First things first. We were pleased to see Louisville and Xavier advance. If Kansas, Memphis, Stanford and Davidson can get it done tonight then our brackets will look quite healthy. We cool?

Lately, when we’re not bringing American productivity to its knees by talking about basketball, we’re thinking about how people are freaking about how the NCAA tournament is bringing down American productivity. We liked this piece on the “boss button” from CNET News, especially the author’s self-deprecating self-assessment as “either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn’t exactly strike fear into the rank and file.”

But even though the boss button is a kind of a joke, its very existence makes us feel . . . well . . . kind of embarrassed. The idea that a grownup can’t spend a few minutes checking scores and highlights out of fear of being scolded is not only ridiculous, it’s insulting. It makes us think of permission slips and hall passes and the word “tardy”.

What do you have to accomplish before you’re allowed to be in control of your life?

How old do you have to be before you can be trusted?

And most important of all, is UNC going to win it all?

We’ve been talking about people having the right to control their schedule, that they need the freedom to choose how to best use their time in order to do their jobs, spend time with friends and family, and generally take care of themselves.

Then we saw this:

You know, maybe we were wrong. People don’t need to break free, not if they can tighten their abs while sitting in their cubes. Thanks, Hawaii Chair!

We’ve written about the challenges and limitations of the Family Medical Leave Act before, but a statistic from this piece really got us scared. Apparently, 44 million Americans provide unpaid assistance to an adult. We can only imagine that this number is going to skyrocket as Baby Boomers enter retirement and semi-retirement in the coming years.

The FMLA requires covered employers to grant eligible employees “up to a total of 12 workweeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period.” For starters the logistics of this law don’t make any sense for long-term caregivers, who may not need workweeks off, but an hour here or two hours there over several years. Even more bothersome are the outdated assumptions about work that the FMLA buys into, even down to the term “medical leave”.

The phrase “medical leave” assumes that if you aren’t physically in the office, then you can’t contribute. This doesn’t make sense in today’s economy. For example, let’s say you need to pick up some medication for your mom at 3:00 on a Tuesday. If you are available via cell phone or e-mail, then are you suddenly “on leave” because you’re out of the office for an hour?

Let’s take it a step further. Imagine you are completely caught up on work, delivering results, and in general, getting it done, and you’re NOT available for two or three hours because you’re helping your mom. Does this momentary gap in availability take away your accomplishments?

As we’ve noted before, we will be forced to rethink these attitudes about work as the Boomers age and the Millennials continue entering the workforce. Different cultures are going to find different solutions. In Japan, worries over how to take care of an aging population has raised the possibility of using robots as caretakers. Maybe it would be easier to just let people run their own lives.

We were all set to blow the lid off the bogus claim that March Madness has a negative effect on the economy. But when we woke up this morning we found that the lid was nowhere to be found. Jack Shafer, the media critic at Slate, had already done all the lid-blowing you could possibly want when it comes to this bit of nonsense.

We can’t improve on what Mr. Shafer says about the “junk economics” behind the claim that the NCAA tournament could cost employers $3.8 billion in lost productivity, but we can point out some of the persistent attitudes and beliefs about work that still live on in his piece. Dig this:

In concocting his lost-productivity estimate, Challenger doesn’t acknowledge that “wasted time” is built into every workday. Workers routinely shop during office hours, take extended coffee breaks, talk to friends on the phone, enjoy long lunches, or gossip around the water cooler. It’s likely that NCAA tourney fans merely reallocate to the games the time they ordinarily waste elsewhere. Likewise, many office workers who don’t complete their tasks by the end of the day stay late or take work home. If fans who screw off at work ultimately do their work at home, the alleged “loss” to productivity would be a wash.

We appreciate that Shafer puts “wasted time” in quotes, but he’s still buying into the culture of judgment that surrounds work. If someone is getting their work done—if they are getting results—then there is no such thing as wasted time. You aren’t “screwing off” at work if the work is getting done at home later. The person who checks their bracket all day, but gets their work done at home, is making a choice about their time. As adults, they have every right to make that choice, and as long as the work is getting done, then no one has a right to judge them about how they spend their day.

People either get the job done or they don’t. As long as they meet their deadlines, it doesn’t matter if they accomplished the task at 10:00 am in a cube or at 3:00 am in their basement. Talking about time, and judging people for how they spend it, gets us nothing. So get your ass over to ESPN.com. There’s a game on.

We’d like to offer three cheers to 37signals, a web-based applications company that is thinking about work in the right ways. Here’s our take:

First, the shorter work week acknowledges the realities of the 24/7, global economy. It’s not about how many hours you put in, but how productive and engaged you are when you’re working.

Second, by funding people’s passions, they are tapping into the new currency of the working world. Money and titles don’t matter to people like they used to. Personal development, like time, is a powerful reward.

Third, giving people discretionary spending accounts gives them control. In our high-demand world, control (and trust) is perhaps the greatest gift you can give people.

You could dismiss this as “nice for them, but it would never work at my company” or say that you can only get away with these kinds of policies at a “creative” or a “young” company, but we think that would be missing the larger point. Like a Results-Only Work Environment, the workplace that 37signals is creating is based on basic, universal truths. Every adult will respond to trust, to control, to freedom. And, the ones who can’t probably shouldn’t be there for other reasons.

Five years ago, when we first started implementing a Results-Only Work Environment at Best Buy, we dreamed of one day bringing ROWE to the rest of the world. We are proud to announce that today, that dream is starting to become a reality. The ROWE Launch Kit: Office Edition is now available for pre-order at www.culturerx.com and we could not be more excited.

What is The ROWE Launch Kit? Over the years, we’ve developed and refined a process for transforming a traditional office environment into a ROWE. The kit distills these best practices into a facilitator’s guide, DVDs, PowerPoint presentations and fun, interactive games. It’s not your typical teach-and-train program. Instead we’ve created a carefully orchestrated experience that will shake your organization to its very core, re-energize your people, and realign their focus on the one thing that matters: results.

Pre-order now and join the ROWE Revolution!

Sue Shellenbarger’s Work & Family blog has a chilling story about how telecommuters are being “called back” to the office in droves. The reasons are “a push to consolidate operations, and the notion that teamwork improves when people work face-to-face.”

The notion. The . . . notion. The . . . one more time . . . notion.

We find it funny (as in sad funny, not funny funny) that businesses will spend incredible amounts of financial and human capital to improve processes, systems and methodologies, but they are still satisfied with “notions” when it comes to their HR practices. So you’ll have companies going ga-ga over Total Quality Management, but then turn around and recall telecommuters based on a belief about face time.

Can you imagine an operations manager saying that she has a notion that changing suppliers or using a different manufacturing technique will lead to increased product quality? Would a marketing director say he has a notion that targeting a certain demographic will lead to increased sales?

We’re not saying that employees never need to meet face to face. Or that we need to shut down every office around the world and have everyone work remotely. What we’re asking is that organizations hold their HR practices to the same standards that they apply to the rest of their business. That means taking a step back, examining assumptions, experimenting with new methods, and then listening to the results rather than freaking out and doing what’s always been done before just because it’s comfortable and easy.

If you’re a company that is rethinking telecommuting, we’re asking that you rethink it again. And we hope that whatever decision you make, you make it on something more substantial than a notion.

In our last post we talked about some of the absurdities of the sick day. Today we’re on to maternity leave. This story from the San Francisco Chronicle is a chilling example of how the progress gained by a previous generation can be lost.

The first half of the first quote (from Diane Freeman, a mother of two and the marketing director for a San Francisco law firm) is a killer:“The company has been really supportive; they’ve let me alter my hours,” she said. She goes on to talk about having balance but wishing she could have had a longer maternity leave, but we got stuck on that first line.The company is seen as being “supportive” by letting her “alter” her hours. Now we know nothing about Ms. Freeman’s abilities at work, but we’re going to assume she’s pretty good at her job to earn the position of marketing director. So she’s good enough to get the job, and good enough to do the job, but she’s not good enough to manage her life in a way that lets her contribute to the bottom line and also spend time with her baby.What makes us sad is that companies give us crumbs (that’s right: crumbs!) and we’re grateful. The best companies can offer people is the chance to “alter” their hours. We find it outrageous that good, hardworking, competent people are happy to get a little flexibility, when in fact they deserve so much more.

We liked this piece on the ethics of going in to work sick. We like how sober and reasonable it is. We think that everyone should print it out and give a copy to their boss so he or she can take it to HR and the entire organization can rethink its sick-leave policy.

We’re just kidding about the last part. Don’t give this article to your boss. What are you - crazy?

Rational arguments about an irrational system: this is the problem with most discussions we have about the workplace. If the office were a rational place, then we could have a rational discussion about the ethics of going in to work sick. But the workplace isn’t even remotely rational. It’s a place of fears, false assumptions, strange beliefs, and mistrust.

If you were to forward this article at work, how do you think people would react? Would you worry that people might think you were angling for something, like maybe a few extra “sick days” of your own?

The problem lies in how we’ve defined work: 40 hours, five days a week, in an office.

When time is our master, when time is valued as much as (and sometimes more than) results, then anything that encroaches on time is a threat. It doesn’t matter if you’re sick, or need to pick up your kids early from school, or you overslept, or whatever. Anything that is perceived to take away from “work time” is bad for business.

When work can only happen in a specific place, then anything that happens outside the sanctioned workplace doesn’t count as work. In a traditional workplace, a “sick day” means a day when you’re not in the office, and so the assumption is that nothing will get done. You have to be “at work” to do work.

In a ROWE, there are no assumptions about what work looks like. Work doesn’t have to happen in a specific place at a specific time. In a ROWE, if you’re sick, you don’t go into the office, and it’s not because of some convoluted ethical argument. You don’t go into the office because, well . . . you’re sick.

Depending on how sick you are, you may still get work done. As long as you are getting results, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, your coworkers may not even know that you’re sick. If you continue to drive results from home (cuddled under a blanket with your laptop) they may be none the wiser. In a ROWE, a sick day is a true sick day, when you are genuinely too sick to work…but you don’t need to submit ’sick time’.

We’re back to that idea in our last post. Why play games? Why “call in sick” when you really just need to run some errands or take a break? Why “call in sick” because you’re burned out and need a day to rest your brain? Why “call in sick” when your best friend is in town and you want to see a movie? Why not act like a grownup when it comes to your health?

Check out these reader responses to a question asked by the Toronto Star about whether or not the government should determine whether or not stores should be open on statutory (or legal) holidays. There is an interesting tension here between people who want the government to step in and keep stores closed (for the greater good) and those who want to leave it up to businesses to decide for themselves.

We think this is a discussion worth having. Granted, the 24/7, global economy has made day-to-day life more challenging. Is the answer a top-down solution? Do we need government or company policies that protect us from our overcharged lives? Or do we need a grassroots solution, where people are given more power and control to find their own path?

We know where we stand on this issue. How about you?