First, the book officially comes out in two days. We can hardly believe it.

Second, we appreciated being mentioned in Adam McFarland’s thoughtful post on Brazen Careerist. We especially appreciate the fact that he has decided to take action:

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

We’d like to see more people like Adam challenge the 40-hour workweek. But we’d also like to see people push themselves even farther, and do something even more radical:

Stop thinking about work in terms of time.

We’d love for Adam to work 35 hours a week, or 30 hours, or 20 hours, or four. For entrepreneurs like him, the work-life balance issue is the amount of time spent working. But for most rank-and-file employees, the bigger issue is control.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, you may work less than 40 hours, or you may work more, but even if you work 60 hours a week, you do it on your own terms. In a ROWE, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as the work gets done. In practice, this translates to working at non-traditional hours (and in non-traditional places) but it’s all up to you. You choose when and where to work, and when you have that kind of power and control over your life (when you get to truly live as an adult) you’re not counting the minutes like you do in a traditional work environment.

Working in a ROWE is a lot like getting things done on the weekend in a traditional workweek. You don’t track your hours while you’re running errands on a Saturday. There is an awareness of time, but not a strict accounting of time. Just that simple change can make a world of difference.

Thanks to author and blogger, Tim Ferris, for this post about lifestyle investing. Tim talks about an exchange he had with a reader who asked if you could invest time the way you invest money. If you can have “compound interest”, then why not “compound time” as well?

We think the answer is “yes” and here’s a story from our experiences with ROWE at Best Buy that shows you why.

One of the managers we migrated at Best Buy was very, very old school. He was older, he used to be in the service, and his entire mentality about work was based on hours. You showed up on time or early. You never left early or took a long lunch or ran personal errands during the day. You put in your time and you respected the structure - no questions asked.

As he went through the migration process, this manager began to see the business and personal benefits of a ROWE. He saw his employees blossom under this new way of working, and this got him challenging his own attitudes about time. Most importantly, he realized that if he didn’t change his behavior, then he would stifle the change. Your boss can verbally support you having control over your time, but if he or she still sticks to the old ways, then that sends a counterproductive message.

So the manager started running. Instead of going to work at 8:00 a.m. every day, he went jogging through his neighborhood. This was not easy for him. At first, he felt guilty and uncomfortable. But gradually, he realized that the work was still getting done. And he saw that his employees were more comfortable working nontraditional hours. The “compound” effect didn’t put more hours in the day, but soon the team enjoyed more control over the time they had.

The traditional mindset about time will always express things in terms of amount. And if you’re trying to get “more” time in your life, you will never win. That mythical “more” doesn’t exist. But more control over your time is very doable. It feels good, it’s something you can share with others, and it creates a new culture of abundance. The fact that there are only “so many hours in the day” doesn’t have to feel like a limitation.

A friend sent us this link to Guy’s Bozoification Aptitude Test, which is based on Guy Kawasaki’s blog entry about how to tell if your company is “sliding into bozosity.”

We know it’s an old post, but this kind of thing never gets old. Right now, a fresh crop of young people is entering the workforce. Right now, they’re being conditioned to behave based on a set of broken assumptions about work. Right now, veterans of the workforce are turning a blind eye to the problem and teaching these new hires how to get along in the world. Work sucks, but what can you do, right?

We encourage you to take this quiz. And by all means, have a laugh. It’s funny. But we also encourage you to consider what would happen if we tried to change the culture of work.

For example, check out Question #7:

“Time is now considered more important than money so you have a company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service. Moreover, the first thing that employees show visitors is the company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service.”

Reading this made us think of a recent post about “The Walk of Shame” on The Juggle, the Wall Street Journal’s work-life blog. (The walk of shame is that feeling you have when you leave the office before “normal” quitting time.) Check out all the comments.  Even in companies that are “flexible,” people are still obsessed with time, as opposed to focusing on results.

The workplace perks that Guy makes fun of are just like the benefits of flexibility: an illusion. We can’t help but wonder how often the “walk of shame” takes people past the cafeteria, the health club and the pet grooming service. Maybe a better option than flexibility is control. Instead of giving people access to an on-site gym, they could have the freedom to workout whenever, and wherever, they wanted.

Which would you rather have?

According to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey, one out of four workers admit to making up fake excuses for being late to work. Here are the top ten “most unusual” excuses given:

1.   While rowing across the river to work, I got lost in the fog.
2.   Someone stole all my daffodils.
3.   I had to go audition for American Idol.
4.   My ex-husband stole my car so I couldn’t drive to work.
5.   My route to work was shut down by a Presidential motorcade.
6.   I wasn’t thinking and accidentally went to my old job.
7.   I was indicted for securities fraud this morning.
8.   The line was too long at Starbucks.
9.   I was trying to get my gun back from the police.
10.  I didn’t have money for gas because all of the pawn shops were
closed.

We appreciate someone trying to get a laugh, but in when you use the ROWE mindset, none of these excuses are funny. Because there is no such thing as a good excuse, a bad excuse or an unusual excuse in a ROWE. The only thing that matters is whether or not the work is getting done.

In our world, we talk about socially acceptable excuses and socially unacceptable excuses. Socially acceptable excuses are the kinds that the article lists as the most common: traffic, getting the kids ready, etc. Socially unacceptable excuses would be something like “drank too much last night and needed to sleep it off” or “the thought of coming in and doing this soul-stealing job had me nailed to the mattress as I hit the snooze bar repeatedly until the fear of getting fired motivated me to get out of bed.”

In all those cases the person might come in a half hour or an hour late. In all of those cases, the person might have gone on to have a very productive day. The person may have even missed a meeting, but was still able to recover that lost experience and contribute to the bottom line. In the end, the nature of the excuse doesn’t really matter. As the article says, a little over a quarter of the managers surveyed are skeptical about whether they’re even true. If one in four employees lies about coming in late, one in four managers don’t believe the lies.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine taking excuses entirely out of the workplace. Employees don’t give them. Managers don’t ask for them. What happens? Do people start coming in later and later and later? Or do they come in more or less at the same time? Are people more productive or less productive? Or the same?

Finally, we did find a ray of hope in this article, which notes that “43 percent of hiring managers say they don’t mind if their employees are late as long as their work is completed on time with good quality.” We think this is great news for all of us who are passionate about the ROWE revolution. That means that almost half of the population generally believes that results are more important than time. Maybe with a little work we could get that number north of fifty. We think that would be a change for the better.

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.

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!

At the risk of sounding arrogant, we saw this one coming. The Workforce Institute conducts a survey and not surprisingly finds that “4.4 million employees may arrive late to work on Monday morning after the Super Bowl, and an additional 1.5 million may call in sick. Super Bowl-related absences could be highest for organizations with a high population of Gen X and Gen Y employees.”

We hear this and think, Big deal. People come in late or not at all, for all kinds of reasons, every day, all around the world. And yet somehow the wheels of commerce keep turning. In a way, it doesn’t matter if you have a “good excuse” or you’re “blowing off” work. You’re not there and as a result, people have to adjust. Then the next day it might be your turn to cover for someone else.

But the Workforce Institute gets all hall monitor about it. Invoking the coming recession they note that:

“Super Bowl or not, those workers thinking about blowing off Monday might want to think twice about the message they could be sending to employers who may be managing tighter workforce budgets.”

That’s just ridiculous. If (heaven forbid) you’re going to get laid off in the coming months, it won’t be because you were up all night being happy for Tom Brady. Companies don’t close plants and outsource work overseas because you have a life outside of work. Don’t buy into the “better look busy, the economy’s bad” mentality. Putting on a show of work doesn’t help anyone.

First, a big thanks to the growing number of readers who are coming to this site and spending more and more time here. We’re happy to have you. We see this topic as a dialog and your questions, comments and even outright objections are not only welcomed but desired.

With that in mind, we’d like to respond to one of the comments to last Friday’s post about workplace rudeness. Tim! asks, “If we have a team meeting and I ask everyone to be in the office by noon and one guy shows up at 12:30 thus wasting everyone’s time, isn’t that also rude?”

We have to admit we are a bit conflicted as to how to answer. We don’t like jerks anymore than the next person, but part of the definition of rudeness has to do with violating social norms.  And, in the case of workplace and time, we feel the norms are the problem, less so people’s individual behavior.

Is a person who keeps their coworkers waiting rude? Yes. At the same time, we feel that when managers create a culture of fear around time, they are selling their people, their business and themselves short. Chewing someone out for being late might make them less likely to be late the next time, but it isn’t going to motivate them to perform better. You’re also sending a message to the rest of the team that time is more important than results.

Furthermore, by making it personal you’re missing out on an opportunity to talk about outcomes. In a ROWE, when  managers are having problems with an employee’s performance, they focus on the work, not on the employee’s use of time, their personal work style, or their “lack of dedication”.

So to all you managers out there: the next time you’re having problems with a late employee, take a deep breath, remind yourself that it’s not personal - it’s business - and talk to that employee about the outcomes they need to drive. Focus on time and you’ll get punctuality. Focus on results and you’ll get performance.

We were excited to see this University of Florida study, or at least as excited as you can be about a thoughtful, scientific exploration of how people use their power and position in the workplace to take a complete crap on other people’s dignity.

The main takeaway from the study is that after being treated rudely, subjects didn’t perform as well as controls when tackling various cognitive tasks. But what jumped out at us is something that we have been observing in the workplace for a long time: even when people simply imagine being on the business end of toxic behavior, it negatively affects their performance.

In other words, your boss doesn’t even have to yell at you for being five minutes late for you to feel oppressed by a work culture that puts the clock ahead of results. As long as those beliefs about time are in place, your mind takes care of the rest.

As Amir Erez, the professor who led the study notes, “As more and more jobs within organizations become increasingly complex and require higher levels of cognitive functioning and creativity, anything that interferes with that process is likely to have an impact, not only on individual job performance but on the productivity of the labor force as a whole.”

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a manager at your organization say something like “late again?” or “nice of you to join us” or “well, look who’s here.” Even the most off-handed comment can do more damage than you might realize.

Plus, that’s like, so totally rude.

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