Here’s an article from the Boston Globe about how companies are realizing that “face time” is more important in the digital age. For the co-presidents of a Needham, MA company, the solution is “Home Week”. During Home Week no boss can travel, there a “deep dive” executive planning meeting, a company-wide pub night, blah, blah, blah.

Home Week is supposed to be a cure for the problems people have with virtual communication—the feeling that you never know where people are, and the sometimes impersonal nature of e-mail and voice mail. On some level this is understandable. We’re all trying to make sense out of the enormous cultural changes that are being created by technology and globalization. When work and life get confusing and overwhelming, it’s understandable to want to go back to what you know.

But face time isn’t the answer.

Have you ever been in the middle of a meeting and thought, We covered the agenda fifteen minutes ago…now we’re just spinning our wheels?

Have you ever walked out of a meeting and felt like you really connected with your team, and then two weeks later, what you thought was going to be the result of the meeting hasn’t taken place?

Have you ever heard yourself saying (or heard someone say to you) “But I thought we covered that in the meeting?”

We’re not against meetings. Human beings are social animals. Getting together feels good and it can be a good way to get work done. But we also run the risk of confusing the feeling that we’re communicating with actually communicating something of value.

We’re skeptical of ideas like Home Week, which seem to us like meeting for the sake of meeting. Why have a monthly “deep dive” when maybe you need have a deep dive three times in one month and then not again for another three months? Why have a company pub night when maybe people would rather decide what to do with their own time?

In a Results-Only Work Environment people put the results first, and then work from there. Do we need to meet face-to-face to get this result? Do we need to meet at all or is there another way to get the work done? If we do need to meet, then who needs to be there and what specifically are they expected to communicate? What are the outcomes? What matters most is results. And when your people are meeting their results and rewarded with both money and control over their time, they don’t care how the work gets done.

Intel says they hope to change. This Wall Street Journal story talks about how the chipmaker is possibly considering maybe being open to changing their cube culture.

Here is our favorite bit:

“In one of its tests, Intel plans to add 32 small conference rooms to a floor for meetings of two to four people and a dozen ‘private audio rooms’ – for private conversations that aren’t possible in cubicles.”

We love you, Intel! You come up with the craziest schemes for allowing people to think and talk to each other.

Not much to say about this piece about SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff other than READ IT NOW. As we’ve said before, focusing on results works. And it’s not, as one of the sources in the story says, “extreme entrepreneurship”, at all. There is nothing “extreme” about not wasting people’s time, effort and energy.

Sometimes when we read articles like this about flexibility at work we just can’t stand it. On the one hand, this story rightly talks about how people are craving flexibility at work, how it’s a competitive advantage for business, and so forth. On the other hand, the piece frets about how flexibility is not for everyone, and how there needs to be core hours. It’s like watching someone at a swimming pool who won’t dive in even though the water is fine. Are you in or are you out?

What’s missing here is trust. At Best Buy, we’ve found that if you actually trust people, then you’ll get amazing results. People not only like and benefit from flexibility, but if you take it a step further and actually give them control, their performance soars. And this happens not just with the best educated workers. Or the most ambitious workers. Everyone responds to being trusted. As long as you give people clear expectations, they will perform. And you don’t even need it in writing.

This recent piece in BusinessWeek is about lawsuits involving overtime, but we can’t help but read it as an example of the 900-pound gorilla that’s in the room whenever our culture talks about work. Even though the article talks about “archaic workplace stereotypes”, it stops short of the real point: We still approach the flexible, fluid, 21st Century global market with the same 19th Century attitudes about time.

Just look at this:

“The issue of when the workday begins can get complicated. Delivery truck drivers, utility workers, and service technicians, for example, now regularly download their route assignments or appointments from their homes by computer each morning. Should they be paid for this time? Should this be the start of their workday?”

In a Results-Only Work Environment the answer to these questions are “No” and “Who cares?” The real question we need to ask ourselves is this:

Why are we still measuring outcomes in terms of time? Now that technology lets you work wherever and whenever you want, why do we still use the clock as a way of measuring performance?

Work has changed. In a 24/7 global economy, the idea of an 8-5, 40-hour week is silly. So let’s start acknowledging the gorilla in the room. Or, at the very least, let’s stop using it as a warm, hairy place to take a nap.