Some of you may have read Jason Calacanis’ recent post The Age of Excellence, about how there’s no longer room for average or good, but rather it’s five stars or nothing. And if you did, maybe you’re wondering if your desire for life balance is putting your career at risk. Jason explained how he handled an average employee, what he refers to as “startup kryptonite:”

“If you have someone who is average, I suggest you do what I’ve started doing: offer to give them a reference to work at your competitors. I seriously did that recently. I liked someone a lot, they were really cool and really smart, but they set their target in life at doing ‘good work’ and having balance in their life…The person left and is happier in their life, and I am happy to open the seat for someone excellent.”

He predicts that unemployment will get worse, and merely good contributors will find their work outsourced to countries offering cheap labor.

Yikes! Do we really have to render ourselves unemployable in the name of a little life balance? Say it’s not so!

Well, this is where I have to disagree with some of his conclusions. Maybe he’s right if he’s just talking about startups. Maybe it’s so hard to hit a home run today that you need everyone on your team to be obsessed with doing just that.

But outside the startup world, I know plenty of people who have gotten by with good, average, mediocre, or even poor performance for years, and I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t continue to do so. While it can be hard to get a job, it’s usually very easy to keep one.

Now, I’m not suggesting that people coast through their careers, doing the least they can get away with. I think that anything worth doing is worth doing well. But this doesn’t mean that performing well enough to exceed expectations has to mean putting in more hours or raising your stress levels. Just a few ideas:

- Don’t waste time. Tackling things with a mild sense of urgency makes them more interesting than just watching the grass grow. If you finish what you’re working on, find something else to do instead of waiting for it to come to you. Skip useless meetings, with the excuse of the big important thing you’re working on.

- Get more experience. This is largely a matter of just keeping your eyes open as things happen. More depth means getting better at what you’ve been doing. More breadth means getting better at more things. Either way, things will tend to get easier over time, if you’re paying attention.

- Communicate better. Ask people if you’re doing what they want instead of assuming. Ask if someone has a better idea than what you’re planning to do. Make suggestions if you see options that might work better.

- Care. If you wouldn’t show up at work with a rumpled shirt and unkempt hair, don’t allow your work to look like that either. Small things can make a big difference. Take that extra step to make sure that your spreadsheet isn’t ugly, your email doesn’t contain random apostrophes, or your program won’t break if someone tries to divide by zero.

Do things like this, and you’ll be far above the line of minimum employability (though perhaps not at a startup), while still having room for that coveted life balance. Excellence optional, not required.

Photo by azrainman

Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. Then I wrote Why We’re Failing the 4-Hour Workweek. Now Jonathan Mead has written The Lie of The Four Hour Work Week. And I in turn will respond with The Lie of the Lie of the 4-Hour Workweek.

Just like Jonathan isn’t really accusing Tim of lying, I’m not really accusing Jonathan of lying. It just makes for a nice title. Plus, it sets up my critics to call their rebuttal post The Lie of the Lie of the Lie of the 4-Hour Workweek.

Tim says that we should find a way to not have to work so much, so we can do what we want. Jonathan says we shouldn’t think of work as something to avoid, but something that’s sacred, that lets us provide value and make a difference.

I agree with much of what Jonathan said. In fact, the only thing I really disagree with is his contention that what he and Tim are saying is really all that different.

We have a semantics problem here, in that people don’t really agree on what constitutes “work.” How can Tim not consider writing and marketing a best-selling book as work? What about doing his own TV show, being a champion tango dancer, building schools in Vietnam, etc? Don’t these things take a lot of effort? Yeah, but none of it is “work” to him.

I’m guilty of using the word “work” to mean two completely different things:
1. slavery, drudgery, tedium, burden, toiling, punishment, monotony
2. freedom, purpose, contribution, self-expression, making a difference, fulfilling your dreams

People are sometimes confused when I say something like “I want to retire so I can get my work done.” It’s because we have two definitions of work that are as different as night and day.

While I don’t feel like starting a movement to get the dictionary updated, let’s see if we can paraphrase Jonathan and Tim in terms of the definitions above.

Jonathan says: “Don’t think of what you do as work¹, think of it as work².”

Tim says: “Get your work¹ done in just four hours a week, so you have more time for work².”

These sound very similar to me!

While I agreed with much of what Jonathan said, some of his commenters really got to me. I’m going to quote them anonymously not because I’m stingy with link love, but because I’m going to be mean to them. Not just for the sake of being mean, but because they’re spewing nonsense like this:

“I actually had the four hour work week for about 18 months… I got so bored that I went and found a real job that paid me much less than I was earning from my four-hour work week business just because I wanted something to do.”

and this:

“I don’t believe he works 4 hours a week. I don’t believe anyone on their death bed will be satisfied with a life like that. That isn’t authentic happiness.”

and this:

“Most people would freak out with all the ‘psychic entropy’ if they had a 4-hour workweek. I know several rich entrepreneurs who did exactly that.”

and this:

“Tim Ferriss has some interesting ideas, but the key is NOT working LESS, but instead working MORE on things you LOVE.”

and this:

“I was a stay at home mom for while and could not take it after about 6 months. The lack of people interaction was mind numbing and I missed going to the office and taking trains. Nothing like a cup of joe from a cart on the corner. For those who like to go out, meet people and feel passionately about everything they do, that lifestyle would not be ideal.”

Did anybody actually read the book? Where is everyone getting the idea that Tim prescribed a life of sitting around and doing nothing all day? Is there some law that jobless people are not allowed to ride trains, get a cup of joe from a cart on the corner, go out, meet people, and feel passionate about everything they do? Tim specifically suggests pursuing a life of excitement and service, and his life is far from boring.

What bothers me the most about these comments is the insinuation that life is inherently worthless unless you have a master giving you assignments. Newsflash: if you can’t figure out what to do with your time, THE PROBLEM IS YOU.

Say you suddenly had complete time freedom. In this world of countless wonders, unprecedented technological advances, and critical problems to be solved, could you really not figure out a way to keep yourself occupied? I can’t imagine ever being bored with life no matter how long I lived, as long as I had the freedom to do what I wanted.

If you ever run out of things to do, you’ve overstayed your welcome on this planet. If you’re bored, I’m happy to give you some sacred work to do. But really, if you have nothing to live for until your boss tells you what to live for, you’re done. You’re already emotionally dead, so as a formality, you just need to complete the process by becoming physically dead. It should be a seamless transition for you.

I agree that one’s work should be sacred. Freud said “Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” But Freud’s work was a lot more exciting than putting cover sheets on TPS reports. Most people aren’t so fortunate, and it’s much more of a challenge for them to make a living from work that’s meaningful to them.

The commenter who missed going to the office actually touched on a good point. What if the job you already have is meaningful to you? Great! You don’t need to avoid your work because you like it. Do your work and be happy.

I agree that a job can be great. I’ve even been there myself. But in my experience, things always change. If you like your job now, will you still like it when you have a new manager, or they transfer you to another department, or the company goes out of business? I’d rather be in control so that I know I’ll like my work every day.

And yeah, Tim and I are a little more job-averse than most. I came across a very interesting study through @phdbre and @thembti on Twitter, in which job dissatisfaction was compared among different Myers-Briggs types.

The study found that the types most likely to be very dissatisfied with their job are ISTP (like Tim), INTP (like me), and ENFJ. None of the INFJs, INTJs, ENTJs, or ESTPs were very dissatisfied with their job.

What ISTP and INTP have in common is that they’re the two types whose dominant function is introverted thinking. I’m not sure why the ENFJs are in that group. They’re called “the great communicators;” maybe there aren’t a lot of jobs for great communicators out there.

Anyway, people all want to do different kinds of work, including kinds that might not be readily available in a traditional job. And the point of the 4HWW is to put your income generation on auto pilot so your time is freed up to do what you want…which in many cases will be work, just work that doesn’t pay so much (or you’d already be able to do it).

Let’s take a look at one more comment:

“My dream job would actually require working probably 60 or more hours out the week since I would like to manage a hotel. Someone like myself would find the book and that lifestyle very unsatisfying.”

Well, if that’s her dream job, why isn’t she doing it? There must be something that’s stopping her, and I don’t know what that would be other than time or money. So if she had enough time and money to manage a hotel, then she could be doing the work she wanted to, right? THAT’S WHAT THE 4HWW IS ALL ABOUT! So why are we disagreeing?

Photo by fdecomite

There’s one more aspect of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) that I haven’t touched on yet. And that’s the idea that our jobs don’t require our presence during certain core hours.

This is definitely a controversial notion, even among people who like the idea of ROWE. If people aren’t all together at the same time, how can the team get any work done?

In my post ROWE Vs. TOWE, I made fun of a vice president who sent out an email saying that even though they don’t have enough work to do, everyone still needs to show up at 8:30 sharp. (The complaint wasn’t that people weren’t putting in enough hours, just that they weren’t starting right at 8:30.)

Dot at Deeper Issues commented:

“I say it depends on the business. If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work. Also, when people start being late, morale falls.

ROWE is an attractive concept to people who don’t like the 9-to-5, but it’s not for everyone. So many Internet entrepreneurs make the assumption that all employees are potential entrepreneurs, or at least are high-level white collar workers. If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else. If you’re the boss, on the other hand, it may matter less when you get in.”

Yes, it does depend on the job. If you’re performing open heart surgery, you need to be there at the same time as the patient and the rest of your team. There’s no way you can be effective by yourself. But I think this situation isn’t as common as we might think.

First, a slight detour. I had one job where they didn’t use ROWE by a long shot, but they did have an interesting way of dealing with time. This was a government contractor, and the government said we had to work exactly 8 hours a day, on average, for the month. We recorded our start and stop times to the nearest 15 minutes, and put our time in their time tracking application. If there were 21 working days in a month, we had to work exactly 168 hours for the month (21 * 8), though it didn’t have to be exactly 8 hours per day. It could be 7 one day and 9 the next.

They were strict about this. When you arrived at work on the last day of the month, if you had logged 163 hours and you needed 168 for the month, that meant you had to work exactly 5 hours that day, no more, no less. Even if people still needed you, you had to go home after your time was up. The company also had a rule that you had to start each day between 6:00 and 9:00 AM. It was OK to occasionally come in after 9, but you had to call first to let them know.

Do you think this system was good or bad? Take a minute to think about it before reading on.

Overall, I think this system was way better than average. One great thing it did was eliminating sludge. The term “sludge” comes from Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. It means judging people by time. Like if you say “Nice of you to join us” if someone comes in after you, or “Leaving already?” if someone leaves before you, or if you brag “I was the first one in the office today!” Sludge reinforces the false connection between time and results, and it doesn’t help anyone.

At this company, there was no sludge, because everyone worked exactly the same number of hours (unless they used vacation time to cover a shortage). If you saw someone leaving at 1:00, no one would ever judge them for that, because they knew they were still putting in the same amount of time as everyone else. Either they had accumulated extra hours earlier in the month, or they’d make up the hours later in the month.

Not that time is a good way to measure performance, but at least the rules were clear. There was no wondering how long you’d have to stay in your chair with nothing to do in order to look good. The system also kept us from working too much (though there were times when I really wanted to work more).

But there were some bad things about this system. First of all, we had to start between 6 and 9. That’s a pretty huge range, and it worked great for me, but it’s clearly biased in favor of the early birds. A lot of people had a hard time getting in by 9. and were reprimanded for coming in even a few minutes late. I didn’t ask why they couldn’t get in by 9, because it was none of my business. If they had to take their kids to school or whatever, who cares if they came in at 9:05? (BTW, the window used to be 6:30 – 9:30 before they changed it. Some people never stopped grumbling about that.)

Another thing is that one of the managers required his team to work exactly 8 hours every day, because in his opinion no one can be effective for more than 8 hours a day. But his opinion of how people should work is irrelevant. For God’s sake, let your people decide what’s best for them! I can’t believe they let this manager destroy the benefit of the flexible time policy for the people unlucky enough to be on his team. It’s no different from deciding that your team won’t have health insurance or a 401(k), when the rest of the company does. The benefits should be the same for everyone, and not left to the mercy of your manager.

They were fairly close to a ROWE, at least on the time aspect. People would occasionally come in on the weekend, or stay late at night and then take off the next day. It was really great having that much flexibility (unless you had that particular manager, but let’s ignore him).

And yet, they still required people to come in between 6:00 and 9:00. That’s a wide enough range that you might as well get rid of it. Why chew people out for coming in at 9:05 or 5:55? Why would 5 minutes make a difference, when 3 hours in the opposite direction wouldn’t?

But wait, wouldn’t that destroy productivity? If they dropped the 6-9 rule, wouldn’t some people come in at 5:45, and some people come in at 10? Yup, they would. But the benefit people gained from having complete control over their schedule would more than offset any productivity loss. When people love being able to fit their job into their life, they’ll do whatever it takes to keep that job.

Say I came in at 6:30 (which was my usual time), and I started working on something, and I noticed that someone had done something that didn’t look right, so I wanted to ask them about it. If they didn’t come in until 10, wouldn’t that be a problem? Well yeah, it would. But it would also be a problem if they came in at 9 (or 8, or 7).

There will always be times when you’d like to have access to someone who isn’t there. But what’s the solution? Make everyone get to work at exactly the same time? Is it worth pissing off the employees just to have better overlap? (BTW, notice that “poor overlap” means the same thing as “broad coverage.”)

Besides, there’s no way you can eliminate this problem. What if someone’s taking a vacation day, or sick, or at lunch, or in a meeting? How can you ensure that everyone is always there? Should everyone live in the same house and sleep in the same big bed?

I haven’t worked in a ROWE, but according to Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, the employees figure out how to handle situations when someone isn’t there. Since they all love their jobs, they work together to ensure that the work gets done. They act like they have a vested interest in the company, instead of just punching a time card.

When you know you can’t assume that someone will be there whenever you need them, you plan ahead to make sure there won’t be any problems. You also make sure you make effective use of the time you do have with them. In a TOWE (Time-Only Work Environment), if you’re judged by time and everyone’s in their chair all day long, why not just chat with them all day? But in a ROWE, you wouldn’t do that because it negatively impacts results, and results are what you care about.

This is all according to that book, and I can’t say from experience that it really does all work out. But when I worked at that company and came in at 6:30, I did sometimes need someone who wouldn’t come in until 9:00 (if they were even there that day). So what did I do? I worked on something else until they came in. Maybe I sent them an email, or maybe I just spoke to them later. But no one should be unable to get any work done just because a particular person isn’t there. Only bad management could allow that to happen.

There have been times when I haven’t been allowed to take a day off when I was sick, on the grounds that they just needed me too much. But if I was really so critical that the company couldn’t function without me, they should have been paying me a lot more.

OK, now we’re done with the detour, and back to Dot’s comments.

“I say it depends on the business.”

Like I said before, I agree. There are some cases where ROWE won’t work. But there are many more where it will.

“If all the business’s clients start their day at 8:30, then 9:00 doesn’t work.”

I disagree. In most cases, the clients don’t have any reason to care what time the employees get there. For one thing, many employees will have absolutely no interaction with the clients. Another thing is that the nature of the work probably doesn’t require constant real-time interaction.

When I lived in New Jersey, I worked with some people in the U.K. But even though they were 5 hours ahead of us, no one considered moving our schedules 5 hours ahead to match theirs, because it just didn’t matter. There was some overlap in our days, and there was also email and voicemail. That was more than enough.

“Also, when people start being late, morale falls.”

Yes, it does. But why? Because of sludge; judging people by time. If someone comes in at a time that we consider late, we think that they’re not getting their work done. But how do we know that? Why do we think that someone’s arrival time is connected to their performance?

I’m writing this post at 1 AM. Is that “early” or “late,” or does it not matter?

Another thing is that if we see someone coming in at 9:05, we might think, “No fair! If he’s not going to get yelled at, then I should be allowed to come in at 9:05 too!” Yes, you should! You’re an adult, and you’re perfectly capable of determining your own schedule. If people were judged by results instead of by time, you’d trust other people to determine their schedule as well.

“If your job is answering your boss’s phone, for example, and your boss gets in at 8:30, then for you to arrive at 9:00 is going to mess up his day and possibly miss out on clients who call while he’s on the phone with someone else.”

This is where we go back to that idea of the team working together to make sure the work gets done, regardless of who is where at any given time. Answering the phone is a skill and not everyone can do it right, but it’s not like only one person in the whole company can do it.

At that company I mentioned before, there was one person who generally answered the phone. But the 6:00 – 9:00 window applied to her, and she was free to pick her own start time. If she wasn’t the first one in, or she wasn’t the last one to leave, there were some other people who would take on the responsibility of answering the phone.

One day we had two feet of snow, and the plows had to push it all into one lane, making that lane unusable. And this is an area with tons of traffic on a normal day, so it took me three hours to get to work. When I got there, I found that the person answering the phone wasn’t one of the regular people. Someone else had stepped up, even though it wasn’t her assigned job. That’s what happens when people work together with a focus on results.

In the worst case, a call could possibly have gone to voicemail. So what? You can call them back. It’s not such a terrifying apocalypse that it warrants forcing everyone to get to work at the same time.

Are there consequences to not having everyone available all the time? Of course. But you can’t have everyone available all the time, no matter what you do. And if you treat people like adults, letting them choose the schedule that works best for them, a funny thing happens. People actually like their jobs. So they do what it takes to make sure the work gets done. And when employees are motivated, the payoff for the company is tremendous.

I just read Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke–the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific. Now that’s a mouthful of a title, isn’t it? It’s about Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson’s concept of a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), where employees can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the job gets done. Come in to the office on a Saturday, see a movie at noon on a Tuesday, work from the beach…whatever, it doesn’t matter, as long as the job gets done.

The idea is that time is what matters to employees. It’s the stuff life is made of, so we want to control it. But an employer should want to buy our results, not our time per se. Spending a lot of time in our chair doesn’t necessarily help them, but producing good results does. So let’s give everyone what they want by letting employees have control over their time, and holding them accountable for producing results.

That doesn’t sound so extreme, does it?

Some of my readers have already experienced ROWE, usually as a freelancer.

Amanda says:

“I guess ROWE is what I do – as a freelance writer, and a contracted-by-the-hour ESL teacher – and it puts into a neat acronym why I love this combination of jobs. There’s no sitting round at work fiddling on the internet and feeling unproductive – my time is MY TIME and what I do with it affects me. I’m either writing, or I’m teaching, and if I’m not doing either of those I’m not working, and nobody cares but me.”

Exactly, your time should be YOUR TIME. If you can’t be productive at a given time (whether it’s because you haven’t been given a task to do, or you’re having a mid-afternoon slump after a big plate of pasta, or you’re just thinking about how you’re missing your kid’s school play), you’re not helping anyone by pretending to work. Do what you have to do, and work when you can be productive.

Ali Hale says:

“Like Amanda, I’m a freelance writer — and I love the fact that I get paid for output, not just for hours spent sitting at my desk!

One of the reasons I left “traditional” employment was because I hated the fact that, however productive I was, I still got paid exactly the same as colleagues who’d spend the day messing around on Facebook. If anything, the 8-5 system *encourages* people to be unproductive, as the only reward for getting through your work early is being given more work.

Whereas now, I know that the more productive and effective I am when writing, the more money I can make — or the more free time I can have.

And on that note, I should get on with my next article…”

Don’t even get me started on how the current system punishes the strong and rewards the weak. Ali’s in the U.K., but here in the U.S. we seem to get the bad aspects of socialism without the good ones. We’re afraid universal healthcare would destroy the country, but we’re happy to see everyone get paid based on their title and years of experience instead of performance.

Dot says:

“On one of my earliest jobs, I knew I was accomplishing a great deal, yet was given only a $10/week raise. I protested and described all that I did. Nothing was done. When I left, they ended up having to hire two people to do what I did.”

I can only wonder if they ever realized it would have been better to give you a decent raise and keep you, instead of hiring and training two brand new people.

Marelisa says:

“I worked for the Panama Canal Commission and my boss was a lawyer from Iowa named Jay Sieleman. Since I produced results Jay basically let me do whatever I wanted. For example, the workday started at 7:15 a.m., but I’m a night person and would usually stroll in around 9:30 a.m. However, I would stay late and would come in during the weekends when there was a complicated case that needed more attention. We had a great working relationship because he would set clear goals and I would meet and exceed those goals within the established time limit. If that meant that sometimes I ate lunch at my desk while other times I took a two hour lunch, he didn’t care.”

And why should he care? You were giving him exactly what he wanted. By treating you like an adult who’s perfectly capable of managing your own time, he was getting results and you were enjoying your life.

But is ROWE always desirable? Could it makes sense for some people to be paid by the hour?

Steve C says:

“I think it all depends on the nature of the work whether ROWE is effective. For example, if you are a lawyer, then billable hours is an excellent measure of results.”

I’m not a lawyer, but I think this is probably right. Lawyers are effective with every hour billed (no Twitter at work for them), and their hourly rate reflects their results. Plus they’re billing clients separately for specific jobs, and they have to know exactly what to charge them.

At Best Buy (where ROWE originated), there are some hourly employees on ROWE. They fill out a timesheet and get paid by the hour, but they still enjoy most of the benefits of ROWE.

Dot says:

“Another question arises from my current job. As a floater who fills in for those who are out, I have days when everyone’s in and can handle their workload. Under ROWE, would I get paid zero, even though I was there M-F 9-5?”

As a ROWE worker on a salary, your pay would be constant regardless of the amount of work on any given day. However, neither you nor the company would want you to ever be bored, so they might expand the scope of the job so you could always be productive. You could also be an hourly ROWE worker if the job didn’t require a full-time effort.

But there’s another issue here about needing to be there at specific times, and I’ll address that in a separate post.

I still have one big question that wasn’t really answered in the book. The idea is that you can do whatever you want, as long as the job gets done. But in a job where we’re not judged by time, what constitutes getting the job done?

As Maria says:

“In most jobs there are no real metrics beyond ‘seat time.’ Frankly, most job performance instruments suck major eggs.”

Let’s say you have a non-ROWE job making widgets. You work for 40 hours a week, but you have no idea how many widgets you make (why would it matter, if you’re only judged by time?). However, you decide to measure your performance, and you see that you make about 40 widgets a week. Now let’s say you switch to ROWE, where your hours don’t matter, as long as the job gets done. And your boss says they want you to produce 200 widgets a week.

Well, that’s a problem. You’ll gain some productivity by having control of your time, so maybe you can now make 50 widgets a week with the same effort it used to take to make 40. But 200 is a lot, and people who don’t get the job done in a ROWE get fired.

If ROWE means getting control over your time but having five times the work piled on, I don’t think it’s remotely worth it. But I don’t think that happens. From the book:

“The good news was the people did not report an increase in work hours. Some people worry that because a Results-Only Work Environment ignores time as a measure, either employees would feel more pressure to work longer hours, or employers would try to squeeze more time out of people. But that wasn’t the case. What did change was that people felt a big increase in work-schedule fit…their work schedule fit their life better…more time to take care of all aspects of their life…increase in sleep…increase in energy…less pressure to work overtime and do unnecessary work…fewer work interruptions.”

So I’m not clear on how you set fair performance expectations, but somehow it works out just fine.

This is related to Steve’s (Brip Blap‘s) comment:

“I’ve read a lot about ROWE and I think one of the primary objections will be on the part of many employees, oddly enough. When companies start realizing that they had 8 people sitting around browsing the web 7 hours a day and working 1 hour a day, they’ll be able to start cutting employees. I know as a consultant I’m expected to be on-site simply to satisfy the client’s desire to know I’m “working”, when in reality I can complete most of my consulting work in a couple of hours a day. But as long as companies expect “core hours” they will build inefficiency into the system AND overpay employees (and consultants). Would most people be happier working in a ROWE environment? Sure – if they are paid a salary. If you’re in my shoes and can only bill 2 hours a day in a ROWE environment, but 8 if required to be onsite – I don’t know how many people would happily agree to that.”

One thing we know for sure is that ROWE will not be a welcome change to useless employees who don’t do anything but still manage to survive in the current socialistic system. Under ROWE, they’ll be found and eliminated.

A chart in the book shows the changes in voluntary turnover and involuntary turnover for three teams from FY 05 to FY 07. Voluntary turnover dropped by 90%, 52%, and 75% because nobody wanted to leave. But involuntary turnover rose by 100%, 78%, and 56% because nonperforming employees were fired.

Or you could say that involuntary turnover shot up because the company realized they didn’t have enough work to go around in a ROWE, and decided to downsize. This concern seems valid, and I don’t know how much downsizing occurs when a company implements ROWE. The book might have mentioned this, but I don’t remember, and they certainly didn’t make it seem like there’s much to worry about. I have to think that eliminating inefficiency is a good thing, because there’s enough work to go around out there, even if some jobs will be eliminated.

ROWE is certainly extreme by today’s standards. It’s possible that one day it will be the norm and we’ll wonder why there was ever an alternative, but for now, good luck saying “Hey boss, let me tell you about this great new way to work.” My main thought after reading this book is “Sounds great, but what can we do about it?”

Not a lot, really. The average person is powerless to fight the system. We might be able to get a tiny piece of it implemented by convincing our boss that it doesn’t matter whether we get to work at 8:00 or 8:15, but the authors say that you don’t really get the benefits unless the whole thing is implemented. What benefits are we talking about?

“We’re still waiting for the study that looks at the long-term effects of ROWE, but anecdotally we have evidence that it makes substantial changes in people’s lives. Javier’s story about taking care of his mom during a family crisis is not atypical. Scores of employees have extraordinary stories about how a ROWE has allowed them to go back to graduate school, take care of sick loved ones, or spend time with relatives in other countries. We’ve also heard everyday, but equally encouraging, stories about people spending more time with their kids, their spouses, even their dogs. When we say that a ROWE gives people their life back, we really mean it.

Giving people control over their time isn’t a magic bullet. People aren’t automatically going to become trim and fit and stress-free (although one person did note that their skin cleared up after their team migrated into a ROWE). People will still have to improve their own lives. But at least a ROWE gives them that chance.”

If you have a secret Santa thing at work, try giving a coworker a copy of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Spread the idea, and one day its time will come.

Photo by michelhrv

I just read the introduction and first chapter of Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It (free with email opt-in).

This book is about how the workplace rewards time spent instead of results achieved. If you’re in your seat from 8-5, you’re a good employee, and if you’re not, you’re not. Your results don’t really matter that much in the current system.

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson advocate a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), where employees can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the job gets done. Meaning that you don’t need to go to an 8:00 meeting if you’d rather drive your kids to school, and you can go see a movie at 2:00 even if everyone else is still in the office. Time spent in your chair doesn’t matter, only results do.

Sure, it sounds great for the employees, but wouldn’t this destroy the company? Actually, Best Buy has been testing ROWE for several years, and they found that productivity increases averaged 35%, and voluntary turnover dropped by as much as 90% in some divisions.

Is this what we need to make work stop sucking? Maybe. But here’s what I don’t get: if there’s no concept of time, then what constitutes “getting the job done?” In a normal work environment, you got the job done if you spent enough time in your chair. In ROWE, how do you know when to stop working, and what stops your boss from giving you an unreasonable amount of work?

Maybe that’s why you have to read more than just the first chapter.