We have some new free downloads on the CultureRx website and we’re very excited to have them circulating around. We invite you to download the ROWE quiz and the ROWE one-pager and share them with friends and coworkers. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here and we’ll get a conversation going.

Great post over at MomsRising about one of those little annoying quirks of the workplace that doesn’t seem so little when you think about it more deeply.

We’re talking about the white lies working women tell when they are late because of their kids. Most would rather blame bad traffic than a stubborn toddler for fear of not looking dedicated to their job. The author, PunditMom, has the diagnosis right, but we stopped nodding our heads when we got to the last sentence:

“And is it time for the government to step in to make sure no parent gets penalized for caring for their family?”

It’s not up to the government. It’s true that government regulations are going to have to change to address our mobile, global, wired society. But a government mandate that attempts to create an open and honest workplace that doesn’t penalize women (or men) with families is wishful thinking.

The reason is that no federal law can change the culture of the workplace. As we saw in our last post, the law allows people to take leave under the FMLA. But the unwritten rules of the workplace (in other words, work culture) say you better be careful about taking advantage of that law or you might hurt your career.

We’re all for good laws that protect and support families, but laws can only do so much. (The same is true about the policies in the employee handbook.) Real change is only going to happen if everyone agrees to a new set of assumptions about what work looks like. If we all change how we define work (something you do, not a place you go for a set period of time) then those laws will become more meaningful. If we change the culture of the workplace, then people can finally live honestly and freely.

And that’s no lie.

Too soft or too tough? This is the question asked by a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about the problems both employees and employers are having with the FMLA. Workers are being fired or punished for making use of the law. Employers are so paranoid about fraud they are hiring private detectives with hidden cameras to spy on their employees. Barf.

First, we have to say that even though a Results-Only Work Environment challenges the status quo of how we work, we in no way advocate breaking the law. We believe that, in the future, the Department of Labor is going to have to rethink a number of its laws, which were designed for an industrial economy and not a knowledge economy. But for now, everyone has to play by the rules.

In the meantime, both employers and employees need to start having a conversation about what any kind of leave means.

Consider this excerpt:

Mr. Kappelmann, 46 years old, of Coral Springs, Fla., says he was required to get several forms signed by doctors and get them to [his employer] Brown & Brown by a certain date, which he contends he did. But the company, he says, soon fired him and stated in a letter that he wasn’t medically able to perform his job. Prior to his firing, he says, a manager asked, “If you’re not going to be here, who is going to do this work?”

We have a number of stories about people at Best Buy who would have been eligible for leave under the FMLA, but elected instead to work through their medical or family crisis. The reason is that their managers weren’t asking them questions like the one above. Instead they were trusted to do their work on their own terms, whether that was from another state or at “odd” hours. As long as the work got done that was all that mattered.

Yeah, but don’t people take advantage?

We hear this question a lot and it’s understandable. The workplace is a breeding ground of mistrust. But here’s a thought for all those employers who worry about people slacking off:

You can’t fake results.

In a ROWE, people either perform or they don’t. Once you make this change, it becomes very apparent who is contributing and who isn’t. And once you free people from the confines of the cube farm and the 40-hour week you’ll find that people want to contribute, even when the circumstances of their life might say otherwise.

According to a recent survey on Monster.com, 82 per cent of employees feel their prospective employer’s work-life balance initiatives are important when considering their job offer. But only 49 percent of HR professionals feel they have attracted better candidates because of these initiatives. (Read this nice summary of the findings here.) So why the gap?

The problem lies with the nature of the questions. The survey essentially asked people if they wanted work-life balance. Not surprisingly the great majority said yes. But the survey asked the HR community not whether or not work-life balance was good for their employees, or a responsible approach to managing people, but if it was a good perk. It’s a completely different set of assumptions.

We don’t feel that work-life balance should be a perk. Everyone is entitled to working and living in a humane way. If you’re getting your work done and contributing to the bottom line, then being able to go to the doctor when you’re sick shouldn’t be a perk. Coming in at 9:00 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m. because it took a little longer to get your kids out the door shouldn’t be a perk. If you treat everyone like adults, then the great majority will act like adults. You won’t have to take surveys about the importance about work-life balance. Because everyone will have it.

Nice mention today in Miki Anderson’s Leadership Turn blog. We talk a lot about how a Results-Only Work Environment is a “people’s movement” as opposed to coming from the executive level. While this is true, we’d also like to acknowledge the leaders at Best Buy who enabled this change. Cheers to those who recognized that ROWE could be good for business as well as good for individual employees.

We also think it’s important to note that this tension between what’s good for business and what’s good for the individual employee is divisive and unnecessary. Many so called work-life balance solutions (flextime, telecommuting, etc.) are underutilized by employees and/or reluctantly supported by employers because of the assumption that working in a non-traditional way is not a good idea. Employers feel like they’re making a concession or a special case. Employees feel like they’re taking a career risk by not being in the office when everyone else is.

The success of a Results-Only Work Environment proves that making employees happy and driving business outcomes are not mutually exclusive. The work-life problem is not a zero-sum game. So hats off again to Brad Anderson and Best Buy. To the rest of you executives out there, maybe it’s time to think about a new way of working.

Here are two quotes from recent articles on lateness. The first is from a piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail about a movement to make companies recognize that not everyone is a morning person. The second is from a column in the Wall Street Journal about what’s wrong with the perpetually tardy.

“‘A lot of motivational speakers tout this stuff about the early bird getting the worm,’” says [HR consultant Jeanne] Martinson, who wrote the chapter after consulting [Carolyn] Schur’s 1995 book Birds of a Different Feather, which highlighted circadian differences among workers. “They make it seem like being a night owl is a choice. It’s actually biological. It’s like being blue-eyed or brown-eyed. It’s not about choice at all.’”

“‘Most chronically late people consistently underestimate time by 25% to 30%,” says Diana DeLonzor, author of Never Be Late Again. “Late people engage in magical thinking,” she says. “They remember that day 10 years ago when they made it to work in seven minutes flat. That becomes their standard.’”

So which is it?

When someone comes into the office at 8:30 instead of 8:00 is it because of their genes?

Or is it because they’re a pudding head who doesn’t understand that a car trip they made a decade ago might take a little longer today?

Does it matter?

We find it interesting that our conversation about time in the workplace focuses almost entirely on the individual. Whether it’s their genes or magical thinking, being late or early invites judgment. People who are “late” are unmotivated, unfocused, unproductive. People who are “early” are driven, committed, effective.

We’d like to see the conversation change. In a 24/7 global economy, when business is being conducted at all times without regard to time and space, there is no such thing as late or early. The only thing that matters is results. Individual people know this. But for some reason, organizations still cling to their outmoded beliefs about what work looks like, which often means from 8-5 in an office. Companies don’t need to “figure out” late people. They need to start questioning why they even care about “early” or “late” in the first place.

We invite you to read “Study Finds Working at Work Improves Productivity” from The Onion and have a good laugh.

That was nice, wasn’t it?

We love good office humor, but over the years these kinds of jokes have also made us increasingly sad. Because the underlying assumption of all office humor is that the workplace sucks and it will never, ever, ever change. Work is a life sentence with no chance of parole. Since you’re powerless when it comes to doing anything about it, you may as well laugh and make the best of it.

Now that technology has made it possible to work anytime, anywhere, work doesn’t have to be a prison. In a Results-Only Work Environment work is something you do, not a place you go. Right now, only a small percentage of the workforce plays by these new rules, but that is changing. We can see a day when the assumptions behind the aforementioned article simply aren’t true anymore. Hopefully The Onion will still be funny, but they’ll have to find something else to joke about.

It’s Election Day today, but will you get the chance to vote? Or will you be too busy, too stressed, too pressed for time? Would you like to vote, but fear coming in late or leaving early? Are you frustrated that something so basic (the right of people in a democracy to vote) should be made so difficult?

Over the years, people have proposed a number of solutions to the problem of voting. There is the idea of making Election Day a national holiday. Every few years, Wisconsin Senator Herbert Kohl introduces a bill to change Election Day to a weekend. There is also the Vote by Mail Project, which is an effort to give voters more options for how to vote. These are all good ideas, but each has been met with either apathy or political resistance.

The flaw with these solutions is that they fail to address a deeper problem that all working people face: for 40+ hours of their week, they don’t have control over their time. In a Results-Only Work Environment this isn’t a problem. As long as the work gets done, then people can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And that includes voting.

Yeah, but what happens if someone is out voting and I need to reach them?

Some of these issues can be handled with technology. If you have a cell phone, you can be reachable while you’re in line at the polls. You can also address these concerns with planning. Just as teams cover for each other when someone is sick, traveling or in a meeting, you can plan for individuals to be gone for an hour or two at a time. That could mean collecting people’s contributions for a meeting beforehand.

Election Day does not take us by surprise. It’s parked in the same spot on the calendar every year. There is no reason why we can’t take some time to vote and continue to do our jobs.

Give people control over their time and they can exercise their rights as citizens, and that’s better for business and for our country.

A nice piece in this Sunday’s New York Times (registration required) about the politics of the modern workplace. The writer focuses on the current presidential campaign, but makes a larger point about the “historic opportunity” we are facing in freeing people from their assumptions about where and when work gets done. He asks:

“[W]hy shouldn’t more middle-class workers whose jobs can now be done remotely have the option to structure their own hours and still enjoy the security of a safety net? Why shouldn’t data-entry clerks and graphic designers and actuaries and reservations agents — anyone who spends his days staring at a terminal in some sterile environment straight out of Office Space — be able to work in shorts and spend more time around the kids?”

Exactly. The answer is that there is no reason why not. What’s been missing until now is a new social and mental framework to replace the old, broken model of face time and putting in hours. That new framework is a Results-Only Work Environment. When people deliver results and are rewarded for outcomes, then they don’t need to put in face time. Businesses benefit from more productive, engaged and focused workers. Employees benefit from having more control over their time. Good news for what the article calls “the modern, untethered workforce.”