Apparently this happens every year. In Germany, during the holiday season, there is a debate about whether or not to allow shopping on Sundays. Merchants want to stay open on Sundays, but tradition dictates that stores stay closed.

We saw (and heard) several versions of this story and typically it was covered as a business story, as if it were just a question of economics. But we’re interested in the larger questions it raises about personal choice in a global, 24/7 economy.

Technology allows you to work, shop, keep in touch with friends and family, and entertain yourself from just about anywhere in the world and at any time of the day or night. As a culture we still talk about work days and weekends and holidays, about being in the office or out of the office, but the lines have gotten blurry. As we noted in a recent post, for some people this is a source of concern, but we see it as an opportunity.

For most, it’s socially unacceptable to answer work e-mails on a holiday. The guy who logs on for a half hour on Christmas is a jerk. What if by answering those e-mails he was able to not go in the next day and therefore get an entire extra day with his family? Is he still a jerk?

What do we lose by all working (or not working) at the same time? What could we gain by having the freedom and the power to work when it’s best for us? And what’s a day off, really, when the world is non-stop?

Here’s some holiday cheer for you: a casino worker who was fired for posting a Dilbert comic strip that likened managers to a bunch of “drunken lemurs.” The best (as in worst) part: they challenged his unemployment insurance.

Fortunately, the state ruled in the worker’s favor in terms of the insurance, although in our opinion the right thing would have been for the worker to be offered his job back.

Work is not the military. It’s absurd that an at-will employee could be fired for “insubordination” as if they were a conscript in the Army.

What is most galling to us about this story is that it represents a problem we find all over corporate America: respect flows in one direction. According to the story upper management found the cartoon “very offensive” but then later, the casino worker’s boss told him he wasn’t being a “team player.”

So it’s not okay to joke about managers in general, but it is okay for the boss to dress you down with vague criticisms about your lack of school spirit?

Happy Holidays!

Here’s a peppy press release from DayTimers, Inc., who commissioned a survey about New Year’s resolutions that target work-life balance. Not surprisingly, everyone pretty much sucks at keeping them:

Top resolutions that people made and failed at in 2007 were related to health, finance and work/life balance. They included:

    1. Increase exercise -- 51% failed
    2. Eat healthier -- 58% failed
    3. Save money -- 52% failed
    4. Spend time with family -- 57% failed
    5. Enjoy leisure -- 54% failed

Hmmm . . . wonder why people find it so hard to keep these resolutions. Is it because they are lazy, stupid and weak? Or is it because the deck is stacked against them? Is it because they’re trapped in a system (i.e. traditional work) that robs them of control over their time, which makes taking control of their life that much harder?

We’re not going to sit here and say a Results-Only Work Environment is going to make the world a healthier, happier place . . . but it could. We have both anecdotal and quantitative evidence that people in a ROWE exercise more,  sleep more (and get better quality sleep), eat better and spend more time with their friends and family. And they still get their work done.

That’s why this year our resolution is to change the way everyone works. Let’s get people living and working in a way that’s sane for the individual and good for business. Then maybe a few years from now you won’t have to make New Year’s resolutions to go to the gym more. Because you already will be.

Interesting story out of Australia about concerns that giving senior government workers a BlackBerry would upset their work-life balance:

“Staff expressed fears about BlackBerries contributing to a longer working day and felt it was going a step too far because mobile phones are adequate for out-of-office contact.

Not everyone agreed, however, with some senior executives claiming a BlackBerry can contribute to work/life balance by facilitating telecommuting and more flexible schedules.”

We often hear this concern when we’re out speaking to the public about a Results-Only Work Environment. People say, “Yeah, but if work isn’t confined to the office, then people will want to reach me at all hours of the day. Work will end up consuming my life.” (This is also an objection people raise to telecommuting.)

This is a valid concern if you’re using technology to promote availability. If your cell phone or remote internet access or BlackBerry only makes you more available to other people, then you’re right to worry. Given unlimited access and no accountability to results, people can use technology to bring you their questions and concerns the instant they arise.

But we would argue that this is a misuse of technology. In a ROWE, the point of technology is not to give people more access to an individual, but to give that individual more control over their time. You use your cell phone, remote internet access and/or BlackBerry to manage your job on your own terms. Your focus is on outcomes, not availability.

When someone contacts you outside of “normal” business hours, it’s your choice as to how to answer. Your decision is based on the results you’re trying to drive. If you’re on deadline for a project and someone sends you a relevant e-mail, then you respond. If someone is just “checking in” then you let it go until the morning. You let the work drive the behavior.

Isn’t that a better way? Would you rather have people be effective than available?

There is a very sad story that’s been going around about a Toyota worker who died–on the job, at 4 am–of overwork. As this version notes, he had put in 106 hours of overtime the month he died.

The Japanese word for what happened to Mr. Uchino is karoshi. Karoshi first surfaced as a phenomenon in the 1980s and the media takes it semi-seriously. A worker’s death is not taken lightly, but the idea of death from overwork often comes off as an oddity, an extreme consequence of the (sometimes) extreme work culture found in corporate Japan.

We say that while the outcome is extreme, the fundamental forces behind karoshi are not unique to Japan, nor are they to be taken lightly. People die at work in Japan because of stress. Even if stress isn’t literally killing us in the rest of the world, we would be foolish to think that the stress of playing the game of work doesn’t take its toll.

The American Institute of Stress has a nice page on the economic and social effects of job stress. The AIS nicely expresses the human and business costs of stress, but we’re not waiting for the right number to come along and tell us that work is broken. And we’re also not going to wait for work to start killing people. A Results-Only Work Environment means that people don’t have to tolerate harmful work stress. There is an alternative and the time has come for people to use it.

We’re not sure what’s funnier, the actual advice presented in this blog p0st or the frequency with which we see the same . . . ideas . . . packaged . . . in . . . slightly . . . different . . . ways.

Our favorite is the idea that it’s easier to get your work done if you’re dressed for it. As the MarketWatch blogger notes, a “crisp shirt” beats PJs all day long. (Maybe the crisp shirt material interacts with the nerves in your skin, which sends special messages to the brain that spur on productivity . . . yeah, that’s it.)

Other bits of advice are equally absurd. Bar the door to your office, don’t do chores, keep “normal” business hours. In other words, even though working from home means you’re free to do your job in whatever way you see fit, your goal is to mimic the office environment as best you possibly can.

The underlying assumptions running through these posts are all based on the same fantasy about the workplace: that it’s optimally efficient. Real work can only happen is in a special sacred place called an office. These offices are temples of focus and discipline, where people show up at 8 am, hit the ground running, and work, work, work until 5 pm, not counting a half hour for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks.

But we all know this is nonsense. Work does happen in offices, but so does an awful lot of goofing off, spacing out, wasted or duplicated effort, chasing down false emergencies, miscommunication, and general confusion and incompetence. If the workplace truly functioned the way we’d like to believe it functions then maybe all this advice about how to work at home would be worth something. But it doesn’t, so then what?

Maybe the answer is to make working from home look as little like working in an office as possible. Maybe the best advice is to tell people who are working from home to take life as it comes. Do you work when you need to do your work; do something else when you don’t. Or do both. If you want to answer e-mail, then answer e-mail. If you want to play with your kids for an hour, then play with your kids for an hour. If you want to fold laundry and talk to a client on the phone at the same time, all while being dressed up like a pirate . . . well, really why not? As long as the work is getting done, it shouldn’t matter what it looks like.

We were catching up on our work-life balance editorials the other day when the following jumped out at us:

“In a survey of 46 studies looking at 12,883 employees, the authors found that telecommuting improved job satisfaction, performance, turnover and stress, and did not harm career prospects. Telecommuting, more than half of the time, did harm relationships with coworkers, but not with supervisors.”

What struck us as interesting was the difference between how managers and coworkers view non-traditional work. Perhaps managers are coming around to the fact that people with more control over their work (i.e. working from home, working “odd” hours, etc.) can still produce results. The fact that managers don’t see their people doing the work doesn’t prevent them from recognizing that the work is getting done.

But what about an employee’s peers? Here, it seems the stigma of non-traditional work still holds true. When you’re working in a non-traditional way, your coworkers end up being more fixated on how you get work done as opposed to what you’re getting done. They don’t see the reduced stress, the increased productivity, or other benefits. They just see you getting away with not having to come in while they suffer through a long, confining, forty-plus-hour week crammed into a cube.

We’d be interested in hearing from both managers and employees about this disconnect. For those of you considering flextime or telecommuting, what are you more worried about? Being supported by your boss? Or being supported by your coworkers?

And for the managers out there reading this, what do you think holds you back from encouraging your employees to work differently? Is it fear of decreased business results? Or fear of the social backlash in appearing to give an employee “special treatment”?

We were at an undisclosed office supply company the other day when this nifty little number caught our eye. Cool, we thought. Now whenever we have an Important Message someone can write down the contact information and a note detailing what the call was about. How handy!

But wait a minute . . . what if we’re traveling? Then either we have to wait until we come back into the office to see this message, or someone has to take the message and then read it back to us when we call in to check messages.

But wait another minute . . . do we have cell phones with voice mail? Yes! We do! In which case the person calling would have just tried another other number instead and left a message if we were busy.

But then again, it might be nice to have a physical record of their attempt to contact us. Plus that space for the note is awfully nice.

But wait yet another minute . . . do we have access to e-mail anywhere on the planet? Yes! We do! In which case the person trying to contact us could have left a message and then followed up with an e-mail with more details. Who knows? Maybe there was no real need to talk on the phone in the first place. Maybe no one called anyone and we addressed everything electronically.

Hmm . . . maybe this isn’t such a great product after all. Which is too bad, because we like things with the word “important” on them.