Our third teleseminar is on Tuesday, July 8th, and we can’t wait for you to join us.  The banter with the participants on the last two calls has been full of energy and passion for changing the way we think about, and do, work.

For more information and to register for this [FREE!] call on 7/8, go to: www.caliandjodybooktour.com.

As always, we are thrilled to be joined on the call by three guests - this time, it will be:

• Tim Ferriss, NY Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek
• David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done and the upcoming book Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life (Dec. ‘08)
• Melanie Benson Strick, Million Dollar Business Coach, creator of Virtual Team Building Secrets

Can’t make the live call?  Register anyway, and you’ll gain access to the recording.

See you on Tuesday!

Readers of this blog know that we’re not fans of traditional flexible work arrangements, but a recent article in Workforce Management has us rubbing our eyes in disbelief. The piece brings up some excellent points, including the fact that of 21 “high income” countries, the U.S. finished last in having laws that support flexible work arrangements. But the solutions that are being proposed make us cringe:

In December, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, introduced the Working Family Flexibility Act, which would grant employees “the right to request” reduced hours or an alternate work schedule.

If the bill is passed, employers would have to establish formal procedures for discussing employees’ needs and how to address them but wouldn’t be required to grant employees their requests.

In May, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington, introduced the Family-Friendly Workplace Act. Under the bill, private sector workers would be able to work overtime and essentially bank that toward paid time off, or “family time.” Currently, only public sector employees have family time.

Taking the first bill first, isn’t the “right to request” something already covered by the First Amendment? Or does the Bill of Rights get suspended once you start collecting a paycheck? (We’re not experts in Constitutional law, so tell us if we’re wrong on this one.) Of course, all the free-speech-loving requests for a humane workplace don’t mean anything if the law doesn’t require your employer to act on that request. Furthermore, companies already have procedures for requesting a more humane work schedule. The reason more people don’t follow those procedures is out of fear of committing career suicide.

As for the second bill, how it is that you’re getting more “family time” by working more hours? Does that mean that the person who works an 80-hour week gets more time with their kids than someone who works a 60-hour week? To us that sounds an awful lot like that old marketing ploy, “The more you spend, the more you save!”

We’re not ruling out the possibility of the federal government playing a positive role in this fight. Blanket cynicism about ineffectual government doesn’t help anyone. But let’s not pretend that trying to rejigger old ideas about time are going to somehow magically make life better. Next time you see an article about a “solution” to the problem of work, put it to this simple test:

Does it give people control over their time? Does it focus on getting work done instead of on what work looks like? Does it give people real power to make choices about what is best for both their work life and their personal life?

If the answer isn’t a resounding “Yes!”, then move on. There’s nothing to see here.

When employees complained about fairness, management put an ingenious (and cruel) spin on it. They told people to think of the policy as a “punctuality bonus”. If you punched in on time, you’d get your 10% bump, even if it really just brought you up to your normal salary.

*Sigh*

We hear stories like these and it makes us wonder what would happen if the leadership at that company were exposed to the ROWE mindset. Work cultures are slow to change, and we doubt this place will become a good place to work without a lot of struggle, but maybe, just maybe we could make work suck just a little less at this company.

You probably have your own horror stories, about a company policy, a manager’s outdated notions about time, or coworkers who Sludge like crazy. You can probably also see how a Results-Only Work Environment would change the culture of your work.

So we want to hear from you. Post a comment (five lines maximum) about why you want or need ROWE. We’ll award a copy of the book to the best entry. If you’d like, we’ll also send a copy to your boss, manager or member of the executive team. We can’t promise to score that “punctuality bonus” for you, but maybe we can help plant the seed that will make those kinds of policies go away.

On time

34% Before 8:30 a.m.

30% There is no such thing as “on time”

27% Before 8:00 a.m.

9% Before 7:30 a.m

Leaving early

41% Before 5:00 p.m.

22% Before 4:00 p.m.

13% Before 3:00 p.m.

13% Before 6:00 p.m.

11% There is no “leaving early” — we leave whenever we want

What we found interesting about these results is the difference between the beginning of your day and the end of your day. It seems that the rules are looser in the morning than they are in the afternoon, that you are more likely to get in trouble for leaving early than for being late.

Our first question is whether or not these results ring true for you. Do 30% of you out there honestly not have to worry about being “on time”? Or is something else at work?

Our second question is why there is a gap in the first place. Why would the traditional work environment have more of a problem with people leaving early than they would with them coming in late? If the goal is to put in an eight-hour day, then what difference does it make where you miss the time?

Thoughts? Insights? Witty comments?

RAW is perfectly executed. A casual passerby would be completely fooled into thinking you were hard at work. But there is also something extremely sad about the very existence of this site. When we see humor like this we laugh for a moment and then settle into a mild funk, because it assumes (and rightly) that:

1. When you are at work, you are essentially a prisoner.

2. You are a prisoner at work, and you will always be a prisoner because the culture of work will never change.

3. Your best bet is to laugh at your imprisonment and/or make up clever workarounds as opposed to finding a way to set yourself free.

We know we have a lot of work to do to change the culture of the traditional workplace. And we’re the last people to want to step on a laugh. But we also want you to take heart. There is a better way. Laughter may be the best medicine, but we’re fighting for an all-out cure.

The second reason we were happy to see this post is because ROWE started at a corporation, but the basic principles behind it (that people are adults who should be trusted to do their work and then left alone to live their lives) could apply to other areas of our life. In our conversations with employees at Best Buy, we often heard stories about how the ROWE mindset had started to influence the other aspects of people’s lives.

We know it’s early to be talking about the second wave of ROWE, but then again, why not? And so we’d like to put a question to you:

If you lived in a Results-Only world, how might your life be different? What would your day be like if you had a Results-Only marriage, family, neighborhood association, school board, etc.?

We love the images they used in the slide show, especially the dude reclining in the middle of the grass and the weirdly composed picture of the hipster guy and his spaced-out coworker (girlfriend?) sitting on the file cabinet. (We’re not sure what that last picture means, but we like it.)

At the same time, in the interest of full disclosure, we want you to see another picture of what a ROWE looks like:

Not very exciting, huh? In fact, if we weren’t outside, wouldn’t this scene look a little . . . ordinary?

We wanted you to see this image because we never want people to lose sight of the fact that in a ROWE, you still have to work. It’s not a time-off program. It’s not a reduced-hours program. You still have the same amount of work to do.

Don’t get us wrong: that was a great day. We were glad to be able to work outside at a coffee shop, but we also had things to do that day that were difficult, and stressful, and frustrating. Just like in a traditional workplace. The difference was that we were able to focus our energies on the task at hand, without having to deal with a bunch of nonsense like being on time, or sitting in pointless meetings, or looking “busy”.

In short, a ROWE does not solve all the problems you’re going to have at work. A ROWE solves the unnecessary problems of work, the ones that arise from our broken, outdated work culture. You still have to work, even if work doesn’t have to suck.

The second teleseminar as part of our virtual book tour is on Tuesday, 6/24, and we want you to join us!  For more information and to register for the [FREE!] call on 6/24, please go to: www.authorteleseminars.com/whyworksucks2.html

We are thrilled to be joined on the call by three guests: 

• Dan Pink, author of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, and Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself
• Jason Alba, CEO of JibberJobber.com and author of I’m on Facebook, Now What? and I’m on Linked In, Now What?
• Scott Stratten, HR professor for Sheridan College, online marketing expert, and author of Thank Goodness It’s Monday

Can’t make the live call?  Register anyway, and you’ll gain access to the recording.

See you on Tuesday!

One of the great business benefits of a ROWE is that it naturally eliminates low-value work. (Think of the “TPS Reports” in the movie Office Space - you know what we mean.) Low-value work is one of the by-products of a traditional work environment. If time and physical presence are as important as meeting goals and expectations, then having work that keeps you “busy” but doesn’t make you productive is completely acceptable. Most traditional workplaces would rather have you present and accounted for (and running a meaningless report that no one reads) than off doing whatever.

When we say a ROWE naturally eliminates low-value work, what we mean is that you don’t need an efficiency expert to tell you when you’re wasting your time. Even today, you know (and we know you know) what parts of your job serve little or no purpose. People aren’t stupid. They can feel busy work in their bones. And the only reason why people don’t challenge the busy work is because there is no incentive. It’s not like you’re going to get that extra time for yourself. Chances are your boss would just come up with something else for you to do to make sure they’re getting forty hours out of you.

In a ROWE, because you put results first, you’re allowed to test any task to see if it’s necessary. Outcomes drive tasks instead of tasks driving outcomes. If your boss says, “I need those TPS reports by Monday” you have a right (even an obligation) to ask if those TPS really need to be done by Monday, or if they even need to be done at all. If something isn’t driving results, then it’s bad for business. So why do it?

So we’ll put this idea to you in the form of a question. What task that is part of your job would you eliminate? What do you have to do (every day, every week, every month, etc.) that you suspect isn’t serving the greater good? What part of your job would you get rid of that no one would miss?

Then he wanted to know what was frustrating about talking about the book. He wanted to know what was the question or concern that we found the most bothersome to answer. In other words, what cheesed us off.

First, nothing really cheeses us off. When we read a blog post comment that calls ROWE a “pipe dream” or us “hippies”, it doesn’t bother us. We’ve heard it all before. And when we hear these comments, we don’t hear the dismissive tone or the casual insult. We hear the sound of someone’s beliefs about work. Beliefs like:

Some people just need supervision

If you give people control over their schedules, they will take advantage

The best collaborations happen face-to-face

And so forth. If these statements were facts (if they had been generated in some kind of Swiss workplace-optimization lab), then we’d worry. But these statements are not facts. They are beliefs that most of us share, but that doesn’t make them true.

However, we do get frustrated when people say things like, “A Results-Only Work Environment sounds great. But it would never work with my job, because you couldn’t measure the results. I do [insert job here] and how do you measure results for that?”

Ironically, this is also the sound of someone’s beliefs about work, although it’s more subtle and much harder for us to answer. The reason why it’s hard for us to answer is that we don’t understand the ins and outs of every job on Earth. We have no idea how to measure results for your job, because we’re not inside your business, tracking its performance goals, jockeying for position with your competitors and trying to survive in your category or field.

But you are inside your business, aren’t you? And your coworkers are. And your boss and upper management and your leaders are. Collectively, you all know what’s important because you’re in the thick of it. If you banded together and had daily, probing questions about what you were trying to accomplish, then you’d know what kind of results your particular job (and every job in the organization) needed to drive.

So the question isn’t, How do you set goals and measure outcomes for [insert job here]? The better question is, Why doesn’t our entire organization have a culture that only cares about results? Why is my boss as concerned about my getting to work on time as she is about whether or not I actually do my job? Why do we have quarterly performance reviews when performance questions come up all the time? Why is 360-degree feedback this huge, elaborate ritual that freaks people out instead of being a natural part of our daily routine?

The answer to those questions is culture. The reason why people can’t even imagine setting goals and measuring results for their job is because the traditional culture of work doesn’t put a premium on results. The traditional culture of work puts a premium on a mixture of results, keeping up appearances and obedience. (Which is fine if you go for that kind of thing.) By putting results first, a ROWE changes everybody’s mindset about work. And when you are only judged on results, the entire organization shifts its focus. You figure out how to set goals and measure results because, quite frankly, it’s all you’ve got.