Working hours? They are just so last season.

In last week’s episode of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, two women vied for a rare opportunity to teach at the village school, eager to experience “a few days of being cherished” in a job. Meanwhile another character tried to organise the Post Office workers, making a stand for an eight-hour day, half a day’s rest a week, and respect for his free time.

His employer argued that the job – providing a postal service to Irish labourers working under much more exploitative conditions – doesn’t best sit in regular hours. And she wants to have fun on it: “We work in such a leisurely fashion that every day is a half day!”

As one would expect from the fictional world of Candleford, all is resolved quite happily in the end, on the understanding that the employee will ask for time off when he wants it – and that there’ll be a weekly job swap to shake up the hierarchy. Progressive stuff even a hundred years on.

If there’s a lesson to be learnt, it’s not about what constitutes decent working conditions. It’s asking why we have the structure that we do. Does it really work for us? Could something else be better? Is there a danger that, having fought for and won a restricted working week, it could trap us in rhythms that have fallen behind the beat?

Do we need to be in the office nine 'til five? Or at all for that matter?

It’s this sort of questioning that brought success to the Brazilian company Semco, whose CEO Ricardo Semler cut out offices, management, job titles and business plans altogether, in favour of the employee’s freedom to do their job on their own terms.

With iphones, video conferencing, ubiquitous wifi and cloud computing, the office is more useful as a social arena than as a workplace. And – as spaces like the Hub demonstrate – the people you meet there don’t even need to be your colleagues.

Photo credit: gabyjalbert / istock