This article in the Washington Post is yet another in a string of pieces we’ve seen over the years about women who choose to come back part-time after having kids, and how they accept reduced pay and benefits (and often risk their career) in exchange for the Holy Grail of Flexibility.

What jumped out at us while we read this story were all the percentages. One source has come back 60% while another has chosen to come back 80%. And this got us thinking: how do employers make sure that these women are doing exactly the right amount of work? How do they make sure that they are getting sixty or eighty percent? (Because it wouldn’t exactly be fair if employers got 65% or 87%, would it?) And how do these women give an exact percentage of their former efforts? Do they throttle back when they find themselves approaching the mark?

The answer, of course, is that neither employer nor employee are measuring actual output. They’re only talking about time. Even though common sense tells us that it’s absurd to look at work as a constant, steady stream of productivity, all the parties in this ridiculous game are assuming that if you reduce your hours by 20% then you must reduce your output by 20%.

This is a fantasy. It’s also a deeply unfair fantasy, especially for the employee. If you’re making $60,000 a year and you accept a 20% reduction of your former role, then you sacrifice approximately $230 a week in exchange for 8 hours. A manufacturing company that makes widgets might be able to argue that those 8 hours are worth $230. But the women in the article aren’t making widgets. They’re knowledge workers, and a knowledge worker can easily deliver that $230 worth of value in 32 hours.

Of course, you could also argue that a full-time knowledge worker could just as easily not deliver the full value of their weekly pay. But that just goes to our larger point about the absurdity of measuring an employee’s value to the business based on time. We want to see both employers and employees get what they’re due. That means employers paying employees based on the value of what they deliver (not the time it takes to deliver it) and employees taking accountability and delivering that value.

Bottom line: we have to stop chasing flexibility. Flexibility can only be based on time, and time means nothing in today’s economy.

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 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!

Apparently this happens every year. In Germany, during the holiday season, there is a debate about whether or not to allow shopping on Sundays. Merchants want to stay open on Sundays, but tradition dictates that stores stay closed.

We saw (and heard) several versions of this story and typically it was covered as a business story, as if it were just a question of economics. But we’re interested in the larger questions it raises about personal choice in a global, 24/7 economy.

Technology allows you to work, shop, keep in touch with friends and family, and entertain yourself from just about anywhere in the world and at any time of the day or night. As a culture we still talk about work days and weekends and holidays, about being in the office or out of the office, but the lines have gotten blurry. As we noted in a recent post, for some people this is a source of concern, but we see it as an opportunity.

For most, it’s socially unacceptable to answer work e-mails on a holiday. The guy who logs on for a half hour on Christmas is a jerk. What if by answering those e-mails he was able to not go in the next day and therefore get an entire extra day with his family? Is he still a jerk?

What do we lose by all working (or not working) at the same time? What could we gain by having the freedom and the power to work when it’s best for us? And what’s a day off, really, when the world is non-stop?

Sometimes when we read articles like this about flexibility at work we just can’t stand it. On the one hand, this story rightly talks about how people are craving flexibility at work, how it’s a competitive advantage for business, and so forth. On the other hand, the piece frets about how flexibility is not for everyone, and how there needs to be core hours. It’s like watching someone at a swimming pool who won’t dive in even though the water is fine. Are you in or are you out?

What’s missing here is trust. At Best Buy, we’ve found that if you actually trust people, then you’ll get amazing results. People not only like and benefit from flexibility, but if you take it a step further and actually give them control, their performance soars. And this happens not just with the best educated workers. Or the most ambitious workers. Everyone responds to being trusted. As long as you give people clear expectations, they will perform. And you don’t even need it in writing.