A few weeks ago, we drew your attention to a feature on our site where we invite you to tell us why work sucks. For those of you who wrote in, thank you for sharing your stories. For those of you who didn’t, we still want to hear from you. We can talk about the why the traditional work culture is broken and dysfunctional, but it’s much more powerful to hear it firsthand.  Here are three examples of the kinds of stories we received. We made some very minor edits for clarity. Otherwise, each statement is in the author’s own words.

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Work sucks because . . . in a tight chain of processes, I spend most of my time waiting for other people to come over with materials for me to work with. I work (and get paid) half-time. They are full-time and expect ‘flexibility’ from me, which means, they are allowed to be hectic, important and spontaneous, and I wait. I fill this out because I am waiting, right this moment, while one promises me materials to be mailed out urgently, today, and the other issues general declarations of Why Not Right Now. I have absolutely nothing to do and am killing time while I’d much rather go and pamper the lovely new hardwood floors in my new flat that I’m moving into on Monday.

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Work sucks because . . . I started out giving my best, and never tiring of going to work, because I wanted to see what I could come up with next to improve our products.  It didn’t take long before this attitude was beaten out of me.  No value is placed on what we do. After years of trying to survive, always “damned if I did and damned if I didn’t”, I’ve now become a drone, just putting in my time.

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I recently received an e-mail from a supervisor reminding me of the necessity to take a lunch break each and every day. The previous week I had worked a few extra hours on Tuesday and thought I could slip out at 7.5 hours without my lunch later in the week. My work was completed and I was not hindering any co-workers by leaving early. My supervisor reminded me that while leaving early without a lunch is sometimes OK, it needed to be approved and should be the exception not the rule. Having my supervisor remind me to stop and eat  lunch was both insulting (I can decide for myself when and if I am hungry) and incredible frustrating that I have so little control over my own schedule.

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P.S. You may have noticed the glimmer of our Twitter box over to the right.  If you want to know what we do when we’re not blogging, check out our Tweets! 

Thanks to author and blogger, Tim Ferris, for this post about lifestyle investing. Tim talks about an exchange he had with a reader who asked if you could invest time the way you invest money. If you can have “compound interest”, then why not “compound time” as well?

We think the answer is “yes” and here’s a story from our experiences with ROWE at Best Buy that shows you why.

One of the managers we migrated at Best Buy was very, very old school. He was older, he used to be in the service, and his entire mentality about work was based on hours. You showed up on time or early. You never left early or took a long lunch or ran personal errands during the day. You put in your time and you respected the structure - no questions asked.

As he went through the migration process, this manager began to see the business and personal benefits of a ROWE. He saw his employees blossom under this new way of working, and this got him challenging his own attitudes about time. Most importantly, he realized that if he didn’t change his behavior, then he would stifle the change. Your boss can verbally support you having control over your time, but if he or she still sticks to the old ways, then that sends a counterproductive message.

So the manager started running. Instead of going to work at 8:00 a.m. every day, he went jogging through his neighborhood. This was not easy for him. At first, he felt guilty and uncomfortable. But gradually, he realized that the work was still getting done. And he saw that his employees were more comfortable working nontraditional hours. The “compound” effect didn’t put more hours in the day, but soon the team enjoyed more control over the time they had.

The traditional mindset about time will always express things in terms of amount. And if you’re trying to get “more” time in your life, you will never win. That mythical “more” doesn’t exist. But more control over your time is very doable. It feels good, it’s something you can share with others, and it creates a new culture of abundance. The fact that there are only “so many hours in the day” doesn’t have to feel like a limitation.

As ROWE started to take hold at Best Buy, we collected stories from teams who had already migrated. We wanted to keep a record of the change, and also give the non-ROWE teams a glimpse at what life in a ROWE was like. Here are three comments from actual employees. We’ll run this feature occasionally to give you a sense of what the movement looks like from the ground.

Enjoy.

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I have had employees tell me very openly that they were certain they had increased the number of hours they worked – voluntarily – after embarking on the ROWE road. This seems unusual, until you learn that the number of hours they worked was not the root cause of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The biggest job satisfaction actually came from having greater control over their schedules. This led to greater productivity and job satisfaction simultaneously.

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This way of working actually feels like more hours in a day have been created because of the flexibility element that is engineered into ROWE. Sometimes, I don’t have the energy to do my best work in the morning or afternoon.  So, I’ll take that time to do personal things around the house, workout, or whatever, and then I will work on my “work” in the evening in my home office after everyone else in the family has gone to bed. I have more creative energy because I have less constraints – most importantly, no perceived requirement to work at the campus in my cubicle.  I can choose my own working environment that is most productive for ME.

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Last week, while I was out on vacation [a coworker] had a family situation come up that she needed to attend to. Her mother was going into the hospital for surgery. [My coworker] worked from her mother’s hospital room via the high speed internet connection, and took meetings via telephone. She did not miss a beat. She kept moving on our business outcomes.

We said we [hearted] them before. And we still do. We especially [heart] this post: Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor.

As they note:

“Software development is rarely a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s multiple marathons, actually. So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak. What a bad trade.”

You could substitute “business” for “software development” and that statement still holds true. It’s just common sense. Enough sleep = better performance. Ask any tired, overworked individual at any company and they’ll tell you if they got a little more sleep, they would be a lot more effective.

So why doesn’t common sense prevail? The problem is that one person’s common sense doesn’t stand a chance against the culture of a workplace. When managers reward employees for showing “dedication” by coming in early and working late, then the company will make those bad trades that the 37Signals blog talks about. As long as your work culture honors people putting in hours rather than people driving results, then sleep deprivation will always be a badge of honor.
We are reminded of a line from Men in Black (quote is courtesy the Internet Movie Database) when Will Smith’s character asks Tommy Lee Jones’ character why the truth about aliens living among us must be kept from the general public.

Will Smith: “Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.”
Tommy Lee Jones: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

We were pleased to see this post from Mojo Mom about SWAT (”smart women with available time”) teams. The context is Sue Shellenbarger’s story in the Wall Street Journal about an experimental project (running business simulations) at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler business school. As Mojo Mom notes, these simulations only happen occasionally, “so Kenan-Flagler needed executive-level talent that could assemble at a moment’s notice to work on an intense but brief project.”

Mojo Mom was one of the project’s participants. Not only did she rock it, but she knows she rocked it:

“When you think of ’stay-at-home Mom’ versus ‘MBA student,’ a stereotypical image might be minnows swimming with sharks. It was good to confront that image because when it came right down to it, I actually felt more like the shark. Because the MBA students are very smart, we might forget that most of them have not been in the working world for more than a few years. Compared to a twentysomething, I have come to appreciate the life experience I have accumulated through every work and family challenge I have faced.”

We would love to see more statements like this be part of our national conversation about work and life. Having a kid and being a parent is not a business liability.  It’s bad enough that we stigmatize women for not being “available” after they have kids. But we also sell them short for not being as capable. The irony is that having children, like any major life experience, presents challenges that can make you stronger and smarter and better. If we dropped the labels and focused on what people could accomplish, we’d have SWAT (and SMAT) teams all over the place.

We’d like to offer a big thanks to Matt Metzgar for setting up this public ROWE forum. We couldn’t be happier. Ever since the beginning of ROWE, we have talked about how great it would be if people took this idea and ran with it. Of course we joined, and of course we’ll be following along, but this isn’t our baby. We started this conversation about how to fix the problem of work, but the ultimate outcome belongs to everyone.

We hope this forum starts to answer the question that people ask us all the time, “What can I do to get in a ROWE?” One of the things you can do is participate in the larger conversation about ROWE and work. This happened at Best Buy in the early days of ROWE. Even when not many teams were ROWE, people were talking and those conversations helped change the culture.

For example, in the early days, if someone found out you were ROWE, they might say, “You’re doing that ROWE thing, aren’t you? How do you like working from home?” The misconception created an opportunity. The person in a ROWE would say, “It’s not really about working from home. I still come in, but I don’t have to come in unless it drives results.”

The non-ROWE employee might not believe them, or they might think there was a catch. But at least the idea was out there. When the non-ROWE employee kept hearing messages like these, her mind started to open up. Later, when it was time for her to transition into a ROWE, she was already a little farther along than if people had remained silent.

That’s how social change works. It’s slower than other kinds of change because you have to change how people think. But it’s possible. Just ask the people at Best Buy and J.A. Counter. They’re living the end result of all that talk.

We thought we’d give a bump to Kelly Forrister’s recent entry on her Simply GTD (Getting Things Done) blog about David Allen’s 3-Fold nature of work:

Doing Pre-defined Work (choosing from what’s already processed and organized on your lists and calendar)
Doing Work as it Appears (responding to latest, loudest and new opportunities)
Defining Work (your own processing and reviewing time)

We’ve found that in corporate America, the second category gets the most attention. At Best Buy, we called them “fire drills” and, like the name suggests, the “latest, loudest” opportunities were often false alarms. Just like in school, everyone lined up single file, marched where the teachers (we mean leaders) told us to march, and then went back to our regular jobs once the all-clear was sounded.

ROWE changed all that. In a ROWE, every employee has the right (even the obligation) to challenge a request to interrupt their work. Because the focus is on results, people are empowered to ask the kind of questions you ask when you feel a sense of ownership in the business:

Is this perceived emergency a genuine emergency?

If it is, does dropping everything I’m doing right now best serve the results we’re trying to drive, or can it wait?

If it can’t wait, then what can we do in the future to make sure this kind of emergency doesn’t happen again? Can we plan better so we’re not in crisis mode the next time this issue comes up?

This is all commonsense stuff. However, if the people in an organization aren’t using a ROWE mindset, then they don’t get the opportunity to use commonsense. Of course real emergencies are always going to come up. But what if more of the work you did fell into categories one and three? What if you first defined work and then spent your day doing the pre-defined work you established for yourself the day, week or month before?

And for those of you who want to jump on this notion with comments about the chaotic nature of the global, 24/7 economy we have this question:

How much of any of the challenges we face today as businesspeople are perceived challenges? And how many of them are just the same old business concerns with a bright, shiny, technological face on them? In other words, how much of the world is genuinely on fire?