This article in the Dallas Morning News about how to solve the problem of the morning commute by adjusting stoplight timing cracked us up. The story invokes Occam’s Razor (all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best) and then offers technical as opposed to adaptive change.So we’re busting out Occam’s Bigger Razor on this one: why have a commute at all?

In a ROWE, people have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done. Which means that people work from home. Or in coffee shops. Or wherever they want. People grocery shop on a Tuesday morning or take in a movie on a Thursday afternoon. If people can change their attitudes and beliefs about face time and core hours, then you fix the problem of commuting by eliminating the commute. (The EPA has this issue on their radar. Here’s hoping they do more).

Even with ROWE, we don’t envision a world without offices. At the same time, the nature of the office might change. Companies might opt for smaller facilities. Or there may be more workshare spaces like the Hat Factory. Who knows? The workplace of the future might look like something we can’t even imagine now.

Of course, we can always just keep things the way they are and time the stoplights better.

This story about a woman who was forced to resign from her job because of her disabled son broke our hearts. When we talk about these workplace issues, we take a light-hearted approach, but as this story shows, the toxic atmosphere in many workplaces is a serious problem. The fact that this woman had to hear comments that her “f****** child” was “always f****** sick” and that she was “using her son to manipulate her working conditions” just turns our stomachs.Even worse is the lack of sympathy people can show for people like Ms. Coleman. One of the comments to the story notes that “Getting rid of discrimination for carers causes discrimination against everyone else. Somebody inevitably ends up carrying these people.”

These people. Just think about how loaded those two little words are.

Here’s a newsflash. We are all, at some point in our life or another, “these people”.  No one skates through this life. At some point you will suffer a personal setback, or someone in your life will go through something that will have a negative impact on your performance at work. This isn’t some touchy-feely, woo-woo, Kumbaya sentiment. This is just reality.

So we can either go to work and deny our basic humanity (and suffer the consequences of stress, burnout, and, in the case of this London firm, a lawsuit) or we can embrace our frailties and deal with them as adults. We’d rather not see the culture of work litigated into being better, but we’re happy to see that justice was done.

We were pleased to see what the good people at workSMART are trying to do. We like the spirit behind Work Proper Hours Day although we question whether this is a case of easier said than done. One person standing up for the right to their time makes for lonely work. (This is why it’s so hard for individuals to get what they want and need in terms of work-life balance. You cannot do it alone.)

What we really appreciated were there insights on the “five causes of long hours working.” There is a line in the second item that really jumped out at us:

“The less say you have over how you do your job and how you organise your work, the more likely it is that this is the reason for your extra hours.”

We also liked their answer to what you can do about long hours at your workplace:

“The first step is to work out where your long hours culture came from. If it has just gradually crept up on you, then perhaps you need to agree with your colleagues to just say no.”

Put these two thoughts together and you have a Results-Only Work Environment. Give people the power to do their work on their own terms. Band everyone together to say no to hours and yes to results.

We encourage you to browse around their site and take their work-life balance quiz. We find that they are a little too focused on time (just working proper hours isn’t going to solve the larger cultural problem of work), but there is some good thinking being done here.

Go England!

This story about how social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are “sneaking into the office” is just a tidbit, but we were intrigued by the last line:

“As with instant messaging and wireless access, banning the technology from the office is not effective because it is likely to creep in anyway. It is better to recognize it, evaluate it, manage it and then use it appropriately.” 

We don’t have all the answers on this topic, so we thought we’d throw the question out to you.

How is technology used (effectively or ineffectively) in your workplace?

How would you like to see technology used?

Finally, if we let technology lead the way (as opposed to us making rules about how technology is used) how might we behave differently in terms of work?

We were pleased to see a follow up to the post we wrote almost two weeks ago, the one that talked about how U.S. government departments have a mandate to offer telework but don’t.

The follow up talks about how 4 in 10 of workers surveyed were unaware they had the option. Obviously this is an institutional problem. The word simply isn’t getting out. But we also see this as a larger problem. The survey suggests that federal employees are so stymied by their work culture that they are unlikely to even ask if alternative work styles are available.

We’re going to spare you the usual jokes about the government. Federal workers get a bad enough rap without us piling on. This blindness to non-traditional work styles is a far more universal problem. Most people simply aren’t very aggressive in their pursuit of a better way of working. That’s because even in “cool” companies it can be a risk to challenge the status quo.

The other day we ran across some interesting numbers from a Watson Wyatt survey. It seems that a percentage of the companies surveyed are aware that certain aspects of their work cultures cause stress, and that employee stress is having a negative impact on the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, in each category, the percentage of employers who are actually responding to this problem is always lower than the overall awareness level. (One wonders if they would call the fire department if their office park were engulfed in flames.)

It’s galling that an organization could acknowledge that their company is a stressful, counterproductive place to work and yet not do anything about it. But that’s not the part of the survey that got us all riled up. Instead, we’re wondering about the companies that DON’T EVEN KNOW they have a problem.

Only 32% can see how a lack of work-life balance is hurting their people and their business? Are you kidding? Less than half can see that working longer hours, and doing more work with fewer resources, is a problem? Pardon our French, but WTF?

It’s this kind of incredible blindness that motivates us to continue to speak out on these issues. It’s this kind of blindness that has us calling for a revolution in how we work. We can’t expect the leaders at the top to wake up to the realities of working in the 21st Century. It’s up to us to make the workplace a more sane and humane place for everyone. No one is going to give it to us.

Great piece in Advertising Age about how to get the best out of the new generation of workers. Rather than tag them as spoiled, the columnist gives some good advice for how managers can change their own behavior to fit in with the times.

With the exception of Tip #5 (Handle with Care) this all sounds like good advice for everyone. Eliminate ambiguity? Treat time as a 24/7 resource? Combine work with play? You don’t have to be 22 to enjoy being treated this way.

There is a new button on this page, a button we want you to see . . . and use.

This very exciting, new, virtual button is directly to the right of this post, and up a little from the picture of the book. There! You found it!

We want your stories about why work sucks for you. We are especially interested in those stories about the culture of your workplace, those unspoken (and often unfair) rules that keep you from acting like an adult.

Vent away!

One of the challenges of talking about the culture of work is that people can assume that finding a better way is not a “must have” but a “nice to have.” Reducing people’s stress, or making maternity/paternity leave policy more humane, or almost any other “work-life balance” issue can be viewed as important but not essential. The business of business trumps all.

As this story from Minnesota Public Radio suggests, that is about to change. As Boomers retire in record numbers, we are approaching a time when there will be record shortages of workers. The most talented of those workers are going to enjoy an incredible amount of say in how they work. Even the the average worker is going to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to picking jobs that offer them more than the daily grind.

The decision every business faces today is whether or not you want to lead through this change, or play catch up. We’ll be blogging more about this issue in the coming weeks, but we wanted to add this thread to the conversation. It’s true that a Results-Only Work Environment is a nice place to work. But nice isn’t enough. We are approaching a time when employee control will be essential to survival.

We’ve been sitting on this story for two weeks now because we kept waiting for it to surface in other news outlets. But it hasn’t so we’re going to bust this whole thing wide open.

The gist of the story is that, according to Public Law 106-846, federal workers should be allowed to telecommute “to the maximum extent possible without diminished employee performance.” And yet it took a federal arbitration panel to get the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to allow some of its workers the chance to telework “on a pilot basis.”

Now we realize that there are all kinds of laws on the books that go unenforced. And we won’t nitpick to death the bit about “diminished employee performance” and telecommuting pilots and all that. Instead, we’d just like to note the fact that a better way of working and living isn’t going to happen from the top down. You cannot write a law that changes what people believe about work.

We’re glad that the arbitration panel ruled in the workers’ favor, and while we don’t have any of the details, we can imagine that it took somebody standing up for their legal rights and, more importantly, for what’s right. We’re glad you did.