A Handsome, Signed Book Plate for . . .
June 5th, 2008 by Cali & Jody
. . . anyone who posts a review on Amazon for Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It. Simply go to our Amazon book page and write a review. After you’re done, send us the review (send to caliandjody@caliandjody.com) and your land address and we’ll send you a handsome, signed book plate to put inside your book. We want to hear what the people think.
Everyone should write a review for Cali & Jody!
Here’s mine:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3UD0PPU37ZMVL/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Thanks
Will you still give a copy for a negative review?
“Terrible book. You can’t just go zero to 60 with something like ROWE- it just can’t be done! This would mean workers would be trusted completely to get their work done. Hrumph!!!”
~Anonymous, Inventor of flextime
That is hilarious. I think JesseG should get one just for that comment.
It is so true. This past week, I heard our “head of work-life-balance” for our firm say that exact thing…albeit, not so eloquently. It really was a slap in the face to be told that I wasn’t mature enough to handle any decisions about my time. Does she know that I just negotiated a big contract for the firm this week? I guess I was a big enough to do that…but can’t control my time. I guess I should fill out some endless forms and send them to the right channels for signatures to see if I can work from home one-day a week. What a joke. “Flextime” is such crap.
Unfortunately, its not uncommon for employees NOT to be capable of managing their own time with work. I tend 3/4 people could probably make the transition without many issues, but there are plenty of employees that must CONSTANTLY be called on to complete projects on time.
I’m curious if it would still be more productive for a company if some portion still kept to traditional work environments while others were trusted to be in a ROWE. Unfortunately I think it would create a lot of resentment amongst employees. One group because people can do whatever they want (even though they get everything done) and the other group because they could quite possibly be doing more work the group in office 40 hours a week.
I wonder, with Best Buy currently going through the process of shift to ROWE, are there some groups that resent others? Maybe it never gets bad enough for us to know?
I’d be happy to post a review (first one on Amazon.co,uk), think your book is great, applaud your work, but I think there is a missing chapter!
I’m looking at the graphs of the number of “involuntary dismissals”, hearing about the non-value add employee who is always first in the office (knows how to play the system, but hasn’t added value for years) and thinking “I wonder what the objectives people get set look like”. Clearly, there must be a defined set of deliverables that define the “value add” to the company goals that person, or their group, deliver.
So, what do these look like? I have three different teams that report to me; a Product Management team where the objectives are simple (business volumes, profitability, foundations set for long term growth); a Product Supply chain one (more customer service, ability to scale, minimise financial surprises) but the one i’m agonising over is a team that answer questions of internal customers. On the one hand, I need them on responding to customer questions quickly, on the other I need them to figure out what they can do to remove rote questions to them in the first place.
In the latter, it’s difficult to think of ROWE compliant measures that ensures that each individual (and the team overall) are all delivering value.
Are there sample “Value add” measures as employed at companies who’ve implemented ROWE available for guidance?
Ian W.
Reading, Berkshire, UK.
@Aaron…
Why would any company want to have employees that require babysitting in the first place? If a ROWE doesn’t work for these people, there is no shortage of others who have the work ethic, maturity, and desire for freedom that a ROWE provides and would clearly be better employees to have anyway.
Why compromise for the least common denominator when you can use a ROWE to weed out these underperformers and replace them with performers? I assure you, there’s no shortage of people who would be happy (desperate even) to take their place.
Val is exactly right. The employee who has been showing up and contributing nothing for the past 10 years suddenly has no excuse. If the only metric used to evaluate job performance is productivity, then an non-performing employee is no longer doing the job and just won’t have a job for very long.
It’s harsh but I mean really… who wants to pay someone not to deliver results? And who wants to work with somebody who isn’t delivering? By allowing “showing up” to be good enough to keep a job, we just guarantee a mediocre-at-best workplace.
In my eyes, ROWE does only a little more than ensure companies are using the real performance metrics most of them *claim* to be using in the first place.