Here’s some career advice about how to talk about work-life balance with a prospective employer. What caught our eye (aside from how generally discouraging and depressing it was) were the number of statements that struck us as completely wrong.

We’re not talking about wrong in the sense that the WSJ columnist who wrote the piece got her facts wrong, or reported it in bad faith, or that the sources she used were outrageously misguided. In fact, quite the opposite. The advice is sound. It just happens to pertain to a world governed by a set of assumptions that are completely insane.

And so, in the spirit of ROWE, we thought we’d translate some of the statements so you  can see what’s really being talked about.

“‘Be careful about telling interviewers that you’re president of the local hockey association and that you coach four teams,” says [career counselor Robin Ryan]. “If you do, they probably aren’t going to hire you.’”

Translation: In addition to owning your ass for 40 hours a week, your job also has a right to dictate your life outside of work.

“Naturally, if you’re a C-level candidate or a physician, you can’t expect to have much work-life balance.”

Translation: Balance isn’t for losers. Strangely, balance isn’t for winners either. We’re not sure who it’s for, but it’s certainly not for everybody.

“[I]f you’re interviewing for less senior jobs at more mature companies, ask questions about the employer’s culture and the job responsibilities instead of bringing up the issue [of having balance] directly.”

Translation: In very rare cases (certain jobs at a certain level in certain companies at a certain place in their business life cycle) you might be able to achieve some balance, but the subject is still so taboo that you can only talk about it in code.

“A more subtle query might be whether the company allows computer log-in access from home.  If they say no and that you have to be here for security reasons, you can make up your own mind,” says Mr. Anderson.

Translation: Under no circumstances are you to stand up for yourself, push back against antiquated and misguided work policies, fight for your time, or in any way ask someone to make an exception to the rule. When in doubt: cower.

“It’s best to [ask about work-life balance] once you’re sure that the company wants to hire you.”

Translation: Who are we kidding? Your prospective employer is doing you an enormous favor in paying you the least amount of money they can in exchange for the most amount of work they can get out of you . . . while also controlling your life. Better to not ask about work-life balance until you’ve already been at the company for two years. By then you may have earned the right to even bring it up.

First, a big thanks to the growing number of readers who are coming to this site and spending more and more time here. We’re happy to have you. We see this topic as a dialog and your questions, comments and even outright objections are not only welcomed but desired.

With that in mind, we’d like to respond to one of the comments to last Friday’s post about workplace rudeness. Tim! asks, “If we have a team meeting and I ask everyone to be in the office by noon and one guy shows up at 12:30 thus wasting everyone’s time, isn’t that also rude?”

We have to admit we are a bit conflicted as to how to answer. We don’t like jerks anymore than the next person, but part of the definition of rudeness has to do with violating social norms.  And, in the case of workplace and time, we feel the norms are the problem, less so people’s individual behavior.

Is a person who keeps their coworkers waiting rude? Yes. At the same time, we feel that when managers create a culture of fear around time, they are selling their people, their business and themselves short. Chewing someone out for being late might make them less likely to be late the next time, but it isn’t going to motivate them to perform better. You’re also sending a message to the rest of the team that time is more important than results.

Furthermore, by making it personal you’re missing out on an opportunity to talk about outcomes. In a ROWE, when  managers are having problems with an employee’s performance, they focus on the work, not on the employee’s use of time, their personal work style, or their “lack of dedication”.

So to all you managers out there: the next time you’re having problems with a late employee, take a deep breath, remind yourself that it’s not personal - it’s business - and talk to that employee about the outcomes they need to drive. Focus on time and you’ll get punctuality. Focus on results and you’ll get performance.

We were excited to see this University of Florida study, or at least as excited as you can be about a thoughtful, scientific exploration of how people use their power and position in the workplace to take a complete crap on other people’s dignity.

The main takeaway from the study is that after being treated rudely, subjects didn’t perform as well as controls when tackling various cognitive tasks. But what jumped out at us is something that we have been observing in the workplace for a long time: even when people simply imagine being on the business end of toxic behavior, it negatively affects their performance.

In other words, your boss doesn’t even have to yell at you for being five minutes late for you to feel oppressed by a work culture that puts the clock ahead of results. As long as those beliefs about time are in place, your mind takes care of the rest.

As Amir Erez, the professor who led the study notes, “As more and more jobs within organizations become increasingly complex and require higher levels of cognitive functioning and creativity, anything that interferes with that process is likely to have an impact, not only on individual job performance but on the productivity of the labor force as a whole.”

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a manager at your organization say something like “late again?” or “nice of you to join us” or “well, look who’s here.” Even the most off-handed comment can do more damage than you might realize.

Plus, that’s like, so totally rude.

Perhaps this kind of work environment is more your speed.

We’re not technology people. (We didn’t understand what Drupal was even after we read the Wikipedia entry.) Still, we couldn’t help but geek out a little when we ran across the Hat Factory, a self-described “community office space for geeks and media hackers.”

The Hat Factory gives freelancers in San Francisco a place to share the kind of resources you might find at an office without sacrificing the comfort and autonomy of working from home. At $200/month, it’s cheap. With their taco recipes and 16mm film festivals, it’s fun. And with their appeal to tech-obsessed hipsters, it’s probably not a bad place to meet people, provided of course that you want to meet tech-obsessed hipsters.

What we really love about the Hat Factory is not so much what it is, but what it represents. It reminds us of stories we’d encounter at Best Buy after ROWE had taken hold. Once people were free to direct their own work, they came up with all kinds of different ways to go about it. Within the larger culture of Best Buy, there were dozens of micro-cultures. Everyone was Results-Only, but how that played out depended on the team. They used technology to figure out what was best for them.

In our last post we wrote about the downside of work playing an overwhelming role in your life. On the flip side of that, what if work could be more like a social club? How much more effective could we be if we got to choose how we wanted to belong?

Thanks very much to Harriet Traxler for the tip on this:

Sound the alarm! Microsoft wants to hook you up to your computer to monitor your “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” And we thought the stress mouse was bad.

You can read the scores of reactions to this story, and we’re in agreement about the privacy issues, but we also think there is something larger happening here. What bothers us more is the idea that the role of the workplace in people’s lives has expanded to the point where it has invaded territory traditionally owned by friends, families, communities, and so forth.

We’re all for health and safety standards at work. What we don’t like is this idea that work is supposed to take care of you, or that work is the place where you have the strongest social network, or that work is where you find your identity.

One of the benefits of a ROWE is that it downplays the role of work in people’s lives. Of course your job should still make you money, and can still bring you fulfillment as a career. But in a ROWE, people rediscover aspects of their lives and their selves that they had forgotten because they had gotten too bound up in work.

Work-life balance is about more than time. It’s really about creating a healthy balance among all aspects of your life. You can reject workplace spyware, but don’t stop there. Reject anything about your job that takes away from you being you.

Change is painful, isn’t it?

We’re not surprised at all at the findings in this study. We see it everyday when we speak at companies with traditional work environments. People who have less freedom resent the people who have more.

But what interests us about this piece is the paragraph toward the end that proposes the solution:

“[B]y ensuring greater face-to-face contact between co-workers when all employees are in the office and granting greater job autonomy, employers may be able to counter these problems”, according to the study published in the journal Human Relations.

So we’re supposed to ensure greater face-to-face contact, but also grant greater job autonomy? In other words, the way to react to the changing face of work is to make people do what we think is best for them (greater face-to-face), while also letting them decide what’s best for them (greater job autonomy). Huh?

We’re not criticizing this kind of mixed message. Given where we are in this global change in how we view work, it’s not surprising that there is confusion.

Our traditional attitudes about work make tempting solutions to our workplace problems because they give us comfort. They are the devil we know. Our emerging attitudes about work are the devil we don’t. Even though give people more control is better fit with the business and the personal realities of a global, 24/7 world, embracing this idea is a little scary.

But here is one thing we know: we’re never going back. The traditional eight-to-five, in-a-cube world of work isn’t dead, but it’s dying. So the question for those miserable souls watching other people enjoy their freedom isn’t how to make them feel better about being left behind, but how to bring them along with us.

Isn’t it funny how work turns us into liars?

We ran across this recent blog post about a new technology that would help people recognize when they were stressed at the office. We thought this was funny, and perhaps a little chilling, that people would turn to their mouse to tell them they were about to blow a gasket.

We have another tool you could use to tell you if you’re stressed—it’s called the human body. The fight-or-flight response is a robust but also well-calibrated tool for responding to external or internal stressors. In other words, when you’re stressed, you don’t need a computer to tell you. You need only acknowledge the misery that you’re already experiencing.

The bigger issue is how you respond to that stress. There are countless relaxation techniques that you can try, but the best thing you can do to eliminate stress is to remove the stressor. If you’re stuck in a rigid, inhumane work schedule, you can do all the deep breathing or desk yoga you want, but there is no substitute for having the freedom to live and work the way that suits you best.

We don’t need another workplace Band-Aid. We need the workplace to catch up with the times.

Charming piece by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who writes a workplace trend blog for TIME. She talks about the gossip you miss by working at home. (She is also working on her snack-hoarding problem . . . wink.)

One thing we’d like to add to the conversation is the following prediction: there will come a time when we won’t have a debate about whether it’s better to work at home or work at the office.

Of course there are pros and cons to both, but there are so many variables (nature of the task, personal work style, etc.) there will never be one answer. The point is that people need to have the power to choose between the two.

The nature of that choice is important. Right now, most people have to make one commitment to an alternate schedule. (For example, you have to commit to four ten-hour days.) What’d we’d like to see is people being able to choose between working in the office or out of the office on a daily, or even hourly, basis. Work at home from eight to ten, then go into the office for two hours, then go to a coffee shop for another two hours, then back to the office for a quick meeting, then home again.

If people are delivering outcomes, there will be no need to talk about where they are being delivered. As people who work in a Results-Only Work Environment will tell you, after awhile you don’t even notice.