We’ve already covered how the legal profession is having a serious internal conversation about balance. Now it seems this issue is affecting doctors as well.

The word in the article that really jumped out at us was “sacrifice,” as in “[Australian Medical Association] president Rosanna Capolingua called on senior doctors to rethink their expectations of young medicos, who were not willing to make the same sacrifices for their jobs.”

The sacrifice in question is time. The idea is that if you are willing to give up your time to your job, then you must be a better worker. Those who make the biggest sacrifices (the story cites 120 hours a week!) deserve the biggest rewards in terms of money, title and prestige.

We don’t dispute that becoming good at something takes a lot of time. And it’s true that high performers do make sacrifices in order to achieve their goals. But while we should recognize and appreciate excellence, it’s wrong for us to applaud sacrifice. What really matters is the value that someone delivers. If a doctor (or any other profession) can deliver the goods in 30 hours, then that doesn’t diminish their accomplishment. If someone else wants to put in 120 hours, that’s their choice. But let’s look at what they are contributing, not how long it took to do it.

Besides, do we really want doctors who only live for work? Wouldn’t it be better (for us and for them) to be whole people with full lives?

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!

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.

Oh, Canada! What are you doing? We turn to you for cheap prescription drugs and commonsense and then you do this.

Silencing people’s “CrackBerries” will not create work-life balance. Even a well-meaning rule, like a BlackBerry blackout from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays, is still a rule. And it’s the rules of the workplace (7:59 am is “early” while 8:01 is “late”) that are killing us.

This policy also makes a fatal assumption about work: that work happens at a specific place (the office) or when doing certain activities (using your WhateverBerry). Instead, we’d like people to start thinking about work in terms of what it really is: a state of mind.

If you’re sitting on a beach and you’re working through a problem you’re having on a project, then you’re working. On the other hand if you’re in your cube zoning out and wondering about who’s your favorite American Gladiator, then you’re not working.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, we don’t make any assumptions about what work looks like. As long as people get results, they can work in a cube or they can work on the beach. They get to define what balance means to them. They achieve that balance because they have the power to do so.

Here’s some career advice about how to talk about work-life balance with a prospective employer. What caught our eye (aside from how generally discouraging and depressing it was) were the number of statements that struck us as completely wrong.

We’re not talking about wrong in the sense that the WSJ columnist who wrote the piece got her facts wrong, or reported it in bad faith, or that the sources she used were outrageously misguided. In fact, quite the opposite. The advice is sound. It just happens to pertain to a world governed by a set of assumptions that are completely insane.

And so, in the spirit of ROWE, we thought we’d translate some of the statements so you  can see what’s really being talked about.

“‘Be careful about telling interviewers that you’re president of the local hockey association and that you coach four teams,” says [career counselor Robin Ryan]. “If you do, they probably aren’t going to hire you.’”

Translation: In addition to owning your ass for 40 hours a week, your job also has a right to dictate your life outside of work.

“Naturally, if you’re a C-level candidate or a physician, you can’t expect to have much work-life balance.”

Translation: Balance isn’t for losers. Strangely, balance isn’t for winners either. We’re not sure who it’s for, but it’s certainly not for everybody.

“[I]f you’re interviewing for less senior jobs at more mature companies, ask questions about the employer’s culture and the job responsibilities instead of bringing up the issue [of having balance] directly.”

Translation: In very rare cases (certain jobs at a certain level in certain companies at a certain place in their business life cycle) you might be able to achieve some balance, but the subject is still so taboo that you can only talk about it in code.

“A more subtle query might be whether the company allows computer log-in access from home.  If they say no and that you have to be here for security reasons, you can make up your own mind,” says Mr. Anderson.

Translation: Under no circumstances are you to stand up for yourself, push back against antiquated and misguided work policies, fight for your time, or in any way ask someone to make an exception to the rule. When in doubt: cower.

“It’s best to [ask about work-life balance] once you’re sure that the company wants to hire you.”

Translation: Who are we kidding? Your prospective employer is doing you an enormous favor in paying you the least amount of money they can in exchange for the most amount of work they can get out of you . . . while also controlling your life. Better to not ask about work-life balance until you’ve already been at the company for two years. By then you may have earned the right to even bring it up.

Thanks very much to Harriet Traxler for the tip on this:

Sound the alarm! Microsoft wants to hook you up to your computer to monitor your “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” And we thought the stress mouse was bad.

You can read the scores of reactions to this story, and we’re in agreement about the privacy issues, but we also think there is something larger happening here. What bothers us more is the idea that the role of the workplace in people’s lives has expanded to the point where it has invaded territory traditionally owned by friends, families, communities, and so forth.

We’re all for health and safety standards at work. What we don’t like is this idea that work is supposed to take care of you, or that work is the place where you have the strongest social network, or that work is where you find your identity.

One of the benefits of a ROWE is that it downplays the role of work in people’s lives. Of course your job should still make you money, and can still bring you fulfillment as a career. But in a ROWE, people rediscover aspects of their lives and their selves that they had forgotten because they had gotten too bound up in work.

Work-life balance is about more than time. It’s really about creating a healthy balance among all aspects of your life. You can reject workplace spyware, but don’t stop there. Reject anything about your job that takes away from you being you.

Here’s a peppy press release from DayTimers, Inc., who commissioned a survey about New Year’s resolutions that target work-life balance. Not surprisingly, everyone pretty much sucks at keeping them:

Top resolutions that people made and failed at in 2007 were related to health, finance and work/life balance. They included:

    1. Increase exercise -- 51% failed
    2. Eat healthier -- 58% failed
    3. Save money -- 52% failed
    4. Spend time with family -- 57% failed
    5. Enjoy leisure -- 54% failed

Hmmm . . . wonder why people find it so hard to keep these resolutions. Is it because they are lazy, stupid and weak? Or is it because the deck is stacked against them? Is it because they’re trapped in a system (i.e. traditional work) that robs them of control over their time, which makes taking control of their life that much harder?

We’re not going to sit here and say a Results-Only Work Environment is going to make the world a healthier, happier place . . . but it could. We have both anecdotal and quantitative evidence that people in a ROWE exercise more,  sleep more (and get better quality sleep), eat better and spend more time with their friends and family. And they still get their work done.

That’s why this year our resolution is to change the way everyone works. Let’s get people living and working in a way that’s sane for the individual and good for business. Then maybe a few years from now you won’t have to make New Year’s resolutions to go to the gym more. Because you already will be.

According to a recent survey on Monster.com, 82 per cent of employees feel their prospective employer’s work-life balance initiatives are important when considering their job offer. But only 49 percent of HR professionals feel they have attracted better candidates because of these initiatives. (Read this nice summary of the findings here.) So why the gap?

The problem lies with the nature of the questions. The survey essentially asked people if they wanted work-life balance. Not surprisingly the great majority said yes. But the survey asked the HR community not whether or not work-life balance was good for their employees, or a responsible approach to managing people, but if it was a good perk. It’s a completely different set of assumptions.

We don’t feel that work-life balance should be a perk. Everyone is entitled to working and living in a humane way. If you’re getting your work done and contributing to the bottom line, then being able to go to the doctor when you’re sick shouldn’t be a perk. Coming in at 9:00 a.m. instead of 8:00 a.m. because it took a little longer to get your kids out the door shouldn’t be a perk. If you treat everyone like adults, then the great majority will act like adults. You won’t have to take surveys about the importance about work-life balance. Because everyone will have it.