Looking Beyond Availability
June 10th, 2008 by Cali & Jody
There is a nice, lively debate about the merits of ROWE in the comments section of The Globe and Mail. One of the conversation threads that stood out for us was this idea of availability. Here are four quotes from four different comments to show you what we mean:
“We need people to be available, in person as necessary, for ongoing issues, and yes at short notice.”
“I find the problem starts when you need to ask a coworker something, and he isn’t in the office that day.”
“[I]n an environment where you need people to be able to offer answers, feedback and decisions on short notice, you need to be able to predict when they’ll be available. Human beings don’t cope exceptionally well with unpredictable situations.”
“In my line of work there are many disciplines working on a project. Timing and scheduling are crucial. There are times when I need a piping designer to make modifications right away; not when they get back from an afternoon movie.”
One of the big misconceptions about ROWE is that because it gives people control over their schedules, it’s a “time off” program. The assumption is that if someone is not physically present, then they are unavailable, and therefore worthless to the organization. When you think about work in this way, then the two choices are either “at work” (and therefore working) or “out of the office” (and therefore unavailable and not working).
There are two problems with this model. First, you can have everyone in their cubes and in meetings from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and the work still doesn’t get done. Even with 100% percent availability, there is no guarantee that people are engaged. They could be surfing the internet, chatting with their coworkers about what they watched on TV last night, or simply spacing out.
And even if everyone were working the entire time (talk about a fantasy!), the energy people spend on being available is energy they’re not spending on driving results. Whether you want to admit it or not, the simple act of making sure you’re on time every day (and appearing bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in front of your boss and coworkers) consumes physical and emotional energy. In our view, that energy is completely wasted. Put that energy toward results and both employer and employee benefit.
The second problem with the availability model is more of an untapped opportunity. As we know from our personal lives, technology has made the notion of availability a lot fuzzier.
For example, if you want to watch a DVD right now, then you would go to the video store. But if you wanted to watch a video sometime in the coming week, then you might rent it online. So which DVD is more available? The video store DVD is available immediately, provided that the store is open. The online DVD is also available immediately (you could rent it at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday if you wanted to), provided you’re willing to wait a few days for it to arrive. The better method depends on your needs and desires.
A ROWE works under the same principle. It doesn’t mean that your boss can call you at 3:00 a.m. demanding to know where you keep the toner. It also doesn’t mean that everyone leaves at once on a sunny day to play golf. It doesn’t mean that if there is a genuine emergency (as opposed to fake emergencies — but that’s for another post) that no one deals with it. A ROWE means that you get very clear about the business results you’re trying to drive. You plan how to get there and then you let people do their jobs (and live their lives).
Don’t you think that beats “available”?
You will note the underlying issue from the comments as well: everything happens with short notice. Little planning.
Being available also means change what you are working on based on a whim from your boss, team, or others simply because you are THERE and present. It will just take 10-minutes, so go ahead and do it. When it really takes an hour, disrupts what you were doing, and bumps the results work you planned to do that day.
I once worked in a department where we did pricing for products we configured and I can’t tell you how many times my day was changed by my boss asking to re-run pricing based on a meeting and it needed to be done that day.
That pushed everyone else out. I got so frustrated that I flat out asked why it needed to be done THAT day and not tomorrow. Was I not able to plan ONE day in advance for my work? Ummm…no.
It is fire-drill mentality for business. It’s “right now, all the time — it doesn’t matter what you were doing before.”
I would submit if you were NOT available all of the time, it would, in fact, push people to plan. Not plan a year with no changes, but plan one day in advance. You’d think it wouldn’t be much to ask for in order to focus on results!
One other thing. If people immediately need to be physically available as noted (and implied) in a couple of the comments, how do you deal with your team members on the other side of the planet?
A global economy requires time shifts; it is one of the reasons companies shift work to other continents. If you’d like a global team member to immediately speak with you about work, you can receive about five phone calls at 3:30 AM while you are sleeping before you figure out that availability is a bit overused as an excuse for planning your work one day out.
Most of what constitutes “availability” in today’s work environment is really working on the “urgent” and not the “important.” And, I would submit, that is what drives people crazy about work.
This is pretty profound. Availability is (as put forth in the book) total crap anyway. It’s 99% perception based on location. People are more available now than they have ever been in history.
I have a nagging challenge though, not related to availability, however:
In my business we bill customers based upon hours. Our rate is XX dollars/hour therefore for hourly jobs we are required to estimate our time spent on a job. I feel this is archaic within the ROWE and puts our minds back into the old mentality. I don’t like charging clients for a “block of time” when I could charge them for a “block of work”. We have a few possible solutions but I KNOW that this isn’t an isolated challenge. What have others done? How do we determine when the results have been met so we don’t overwork on an hourly job when we don’t track our time? Any feedback would be great!
I think the 4th quote notes the biggest issue among customer facing companies. Sometimes changes need to be made right away… not 10 or 15 minutes from now, but immediately. For example, someone server goes down and needs to be worked on physically, you can’t wait 20 minutes for your IT guy to come into the office…. companies have gone bankrupt from being sued for less downtime. (granted in this scenario a company should have some redundancy measures, but the point is still the same).
being available by phone or over chat, is not the same as being available to the resources that are only available in a certain location.
Adam - yup. Charging for a block of time is archaic. From the standpoint of the charger, you want to make lots ‘o money, so why would you want to be efficient? The more efficient you are, the less hours you can bill. And, on the flip side, the chargee wants to cut costs and pay as little as possible for quality work. So, the charger and the chargee are always in conflict - and nobody is talking about the WORK.
We are serving two masters: TIME and RESULTS. We need to serve just one: RESULTS
(Deadlines are still important, so let’s not get all bogged down in that argument!)
It will take many moons to change a practice that has been around for decades. But, it needs to change. Start having conversations with your customers about billing them for the outcome of the work, not the hours it talks to complete it.
The conversation will be lively, no doubt.
And, the only way we can ever know if the results have been achieved is to set up measurement - or metrics - in advance. Otherwise, we’re all just puttin’ in our time.
Excellent point! You solidified the way I feel about our current system.
Covering expenses are still (of course) a primary concern. Adaptive change will come into play on this, I’m sure. We’ll simply determine the average “range” of cost for a specific job based upon internal historical data, market value, and specifics about that project. All of this will have to be determined in advance and the inclusions/exclusions will have to be crystal clear. If the client wishes to move outside of those contracted boundaries then we will re-evaluate the invoice.
What do you think about that? Any loopholes that you see? It’s our goal to be as efficient as possible (duh!) and I’m REALLY excited about implementing ROWE in my company. Before any drastic growth happened in my design company I was a freelancer (aka. Results-Only) and then when I found a partner it was the consensus that we need an office and business hours. OOPS! Despite that, I’m really eager to get back to focusing on results!
Thanks!
@aaron — I think it is reasonable within a ROWE to accommodate “shifts” on a site if it is really needed. However, I would note that most data centers are miles, sometimes thousands of miles, from where the application and support people are located. They can’t be physically present in twenty minutes; they can’t be physically present in three hours.
I’ve managed outage calls where access to the servers was on one continent with database administrators on a second continent and application support on a third. That’s not a physical presence need.
The speed and availability issue is when a part needs replacing, not the data. That is usually done via a vendor and a dispatch and that is what takes the time. Dispatch and a parts depot is a challenge for a ROWE. But, the rest of it may not be with the right setup.
A lot of a ROWE is how to setup the processes to focus on results and determine the behavior to get to the results rather then the event (server down) itself. The result is what do we do to get the server back up? Then you look at how that can be accomplished in a ROWE environment.
It’s not easy, but a lot more interesting.
Hope this helps.
We need people to be available, in person as necessary, for ongoing issues, and yes at short notice.”– The comment captures your attention from the 1st sight.
BTW how can we serve only results if in most cases we all are in strict time frames???