The Case for Designing Work Around Circadian Rhythms

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.

ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ALISON BEARD: Adi, when do you do your best work?

ADI IGNATIUS: I generally have a lot of projects moving forward at once. I’m tending to fires all day. It’s often at night, after hours, when I carve out time and do what’s probably my best focused work. I don’t recommend this because it eats into my so-called real life, but I do find it necessary.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So it sounds like you and I might be the same. I tend to sleep in. I wake up, I grab a coffee, and then I hit my stride mid-morning, and I can work through the afternoon and also really, really late into the night if I need to. So this means that you and I probably have similar circadian rhythms. That’s the internal clock that determines when we feel most awake and energized and engaged and when we don’t. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, why leaders need to pay attention to their own rhythms and the rhythms of everyone on their teams to better manage and distribute work.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, I have to say, I’ve always been a little bit skeptical about the circadian rhythm theory. I mean, I’ve seen people talk about how we have these internal clocks and cycles and that they’re real. But I also suspect we can adapt. In other words, that we have more control than you suggest about these rhythms and how they control our lives, but I am not an expert.

ALISON BEARD: Yes. Well, our guest today is, and he says that they’re actually really hard to fight against. And so you’re better off trying to adapt within reason, of course. And he has some really practical advice for leaders on how to organize around people’s varying circadian peaks and ebbs to make sure that they’re collaborating at mutual peaks and then splitting apart for their ebbs. And this will all lead to better performance and wellbeing.

Stefan Volk is a professor at the University of Sydney Business School and author of the HBR article “Tapping into Your Team’s Circadian Rhythms.” Here’s our conversation.

So, let’s start with the basics. What exactly are circadian rhythms and how do they affect work productivity?

STEFAN VOLK: Well, we live on a planet that’s rotating around the sun on a 24-hour cycle. And over thousands of years, all living species on this planet have developed an internal timekeeping mechanism, which we call a circadian clock that entrains us to specifically the light dark cycle of our planet.

In 2017, the Nobel Prize of Medicine was given to the people who discovered the circadian clock. And in humans, it is a little brain mechanism that sits over the eye nerves and it’s very much related to our sleep and wake cycle. So, whenever that little mechanism brain area recognizes darkness, it uses hormones such as melatonin to make us sleepy and tired.

And when it recognizes light, it floods our bloodstream with hormones that make us awake and energize. And we all have these rhythms, but there are significant differences in terms of when the peaks and troughs of these rhythms happen. And that’s what we call chronotypes. And most people are probably aware of these terms of talking about morning people, evening people, intermediate people.

Most children are morning types. Most teenagers are evening types. And then from the age of 20 to 50, we become quite diverse. People are morning types, people are evening types, and they say an extreme morning person and extreme evening person could share a bed and would never see each other because they have such opposed rhythms.

So, people really, are able to do their best work, are most energized at different times of day, and that is currently not reflected at all in the workplace. So, we usually, at least until COVID, worked all very similar hours. It was traditionally the traditional nine to five approach. And in addition, there’s a morning bias in many societies where there’s often a belief that all the good things are happening in the morning.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. As a night owl, I definitely dislike that morning bias and wish that everything would shift about five hours.

How much better are people at their circadian peak versus their circadian ebb in terms of their performance?

STEFAN VOLK: So, two aspects to it. It’s their mental capacity and it’s their emotional capacity, right? So, when we are at our circadian peak, we are more alert, we are more attentive. We have generally better cognitive processing capacities. So, we think clearer, we are sharper. We are better able to respond to challenges. We are better able to learn. We can be challenged, we can better deal with challenges.

While when we are at our circadian trough and everything is slower, it’s harder. We can still perform work, but it’s all a little bit essentially dulled and much more difficult. It takes longer. The other aspect of how circadian rhythms affect us is through moods and emotions.

So, when we are at our circadian trough, we have reduced self-control. We are more moody. We are more impulsive. And as a result, we can be more impatient, more irritable, even more aggressive. And also as leaders, we are less effective because we just don’t have the patience that we have when we are more emotionally stable at our circadian peaks.

ALISON BEARD: Why is it important for leaders to pay attention to not just their own circadian rhythm, but also those of everyone else on their team? What happens when they don’t?

STEFAN VOLK: So, in general, most people are aware of their own circadian kind of predisposition. The problem with that is that we often assume that others are like us. In particular, people that are more morning types, since they are more productive in the morning, assume that most others are also more productive in the morning. And that is obviously not the case, right?

So, knowing your team and knowing when your team have their peaks and troughs during the day, obviously enables you to much better understand them – understand why, for example, certain people in meetings are not contributing, seem to be disengaged at a certain time. It helps you to better understand why people sometimes might be a bit short-tempered, why they might not be performing as usual, and also when you can best leverage their strength and weaknesses during the day.

So, for example a surgical team. When you have two surgeons and you have a nurse in an operating room, when they’re all morning types and they’re doing surgery in the evening, that it’s their worst time of the day where they would be least attentive and most likely to make mistakes and errors. So, it makes sense to pay attention to people’s peaks in particular when you have an ability to distribute work across the day to some extent.

ALISON BEARD: And I can see that being true in professional office settings as well, where it seems less high stakes, but at the same time, you want people to be at their peak when they need to be collaborative and you need to schedule different types of work when people are at their ebbs or even give people breaks.

STEFAN VOLK: Yeah. So, clearly we cannot always work around people’s circadian rhythms. That’s in fact, one of the most common criticisms I get about this type of research that people say, “What do you expect us that we now all work around people’s individual preferences?” But that’s not what we are saying. We’re saying is it makes sense to pay attention to this, right? And I do a lot of executive education when we talk about this and people say, “I now realize why that 9:00 AM meeting on a Monday morning doesn’t work, so well.”

ALISON BEARD: I would imagine that when there are circadian mismatches there’s also much greater conflict on teams?

STEFAN VOLK: When people are – in particular when they’re in their circadian trough, it’s similar to when we are tired, when we are sleepy right. So a major mechanism through which this works is self-control. One way that keeps us from saying out loud what we think is an ability to realize that this is not the right thing, the ability for self-control. There’s a brain connection between the brain area that produces strong emotions, which is the amygdala, and the brain area that controls these emotions which is the prefrontal cortex.

And that connection that essentially steps in and prevents us from being moody, being impulsive, is impaired when we are tired, sleepy, or we are in our circadian trough.

So as a leader we need to be aware that difficult conversations can be tricky when we are at the circadian trough because we are more likely to be impatient, we are more likely to snap. And similar for team members. And that just can create a very negative work environment.

ALISON BEARD: What about the argument that people can change or shift their sort of natural preferences that you can sort of train yourself to be a morning person?

STEFAN VOLK: Well, that’s interesting. I just had a journalist contact me from a finance newspaper saying he wanted to write an article about how to train yourself to get up at 5:00 AM and love it. And I said, “I’m really the wrong person for this because I’m really arguing against this.” The thing is that we know that the circadian system is a very slow, stable system and it changes very slowly. So, for example, I think over a 10-year period, it changes like around seven minutes during adulthood.

And you can see it, for example, when you travel, jet lag is nothing else, but your circadian system trying to catch up with a new light, dark cycle. And it can only do this by one hour per time zone that you traveled. So, you may think you have adjusted quicker because you’re already going to bed and waking up at the right time, but it’s a deep biological process. All your organs, even down to the microbiota in your gut, they have a circadian rhythm and they have to adjust to this new kind of setting.

It’s a very slow system and if we are in our natural setting, it won’t change much. And that’s what happens a lot. People try to get up earlier, but evening types cannot easily fall asleep earlier. It’s because their biology, their body doesn’t settle down early. Their melatonin production doesn’t start early enough to initiate sleep. So, what then happens is that people, they try to become morning people by simply cut down on sleep. And when you cut down on sleep, it has a whole range of other negative consequences in relation to your performance, in relation to your health, and in relation to your moods and emotions.

ALISON BEARD: This is all music to my ears because I am constantly told that I need to try to wake up earlier and that I should recover from jet lag more quickly. And now you’re giving me scientific evidence that I can’t. I can’t. So, we are in an era when teams span time zones, people can work from anywhere at any hour. Does that make it easier for people to work at the right hours for them within their circadian rhythms or is it harder because we’re all constantly connected?

STEFAN VOLK: Probably the only good thing that came out of COVID is that many organizations realized that flexible work arrangements are not as bad as they thought they would be. However, if you look at it, you see that a lot of flexible work is actually about flex place, but not flex time. So, you still have to attend at 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM meeting.

So, people are still essentially stuck in a very strict kind of time schedule. What we are suggesting is, and what many organizations are in fact already doing is that you have some core working hours during which everybody has to be available for meetings, for creativity, for teams to be able to coordinate, for example, from 10:00 to 3:00. And then there should be hours where people can add to make up their full hours. So for example some people could add hours in the morning, some people could add hours in the evening. So, that type of flexibility we suggest can kind of combine the needs of the organization, the needs of teams, with individual preferences.

ALISON BEARD: For people who aren’t sure what their natural rhythm is or what their chronotype is, how do you figure it out?

STEFAN VOLK: Well, the most simple way is when do you wake up on a weekend with an alarm clock, right? So, morning people wake up early, they are jumping out of bed at 5:00 AM and are fresh and sharp. And I hate those people because I’m an evening person and it’s my own experience of being an evening person that has essentially shaped my research in this area because all the important things happen in the morning, right? It starts in school with exams and universities with exams, job interviews, presentations, important meetings all usually happen during the first half of the day, when morning people are having an advantage because they’re operating at full capacity while evening people are at a disadvantage.

But in general, when you naturally wake up on a weekend, there’s a good indication what kind of type you are. Most people are aware of what they are. The problem is more to understand what other people are. And you can measure circadian rhythms and chronotypes and lab settings, through biological indicators, but the field that does research on this, which is chronobiology, they have developed questionnaires that have been validated based on these biological indicators and they’re very easy to administer. They’re freely available.

And what I suggest, for example, in my executive education is that people take these questionnaires and they do them in their teams and they use this as a conversation starter, that people firstly can reflect on their own results, but also see what other people are and then start a conversation around what does it actually mean for you in terms of work, in terms of performance, in terms of preferences, and what does it mean for us as a team? How can we essentially try to work across these differences or maybe we are all morning types, which would be then easier, but that is rarely the case.

ALISON BEARD: So, let’s dig into some of the changes that one might make when they know their own circadian rhythm and they know how that compares to the people on their team. I guess the first step is sort of understanding and optimizing for your own rhythms. What work should we all be aiming to do in our peaks, especially as leaders?

STEFAN VOLK: Different people have different preferences, but the basic rule is the thing you really don’t want to do, that’s really challenging for you. That’s the one that you should really tackle during your peak time because that’s when you are mentally, emotionally at fullest capacity with maximum self-control. Could be for some people having that conversation with a team member. For others, that’s something that they actually enjoy, having a conversation with a team member, but they’re loath doing the accounting or, I don’t know, other things.

And then there are obviously more routine tasks, for example, of an email. There’s a thing that they call the morning email inbox problem is that often, in particular, when you work with international teams, when you wake up and you come to the office in the morning, your email box is full. And then people start working through emails, and a lot of this is just routine work. And morning people in particular are wasting their best hours doing this type of routine work.

And then once they’re done with the emails and they’re going into the early afternoon, they go and do the more challenging work, like strategic planning, for example, or interactions with team members, meetings and so on and so forth, but then they have already wasted their best hours.

ALISON BEARD: I do wonder though, in terms of adjusting your own schedule to suit your circadian rhythm, there must be teams and organizations where just a specific type continues to be valued because that’s the culture. So, is it really possible to adjust on the margins in a way that will make you feel healthier if there is an expectation that there is always 7:00 AM meetings or that there are always late-night dinners?

STEFAN VOLK: It is to a large extent driven by the leader. So, we know, for example, that people like Arianna Huffington is a big supporter of healthy sleep and circadian alignment. In other areas like, for example, Donald Trump usually talks about how little he sleeps and how this helps him to be more competitive. So, the people at the top essentially set the tone, but we have research that shows, for example, that leaders misjudge their employees.

For example, if your boss is a morning person and you’re an evening person as a team member, you’re more likely to get bad performance evaluations compared to a team member who’s also a morning person. A lot of this is around awareness. My experience is that starting a conversation around this typically brings about positive change that people are more likely to recognize that there is value in allowing people to adjust to a certain degree.

ALISON BEARD: So once leaders are aware of the different chronotypes and rhythms on their team, and they know which type of work should be done when, either collaboratively or handing off, what’s the best way for them to instruct people or schedule people or encourage people to do the right thing here?

STEFAN VOLK: Depends on the size of the team obviously. But in general, if you know your team members, you will know very quickly once you start a conversation what types people are. And then it really depends.

What is your own chronotype? Are you a morning person? Do you have a big job, a big presentation in the morning? Do you need the support from a team member that is equally peaking at this time, right? So who do you choose to go into that meeting with you, to go into that presentation with you in order to support you in that presentation. Or similar, if you have to do that presentation in the afternoon, where you are not at your best. You aren’t going to take the same person.

You take the person where you know that person is more of an afternoon person and is sharper and stronger at this point of time. Sometimes, you need somebody to support you at peak time. Sometimes you want to take yourself out as well. So, for example, in the afternoon as a morning person, that’s a good time to take yourself back a little bit, not essentially drive every single decision, everything, single process. It’s a good time to empower people, to delegate work to other people that are more energized during that time. So, when do you take charge? When do you let go? When do you delegate? When do you step in?

In particular, outside of your circadian peak time, you have to conserve the limited energy you have for the really important situations where you have to step in. But obviously you can already at the beginning of the day start to plan your day/tasks around these things, in terms of when do we do the more challenging work, when do we do the more routine work and how can we distribute it across the team?

The beauty of the team is that you can really leverage these differences and coordinate them in a very productive way as much as possible. Sometimes morning people and evening people have to work together and then there’s often also middle ground where you work in the middle. So, for example, I know my supervisor was a morning person, I was an evening person. So, we used to have our meetings around noon when he was still mentally alert and I was already mentally alert.

ALISON BEARD: The same probably goes for team meetings and collaborative work, brainstorming or anything where you need as many people at their peak as possible, you just need to find that common ground time that will be best for everyone, right? That will catch –

STEFAN VOLK: The most people being engaged. Yes.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah.

STEFAN VOLK: And at the fringes of the day in early morning, in the late evening, you’re more likely to lose a substantial fraction of your team. So, they say around 20 percent of people are morning people, around 20% of the evening people, the remaining are in immediate people, but it’s actually a continuous variable. People can peak at any point during the day, right?

So, it’s quite distributed, but it’s a bit of a normal distribution, but most people more in the middle of the day. So, scheduling late morning would be a good time because we also know that in the early afternoon, there’s a little dip in our circadian rhythm. That’s what you feel when you’re really tired in the early afternoon. Often people think it’s lunch…

ALISON BEARD: Post lunch, right?

STEFAN VOLK: Yeah.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, exactly.

STEFAN VOLK: It’s probably less the lunch. It’s more that we have a predisposition to nap. We have an evolved predisposition to nap and that you can still see it in the circadian rhythm. So, there’s a little dip in the early afternoon. And that is usually the worst time to have meetings.

ALISON BEARD: And as a boss, when you need to ask people to work outside what you know is their peak time, how should you communicate that and make sure that they’re going to give it their all even though they’re not at their best?

STEFAN VOLK: So, people are used to doing that right because that’s been the standard. So people are just being asked to work at times whenever it suited the organization, the team, not so much when it was in their own preference. So, people probably won’t complain about it, but it is good to be aware that they can still function, but everything takes longer. Everything is harder. They’re depleting quicker, right? So, if you do this constantly, people are much quicker burning out or developing other health problems. So, we have to account for this.

We have to allow for recovery, we have to rotate people out of these patterns. People have to be aware that – and in fact we are mostly not aware of this, that when we are outside of our circadian peak, our attention, our reaction time, all these things are slowed and subdued. It happens also for me very often when it gets too late, and I want to finish some work before I go to bed. Just I want to finish the project. And a job that would take ten minutes usually takes me an hour, and then it’s not even well done.

So we have to be aware. We have to have the second set of eyes, we have to have more checks and balances, and we have to give people more ability to recover and recharge. And then we can also obviously work outside of our rhythms for a certain time.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Is there an example of a team or organization that you’ve seen implement these changes and team performance has demonstrably increased as a result?

STEFAN VOLK: So, in the article, we have a couple of examples. For example, I think the CEO of Trivago who is a morning person and has realized that this is precious time for him. And he essentially blocks that morning time for his own work. So, he doesn’t have any meetings in the morning in order to be able to do the tasks that he perceives as most challenging during that time.

We have an example of Citigroup that has different teams working at different times depending on their ability in cross-border transactions, where they also could see an improvement in performance, improvement of happiness of the employee.

It is something that is still relatively new though, right? So, that’s why we talk about it. It’s what most organizations are not aware of. Again, we have industries where this has been implemented for a long time; where it’s very clear evidence that it’s related to reduced errors, reduced mistakes in aviation, in transportation where this has been done for decades. But it often is seen as it’s only relevant if you go to the extremes, for example, night shift work, right? But it’s not just about night shift versus day shift.

Within a day, within a regular 10- to 8-hour day, there are quite significant differences in terms of people’s ability to perform and adjusting to this can have very positive effects in terms of performance, in terms of wellbeing, and in terms of long-term health.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, Stefan, this, as I said, has been a conversation that is music to my ears because I definitely work best at night and I want to keep doing it. And so, I am now not going to wake up at the crack of dawn to try to be more productive. And I’m going to encourage everyone on my team to follow their own circadian rhythms as well. So, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

STEFAN VOLK: Yes, thank you. Thanks for having me.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Stefan Volk, professor of management at the University of Sydney Business School and author of the HBR article Tapping into Your Team’s Circadian Rhythms.

Next week, Adi speaks with Marcus Buckingham about the importance of customers truly loving your products. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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