By her own account, Carolyn Schur made a lousy employee. Working in a government office, she'd show up late for morning meetings, spend much of the day telling off co-workers and be incapacitated by frequent headaches.
Her bosses didn't have much sympathy. She was singled out as unruly for routinely flouting the office's 9 a.m. start time. One supervisor warned that if she continued to arrive late, she would be disciplined, Ms. Schur says.
“I ignored it for a while. And then I just said, no, I don't have to take this any more. There's a reason for why this is happening.”
The reason? “I'm a night owl,” says Ms. Schur, who's spent the 30 years since her first forays into the workaday world as a human-resources consultant.
“When I tried to change, I got sick.”
Night owls have long suffered under the tyranny of the early bird.
At work, early risers are quick-climbing keeners. At home, they can sneak out the door while the house is still quiet. At breakfast, they pay half price.
Any list of the world's most powerful people attests to the merits of rising before the rooster. By 4:30 a.m., U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is already pondering foreign-policy conundrums. Half an hour later, real-estate mogul Donald Trump is well coiffed and considering his next deal. At 5:30, Research In Motion bigwig Jim Balsillie can be found working on his backhander at an ice rink.
Not for much longer. A growing parliament of night owls is finally starting to hoot in protest. Citing genetic differences that force them to wake up late, these dawdlers are organizing worldwide to overthrow a workplace bias they say favours early birds.
“Why should we have the work hours of farmers and peasants forced upon us in this day and age?” says Danish engineer Camilla Kring, an emerging international force in the fight to recognize night owls in the workplace. “We all have different day and night cycles and it's time workplaces created new structures that support our different rhythms.”
After struggling her whole working life to adapt to the dawn alarm that went with Denmark's 8-to-4 workday, Dr. Kring, whose PhD was on work-life balance, began researching what was so different between her and morning people. She soon latched on to a University of Surrey study showing that early risers are more likely to have the long form of a gene called Period 3, while late risers are more likely to have a short form.
Dr. Kring has labelled the larks A-people and the owls B-people.
“B-people are not lazy,” she says. “It's genetic.”
This year, Ms. Kring launched B-Society, a group devoted to lobbying companies to stagger start times and better accommodate those whose circadian rhythms are a little delayed. In just six months, the group attracted 5,500 members and sprouted offshoots throughout Europe. The group's website is adding a job board on which B-friendly openings throughout the world will be posted.
“B-people are just as productive as anyone else,” she says, “but they are productive at different times of day.”
By some sort of cubicle telepathy, the idea that some workers should be allowed to start work late has spread to North American shores as well.
In a chapter of her new book War and Peace in the Workplace, Regina-based HR consultant Jeanne Martinson argues that circadian rhythms should join race and gender as diversity issues that supervisors cater to in the workplace.
“A lot of motivational speakers tout this stuff about the early bird getting the worm,” says Ms. Martinson, who wrote the chapter after consulting Ms. Schur's 1995 book Birds of a Different Feather, which highlighted circadian differences among workers. “They make it seem like being a night owl is a choice. It's actually biological. It's like being blue-eyed or brown-eyed. It's not about choice at all.”
