Biology Doesn’t Clock In at Nine and Out at Five

Lion, Bear, Wolf, or Dolphin? Your body already knows what time it runs on.

Biology doesn’t clock in at nine and out at five. And yet almost every workplace is built as if it does. It’s a strange blind spot for organisations that claim to care so much about their people.

Corporates have changed a lot over the years. Just not enough. They spend tons of time talking about improving employee experience, discussing the initiatives being put in place for employee wellbeing, but they’ve done very little to date to move the needle and shift and alter the homeostasis. A lot of what we’ve seen is more talk than do. Most organisations just tend to follow one another, applying and fostering whatever’s already trending elsewhere, but essentially there’s a lot of blind leading the blind with most of these initiatives not being good enough, or tokenistic at best. Wellness apps, an extra day off here and there, these in my humble opinion are all drips and drabs, not a strategy.

So why is a marketer and self-professed gym junkie and fitness fiend talking about this? Well, I spent 25 years in corporate, and since recently sidestepping away, I can see the forest from the trees a lot better. A for effort for some corporates, D to F in implementation and execution.

Part of that shift has meant immersing myself far more in health and wellness, reading, listening to podcasts, genuinely paying attention in a way a demanding corporate career never really left room for. And the more I have, the more obvious it’s become how much corporates should be doing for employee health and wellbeing that they simply aren’t. People’s whole days are essentially consumed by work, endless hours in front of a computer screen, back-to-back meetings, with barely a moment carved out for themselves. Employees give a huge amount of themselves to these organisations, and the reality is they deserve to get more back for it. This isn’t a nice-to-have. And, not to be overly dramatic here, but their health as well as their lives, depend on it.

Despite all the societal evolution and technological advancement, the protocols and day-to-day practices inside the corporate world have really changed very little over the decades. Meetings still default to 9-to-5, one-size-fits-all scheduling, regardless of what any of that “wellness talk” claims to value. One-to-ones are generally scheduled at the optimum time for the manager, not necessarily the employee. Although in the employer’s defence, maybe the employee hasn’t appreciated the best time of day for themselves either. And while some strides have been made, we do see some organisations offering more flexible working hours, four-day work weeks, or other variations on that, these practices are still very much in the minority.

So what if workplace practices were modelled around what actually works best for employees, biologically? The impact on wellness and morale alone would be worth it, before you even factor in what it could mean for productivity and efficiency, both human and organisational.

I guess this is the part where we jump back into sleep chronotypes, and what implications they could have on the corporate world and how recognition of these could benefit all parties concerned.

Chronotypes, Quickly Recapped

Quick refresher for anyone who missed my last piece. Dr. Michael Breus groups people into four chronotypes, named after animals, based on when they’re naturally most alert. Lions rise early and peak in the morning, roughly 15-20% of people. Bears, the majority at around 55%, track fairly closely with a standard daytime schedule. Wolves come alive later in the day and evening, about 15% of people. And Dolphins, roughly 10%, are light, easily-disturbed sleepers who tend to run hypervigilant, myself included. None of the four is better or worse, just different, but each is wired to peak at a different point in the day.

What actually matters beyond just knowing your own type is this. A workforce built entirely around one fixed schedule suits maybe one, or possibly two, chronotypes at best, leaving everyone else working against their own biology by default. Take a Wolf, for example, being forced into an 8am meeting, they’re being asked to think sharply during the exact window their biology is working against them, and this has nothing to do with concentration or commitment. Or a Dolphin, already prone to poor sleep, starting the day early on top of that, compounds an existing vulnerability, more fatigue, resulting in less genuine engagement. This is a structural flaw in how workplaces are built, an antiquated practice that isn’t really looking at the employee, at what suits their needs, or what factors into their biology.

Putting This Into Practice

But wouldn’t it be great if companies embraced chronotypes and started to apply it to their organisations? Plenty already dabble in something similar, DISC assessments, personality profiling, usually rolled out as part of a team offsite or a one-off development day, rather than a genuine, ongoing part of how people are managed. So why not a sleep chronotype test too, based on Dr. Michael Breus’s framework, done at the point of hire, or as part of onboarding? Managers would then have real visibility into what that person’s makeup actually is, and could tailor how they engage with them accordingly.

Practically, that could look like a lot of things. If you’re asking a team member to give a presentation, when’s the best time of day for them to do it? I can speak to this personally. If you asked me to give a presentation, or speak on a company-wide call, between 2 and 4pm, that’s about the worst window you could pick. That’s my slump zone, energy tanks, focus goes with it, and I’m nowhere near operating at my best. Ask me the same thing first thing in the morning instead, wide eyed and bushy tailed, and you’d get a completely different version of me who is sharper and more articulate. Same logic applies to a one-to-one, a training session, when someone’s genuinely alert and receptive to new information rather than running on empty, or to how you split up a larger team, grouping meetings around where people actually fall across the four chronotypes instead of one blanket slot for everyone.

If a company’s already offering flexible hours, this is a natural extension of that. Someone who’s more of a night owl could start their day later, if the role allows for it. Someone who’s a genuine early bird could start earlier and wrap up sooner. Flexible hours modelled around actual chronotype, not just flexibility for the sake of it. Remote and hybrid workers already have more of this control built in by default, less need to be physically present at a fixed hour, more room to work when their biology says they’re at their best. If anything, that makes the case even stronger, the infrastructure for this already exists in a lot of workplaces.

However, the reality is it’s just not being used with any real intention.

It comes down to this: we’re not all the same. I think corporates take too much for granted that everyone operates identically, when in reality, we’re all individually, biologically different from one another.

It doesn’t have to stop once someone’s already employed either. Talent acquisition could benefit from this just as much. If a recruiter knew a candidate’s chronotype, booking the interview during their sharpest window, rather than whatever slot happened to be free, that would give a far more honest read on how that person actually shows up. The same logic applies to performance reviews. An appraisal is meant to capture someone at their best, not whenever their manager’s calendar has a gap. If someone’s biology has them running on empty at 3pm, that’s exactly when you shouldn’t be asking them to sit through a conversation about their performance.

There’s real research backing this up too. A study looking at survey data on chronotype and work-schedule misalignment found that employees whose schedules aligned with their actual chronotype reported meaningfully higher productivity, while evening types forced into early starts specifically showed lower performance and reduced efficiency. In some cases, aligning start times with chronotype was linked to productivity gains of more than 10%. That number should by no means be trivialised, especially since it comes down to something as simple as adjusting hours to when employees are naturally and more biologically on point.

And yet, hardly anyone’s actually acting on it. Honestly, that’s not surprising either. Even tried and tested methodologies, ones that are barely new at all, still aren’t being properly implemented, so it tracks that something like this, still fairly new territory, isn’t either. But that’s exactly where the real opportunity sits.

Look at what corporate wellness tends to focus on. There’s been some effort put into reducing stress, rolling out app subscriptions like Calm here and there. However, it’s far from enough, even though it is more than every other category combined when we speak about health modalities. Movement and physical activity, actually getting employees off their chairs and away from static desk-bound days, has had very little real attention. Healthy eating gets even less, and where it does show up, it’s often as simple as what’s stocked in the office fridge, healthy beverages instead of carbonated ones, fruit bowls on hand, not exactly a heavy lift. And sleep? Practically nothing.

Maybe the counter-argument is that sleep sits outside a company’s remit entirely, something too personal, too far from nine-to-five, for an employer to reasonably touch. But employees spend an enormous number of their waking hours at work, and what makes someone a well-rounded, healthy individual isn’t just what happens at their desk. I’d argue corporates have a duty of care that extends both on-premise and beyond it, supporting the conditions that let someone rest and recover outside of 9-5 hours.

Where This Actually Gets Hard

So what’s actually stopping this from happening? A few real barriers.

The first is probably that most organisations simply don’t know where to start. The second is structural. Very few companies have a dedicated corporate wellness officer, so the task usually gets handed to HR by default. And I can assure you, it sits right at the bottom of their list, not because they don’t care, but because HR already carries an enormous, diverse remit. With talent acquisition, payroll, compliance, labour relations and the list goes on and on, wellness rarely gets the specialised, strategic attention it deserves. There’s also a qualification gap worth naming plainly: having an HR degree doesn’t mean anyone actually knows a thing about health and wellness. We’re asking one function to wear far too many hats, and this particular one, quite frankly, shouldn’t sit with them at all. I’ve written about this properly elsewhere, the case for a genuinely empowered wellness leader who reports somewhere with real influence, rather than wellness being one more HR sub-department competing for attention.

Practically speaking, scale matters too. Trying to apply this across a huge global organisation, thousands of people across time zones, isn’t realistic in the same way it would be for a smaller one. That complexity is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. This is where midsize companies have the real advantage: easier to pilot, easier to iterate and quite frankly easier to get things done. MSK, a 270-person law firm, proved exactly that with a small pilot before rolling anything out wider, I’ve written about it in more detail here, and the results were striking.

But for individual managers, none of this needs to wait for a company-wide pilot. One-to-ones, hard conversations, feedback sessions, performance reviews, all of that sits squarely within a manager’s own sphere of control. It doesn’t need HR or a company-wide policy. It just needs a manager willing to ask the right set of questions.

There’s also a low-effort entry point worth mentioning, team building. We’re always looking for novel ideas for icebreakers and offsite exercises. I mean low and behold the marshmallow-tower type of thing. Imagine folding in a combination of DISC profiling, Myers-Briggs, and sleep chronotypes into that mix, and unpacking what it all means as a team. For team-building days specifically, I think this could be brilliant. Ongoing implementation then comes down to the individual manager and how they choose to leverage that information.

At its core, this is really about emotional intelligence and empathy, understanding how teams function and how to get the best out of the people in them. The more appreciation you have for someone’s personality, what energises them, what drains them, how they like to be communicated with, when their energy naturally peaks during the day, the better equipped you are to lead them well. And chronotype feeds directly into that. It tells you when you’re likely to get the best out of someone, and just as importantly, when not to try. If there’s conflict within a team that needs addressing, doing it during someone’s flattest hours of the day is setting the conversation up to fail before it’s even started. You want people on their best biological footing for the things that actually matter whether that be difficult conversations, real feedback or conflict resolutions.

The Bottom Line

I can already hear the dismissal: what does a company have to do with someone’s bedtime, their sleep schedule, their personal biology? Fair question, except sleep is one of the fundamental pillars of health, and most employees spend somewhere between eight and twelve hours a day, every day, inside that company’s orbit. A genuine duty of care doesn’t stop at managing stress during working hours. It extends to whether people are moving enough, whether they’re eating well, and whether the demands placed on them are compatible with them sleeping properly at all.

To be fair, some organisations are already proving this is possible. I’ve covered MSK’s precision health pilot and Alea’s health-first workplace in more depth elsewhere, both worth a read if you want the full picture. Even genuinely committed organisations like these are still further along on stress, movement, and nutrition than they are on sleep specifically. That’s the gap this piece keeps circling back to.

We’re all biologically wired and genetically modelled differently. Naveen Jain, CEO of Viome, put it well at a summit I attended last year: “There is no such thing as universal healthy food… unless your name is everyone, just don’t do it.” He was talking about food, but the same logic applies to sleep. We’re not conditioned identically, and those differences ripple directly into our individual efficiency and productivity levels.

Ultimately, this comes down to understanding people better and where their energy peaks and troughs. Get that right, and it isn’t just good for the individual. It’s good for the team around them, and it’s good for the company footing the bill. The end game is to get it right for the whole trinity.

Biology doesn’t clock in at nine and out at five, so why do we keep building workplaces like it does? Sleep chronotypes give us the information. All that's missing is workplaces willing to take the initiative of building around people, instead of around a clock.