Michael Schluter and John Ashcroft write from Cambridge, UK. They are the Founder (Michael) and current Director (John) of the Relationships Foundation; Michael is also currently Chairman of Relational Research and CEO of Relational Peacebuilding Initiatives. Between them they have authored and co-authored numerous books on the significance of relationships, including being two of the four co-authors of the seminal The Relational Lens.
The interactions between time, money and relationships are complex and often go unrecognised.
Time is the key resource — and the biggest cost — for many organisations. The language of money is readily applied to time: it is spent, saved, allocated, invested and wasted. It is, however, less readily measured and accounted for, and (unlike money) cannot be ‘stored’. It is exchanged through promises, which may be commodified into money or legalised through contracts.
Interest links time and money. Capital is used to buy time (labour) which creates opportunities for profit, but the cost of time also competes with profit. Where time horizons are shortened by investor/lender requirements or limited continuity of relationship, future costs or benefits may be discounted more heavily or even ignored.
Technology increases productivity and busyness, but rarely saves time. The value of time has, however, increased because more can be produced within a unit of time. As a result, an hour’s work is reckoned to be worth 25 times more today than in 1830.
Time also differs from money in that the benefits of spending time are usually less tangible, particularly when spent in relationship rather than in artisanal production.
Moreover our ideas of efficiency are shaped by our scale of value. More relational uses of time may be deemed inefficient if outcomes and value are too narrowly defined, and it is not recognised that the value of time is shaped by its relational context. The benefits of any previous investment of time are retained in a relationship, thus enabling more productive use of any future investment. As explored in the previous post, all aspects of relational proximity increase the value of time.
The tangible costs of any choice or action are more visible and thus more easily monitored than the time costs, which will be apparent to the individuals affected but may not immediately be noticed by others, particularly if they are not physically present. Opportunity costs may be time specific and not transferable: time cannot be reallocated across budgets as readily as money.
We cannot acquire more time, but we can buy the product of other people’s time and so increase our ability to direct our own fixed stock of time to our chosen purposes. Control over your own time and control over the time of others is therefore a significant power issue. Weaker and more vulnerable members of society are often forced into sacrificing preferred working hours to meet the needs of those who are ‘cash-rich’ but ‘time-poor’.
A more relational understanding of time and its economic value has a wide range of practical implications and challenges.
For businesses and other organisations, it is important to know where employees’ time is spent and invested, and whether this matches strategic priorities. Monitoring the time and relational costs of meetings, phone calls, email etc is one specific example, but a wider view could inform service and job design (are staff spending time on value-creating relationships? What is distracting them from these relationships?)
This might feed into relationship management processes — developing better modelling of the costs and the dividends of a relationship, and the investment required to sustain it.
More broadly, processes for the financial costing of projects or policies are much better than those for anticipating relational costs and consequences. A recognition of the time-value that has been invested into existing working relationships — and which would need to be invested into developing new ones — should be factored into assessing any proposals which would disrupt them. In addition, focussing on the time implications for individuals affected by key decisions should help to uncover some of their hidden — but very real — relational impacts, which should then be taken just as seriously as other ‘externalities’ such as impacts on the wider environment. Particular issues where these considerations (perhaps in the form of a ‘relational impact assessment’) could significantly influence decisions include:
- the time and relational costs of accountability processes and performance monitoring (e.g. in public services)
- policies to reform working and/or trading hours
- transport, infrastructure and planning decisions, particularly where they impact on commuting time and thus time for family and community
- the costs, timing and implementation of organisational change.
Comments and discussion are welcome (see below). Please note that comments will be moderated to avoid trolling and spamming, and so will not appear immediately.