We thought we’d pass along this funny story from the trenches of work (and work sucking):

A friend of ours has a “Work Sucks” magnet on his car. When his boss saw it, he said, “Bob, I’m really disappointed in you for having that on your car.” Our friend didn’t think anything of it, but his boss kept commenting on the magnet throughout the day. When he went out in the parking lot at the end of the day, our friend noticed that his boss had taped a note to the magnet, altering its message. It now reads:

“Work is really good and I love my boss”

We’re grownups. And, as grownups, we are not afraid to recognize (and correct) our mistakes.

From this point forward, work is really good and everyone loves their boss.

Perhaps these signs are funny. Perhaps they are sad. Perhaps they are funny-sad. (Or sad-funny.) Whatever they are, they reveal a lot about what we believe about work. A free copy of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It to the person who best translates the hidden meanings.

Monster.com’s blog is running a contest that asks the eternal question: Is Your Job Like a Sitcom? Judging by the responses so far (contest ends May 5th), the answering seems to be that yes, most people’s jobs are pretty much like a sitcom.

Just check out this excerpt from a contest entry about life at a small brokerage firm:

“Usually at any time of the day they have what is known as their alley. This alley begins at my desk and goes past the assistants. This alley is used for football, soccer and softball practice. I usually am ducking half the day while on the phone trying to work. The ball hits me in the head and I just keep right on talking. There is a five dollar fee for any direct hits to me or the items on my desk!”

So this poor woman goes to work every day and things are so out of control, her only recourse is to charge money when she gets hit by a poorly thrown football.

As one of the entrants notes, “At the end of the day, there are a million stories in these buildings and no one would believe any of them because we live the stories and we can’t believe them ourselves.” That sentence (and the football-dodging worker’s story) sum up the challenge facing all of us. Your workplace’s culture, no matter how broken, still operates almost invisibly. The daily indignities and absurdities are so commonplace that you barely notice them. You might even feel embarrassed to complain about them. It’s just the way it is, right?

What a lot of people might not realize is that cultures can change. You can complain, especially if you have a reasonable alternative. Even if you aren’t in a position to implement ROWE, you still have the right to talk to your manager or your coworkers about results. What exactly are we trying to accomplish here? What can we all do to drive those outcomes? And can you please talk to those guys about “the alley”? Because there is work to do.

. . . and yet still so close.

When we first started working on the framework for what would become a Results-Only Work Environment, we didn’t have a language for what we were trying to say. We knew that work was deeply dysfunctional, and that people had all kinds of strange beliefs about time and how work gets done, but we didn’t have the vocabulary for it that we have now. So when we needed to explain ourselves, we knew we could always point at a Dilbert comic.

This recent post on Scott Adams’ blog reminded us of those early days. Because even though we’re deep in our own world of ROWE, some things haven’t changed. It’s still all about giving people control over their time. It’s about giving them real choices for how they live their lives.

Adams gives three satiric choices for how people can wisely manage their time:

1. Become independently wealthy

2.  Don’t eat or sleep

3. Live for the moment, but be prepared to live on cat food when you retire.

He’s kidding, but some of the comments are no joke. It’s scary to think that, for a lot of people, the idea of actually having control over your life seems as likely as winning the lottery.

We’ve been talking about people having the right to control their schedule, that they need the freedom to choose how to best use their time in order to do their jobs, spend time with friends and family, and generally take care of themselves.

Then we saw this:

You know, maybe we were wrong. People don’t need to break free, not if they can tighten their abs while sitting in their cubes. Thanks, Hawaii Chair!

Perhaps this kind of work environment is more your speed.

Isn’t it funny how work turns us into liars?

Charming piece by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, who writes a workplace trend blog for TIME. She talks about the gossip you miss by working at home. (She is also working on her snack-hoarding problem . . . wink.)

One thing we’d like to add to the conversation is the following prediction: there will come a time when we won’t have a debate about whether it’s better to work at home or work at the office.

Of course there are pros and cons to both, but there are so many variables (nature of the task, personal work style, etc.) there will never be one answer. The point is that people need to have the power to choose between the two.

The nature of that choice is important. Right now, most people have to make one commitment to an alternate schedule. (For example, you have to commit to four ten-hour days.) What’d we’d like to see is people being able to choose between working in the office or out of the office on a daily, or even hourly, basis. Work at home from eight to ten, then go into the office for two hours, then go to a coffee shop for another two hours, then back to the office for a quick meeting, then home again.

If people are delivering outcomes, there will be no need to talk about where they are being delivered. As people who work in a Results-Only Work Environment will tell you, after awhile you don’t even notice.

Here’s some holiday cheer for you: a casino worker who was fired for posting a Dilbert comic strip that likened managers to a bunch of “drunken lemurs.” The best (as in worst) part: they challenged his unemployment insurance.

Fortunately, the state ruled in the worker’s favor in terms of the insurance, although in our opinion the right thing would have been for the worker to be offered his job back.

Work is not the military. It’s absurd that an at-will employee could be fired for “insubordination” as if they were a conscript in the Army.

What is most galling to us about this story is that it represents a problem we find all over corporate America: respect flows in one direction. According to the story upper management found the cartoon “very offensive” but then later, the casino worker’s boss told him he wasn’t being a “team player.”

So it’s not okay to joke about managers in general, but it is okay for the boss to dress you down with vague criticisms about your lack of school spirit?

Happy Holidays!

We invite you to read “Study Finds Working at Work Improves Productivity” from The Onion and have a good laugh.

That was nice, wasn’t it?

We love good office humor, but over the years these kinds of jokes have also made us increasingly sad. Because the underlying assumption of all office humor is that the workplace sucks and it will never, ever, ever change. Work is a life sentence with no chance of parole. Since you’re powerless when it comes to doing anything about it, you may as well laugh and make the best of it.

Now that technology has made it possible to work anytime, anywhere, work doesn’t have to be a prison. In a Results-Only Work Environment work is something you do, not a place you go. Right now, only a small percentage of the workforce plays by these new rules, but that is changing. We can see a day when the assumptions behind the aforementioned article simply aren’t true anymore. Hopefully The Onion will still be funny, but they’ll have to find something else to joke about.