“Time is money”, said a student in my course when I talked about recovery from work and the importance of breaks and leisure time. Another one asked me why managers should invest in improving workers’ health and well-being by granting them more free time at the expense of working time. What is their return on investment? This question caught me by surprise and made me wonder:

• Why do we frame free time as “recovery from work”? Does this imply that leisure should serve work?
• What is it that we need to recover from?
• If leisure is more than a counterpart to work stress, what is it exactly?
• Can we even distinguish between work and leisure in lives in which work is no longer confined to a specific time or place?
• And what should we make of expressions such as: 'If you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life'?

To find answers to these questions, I dove into the scientific literature. But the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. Overall, my reading was both an enjoyable AND confusing endeavor. I did not find clear answers to my questions. But still, I learned a lot. For instance, I realized that society's view on work and leisure is constantly changing and often paradoxical. I will describe four major challenges I encountered and that puzzled me.

Firstly, from means to meaning: Nowadays, workers want jobs that serve a greater purpose, provide them with a sense of fulfillment, and personal satisfaction. Having a meaningful occupation reduces sick days, absenteeism rates, increases participation in skill training, and extends retirement age. However, jobs in societies focused on meaning rather than means require high levels of recognition and appreciation from the social environment because a salary slip is no longer enough to feel valued. Pursuing a greater cause at work may also lead workers to neglect other roles in life and they may be more easily exploited. In meaningful occupations such as higher education, social work, and healthcare, workers contribute to the greater good, find meaning in their work but also face a high risk of burnout.

 Secondly, the workload challenge: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses found that workload in modern work is high and is consistently related to counterproductive work behaviors, psychological strains, and poor physical health. Under stress, people avoid exploring potentially more time-consuming routes, and stick to what they already know and can do well. They concentrate on urgent tasks which they complete as fast and as efficiently as possible. Under stress, people also shift their focus to the product rather than the process. That is, workers with a high workload cannot devote time to taking less experienced team members along in their reasoning and help them understand why they pursue a particular course of action. In this environment, it is unlikely that new, innovative ideas and a positive team climate will emerge.

Thirdly: Burnout. Today, we can still see the heritage of Christian ́s praise of work when burnout is framed as a badge of honor and our social welfare states punish those who do not or cannot pursue paid occupations: “Those who do not work, shall not eat.” Let ́s move on to the fourth challenge: hybrid work and flexibility: At no point in history have workers enjoyed greater levels of flexibility in time and space. Many knowledge workers can freely decide whether they want to work at the office, from their home, at a co-working space or at a café. This freedom of work location often comes with enhanced time control. People can decide when they start or end their working day and when they take breaks. But are we actually “working from home” or “living at work”? Many people are available for work around the clock and find it very hard to mentally disengage from work. Work is literally in people ́s pocket and on their nightstand when they sleep. Furthermore, leaders struggle to create some sense of community when their team is dispersed across different locations. Across the world, employers currently witness an erosion of work communities and a lack of social cohesion. In hybrid work settings, new and less experienced colleagues more easily get stuck in their tasks with no one around to support them. Problems that would be easily talked through and fixed over a lunch break with colleagues can result in days of frustration. And when people are at the office, they often schedule back-to-back meetings throughout the day, leading to intensified  working days without breaks. So, even when people are at the office, possibilities for spontaneous, informal interactions are limited. This makes it increasingly difficult to get to know colleagues personally and build the trust necessary to collaborate effectively. Overall, there seems to be a tension between people ́s high need for autonomy in determining the time and space of their work activities, and the social connections that develop when people interact with each other face-to-face and spontaneously.

I believe that the challenges we face in society and work organizations, stem from broader developments over recent decades, particularly our fixation on individual freedom at the expense of our social nature. Neoliberalism and neoliberal policies which have been implemented across the world, entail the “economization of the social”. Freedom became a guiding principle of society, forcing the individual to organize their whole life according to rational, economic principles of efficiency. At work, traditional management principles are increasingly replaced by so-called indirect management principles. Direct supervision and control are replaced by guidelines which empower individual workers to take responsibility for their own work. Workers thus have more autonomy. Other ingredients for indirect management are a cohesive company culture, inspiring rather than controlling leaders and performance metrics such as impact factors and H-indices which shape employee behavior without direct intervention of managers. With the help of indirect management, salaried workers adopt an entrepreneurial mindset, external market pressures are internalized. Workers experience more pressure because they have more freedom.

For a deeper understanding of autonomy in modern work settings and sustainable working lives, we need to reconceive autonomy and acknowledge its social nature. With this lens, which I call 'autonomy in connection', I revisit two of the challenges I just described, taking this new perspective.

Firstly, workload. Workload emerges due to hierarchy and status differences. Academia is an environment par excellence with hierarchy and large status differences. Lower-status workers may hesitate to ask for support from their high-status colleagues and they are often dependent on them to progress in their work. Higher-status workers may allocate resources unfairly or delegate unpleasant, time-consuming or futile tasks to their lower-status colleagues, which these colleagues  may perceive as illegitimate. But lower-status workers may lack the power to speak up against an unfair division of tasks and resources. In such an environment, workers may end up doing more and more just to be seen and noticed by their high-status peers. Workload also emerges when people experience a lack of recognition of their work and encouraging feedback by their leaders, team members and peers. This problem is also extremely common in academic settings, where positive feedback seems to be the exception rather than the rule and individuals compete for scarce resources. Workload often emerges due to poor leadership. Leaders may for example have a limited understanding of the time it takes to complete certain tasks, or they may not help employees to prioritize tasks. Some leaders make their employees think that they should become a sheep with 5 legs and that they need to excel at everything they do, all the time. Leaders also serve as role models. If they skip work breaks, work long hours, and send emails during nights and weekends, their advice for employees to prioritize well-being loses credibility. Workload also emerges when there is competition for tenure and promotion, and people may take on too many tasks because they feel that they need to show that they can do more or better than others. Competition is further intensified by performance systems that reward individual performance, even though, in reality, individuals depend on the work of others to excel in their jobs. Workload often emerges when there is a lack of social support and workers cannot ask anyone for help when they are overburdened or unfamiliar with a task. Finally, workload often emerges when workers experience time poverty, referring to the constant feeling that there is not enough time to fulfill one ́s obligations across life domains including caregiving responsibilities, or other commitments in life. Summing up, the autonomy people have at work makes people believe that workload is their personal problem and rooted in their inability to work faster or more efficiently. But I hope what I have just described makes it evident that workload is a collective problem and can only be addressed as such.

The second challenge I would like to revisit is hybrid work and flexibility: Managers have tried to reinstall a sense of social connection and community by enforcing days that people must come to the office. This approach usually fails because people perceive this as a limitation to their autonomy, rather than a measure to increase social connection. This perception also stems from the different time frames by which autonomy and social connection unfold. When an organization does not  allow employees to work from home, autonomy loss is directly tangible whereas the decrease of social connections will only become apparent in the more distant future. Accordingly, working from home is like indulging in a sugary snack while on a diet: it feels good in the moment, but harms you in the distant future. Sustainable Human Resource Management needs to adequately reflect both the social and the individual nature of human beings. Autonomy is given to us in interaction with our social environment, in connection with others and it is rooted in shared social norms and values. To be and to feel autonomous, we need relationships. Or to put it differently: social connections do not contradict or limit autonomy, but they are a precondition for autonomy to emerge. For autonomy to unfold its benefits, we also need institutional and social practices that foster participation. And we need time to experiment with and experience autonomy in connection with others. Those who have this time are more likely to be active workers and active citizens who shape the world they are working and living in. We need a vision, which understands people as holistic beings with a life outside their paid occupation that deserves their attention, and which is valuable to society. Decreasing weekly work hours would be the first step towards redesigning our life, centered around people rather than work.

Back to the question of my students about the return on investment of leisure time. I would like to use the words of Russel and respond: “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. [...] The leisure class cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Without leisure, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.” We need to rethink our view on leisure serving work and work time as an indicator of productivity. In a “Tätigkeitsgesellschaft” as Hannah Arendt called it, our livelihood would not depend on a full-time paid occupation, and we would value equally the time people invest across various life domains. In this society, we may engage in and find pleasure in tasks that we now delegate to others or do not prioritize due to time poverty. Time is not money. Time cannot be recovered, exchanged, saved or stolen. Time is valuable and sweet, enriching every facet of human existence. Time is honey.