIREMENT (a.k.a. time bonuses)

At the end of every fiscal year, a company needs to decide what to do with any profits. Generally, it can…

1. pay out to shareholders if they’re publicly held

2. reinvest the money in the business

3. pay out to employees (or the owners themselves) in some kind of profit sharing/bonus situation

This all makes sense under the grand and pervasive assumption that a company exists to make and distribute money. But there is an alternative:

a company’s ability to make and distribute time.

(Of course there’s been a promising trend of businesses focusing first on making and distributing impact (i.e. their purpose). I support this. But also, in practice, maximizing money and maximizing impact often look the same, with companies and their people pushing themselves as hard as they can every day until… forever. It’s kind of tiring, don't you think?)

I can imagine a different plan, and it goes like this:

1. A company forecasts its operating costs for the year based on current size

2. The company then sets off in January to make that amount of revenue

3. Maybe it takes until December 31st, or maybe until November 31st or maybe until August 31st.

4. When that day comes, the company says “hooray!”, throws itself a party in celebration of ANNUAL COMPANY RETIREMENT DAY, and then closes up shop for the remainder of the year. Everyone still gets paid for the full year (annual salaries were part of the operating cost calculation).

5. That last month or two or four—that’s the time bonus! People just go about enjoying their lives. Their days look like long walks and vacations and learning to paint and glorious meals with friends and family. Or whatever else they want!

Because if we believe (as our employment contracts state) that time = money, when there’s extra of that good stuff, why does it always need to be more money that we extract from our efforts? Why not more time?

In sharing this idea with my husband, Brad, he was like “Oh yea, it’s just making business a different kind of sport!”

Right now, business is a “play to the last second” sport, in the same category as football, basketball, or hockey. In these sports, you get as much “done”—get as many points as you can on the board—in the agreed upon time of gameplay. Business is the same. Make as much money (or impact) as you can in the the fiscal year. On December 31st or your fiscal year end, you tally up your winnings and see how you did.

But there’s another way.

There are also “complete the goal” sports, in the same category as track, swimming, or golf. Once Usain Bolt makes it to the 100m finish line, he doesn’t keep going to see how much more he can do. Once he’s done it, he stops, celebrates, and rests! Once you’ve done your 18 holes as skillfully as you can, you don’t go on to a 19th just because the course is still open. You go for a beer!

So that’s my philosophical pitch. What do you think?

I’ve found when I share this idea with others, their wheels immediately start turning about the what ifs and how would yous, which I think is part of the fun. Like sorting out the rest of the rules so the gameplay makes sense. Here are some that have come up, but please share others that come to you (and your imagined solutions!):

• What if people wanted to keep working after you “made the year”? Could they elect to carry on, and then keep any revenue for themselves? Would that require internal functions to keep working too, though? Like if a consulting team wanted to work past the annual retirement date, would you then need legal and IT to keep working to support them and how would that work? What if non-revenue generating person like IT wanted to keep working but those on the revenue generating side of the house didn’t?

• What if you stopped all essential work for the year, and the company just worked on fun/improvement/20% time projects the rest of the year? Though maybe that defeats the premise of valuing time over money? Might be fun to deliberately switch gears?

• How would it work for a product business? Would you just stop selling your stuff or maybe you could set up automatic operations plus keep some customer service and distribution staff on? Would it work the same for a SaaS business? Is that not nice for the customer service people?

• What about a service business? In consulting, how would you pitch projects into the later part of the year knowing you might be closing up shop at some point? Would clients agree to wait to start new projects until January?

• What about essential services like hospitals? Could there be two parallel halves of a hospital, one starting its fiscal year on January 1st and one starting on June 1st so the hospital is always staffed? Would this two-half set up provide some friendly softball league opportunities as well?

• Could people choose when to take their time bonus (i.e., not all at once at the end of the year)? Would that screw with the business being able to predict its people’s availability?

• Maybe a nice thing would be to make the start of your fiscal year September so that you have your annual retirement hopefully before/during summer? (Or the reverse for the southern hemisphere)

• What if a company wants to grow? Would it forecast a slightly higher operating cost each year? Or is that defeating the purpose?

• What if lots of companies did this? Would the economy grind to a halt? Or is it totally fine and Europeans prove this to be true every August?

What other questions and possible solutions can you imagine? Come dream with me!

P.S. I first described the football/basketball/hockey sports as “run out the clock” sports and Brad was like: “no”. I accidentally pressed publish before I changed it and then we had this text exchange. I am in fact, NOT SPORTY.