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?

First things first. We were pleased to see Louisville and Xavier advance. If Kansas, Memphis, Stanford and Davidson can get it done tonight then our brackets will look quite healthy. We cool?

Lately, when we’re not bringing American productivity to its knees by talking about basketball, we’re thinking about how people are freaking about how the NCAA tournament is bringing down American productivity. We liked this piece on the “boss button” from CNET News, especially the author’s self-deprecating self-assessment as “either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn’t exactly strike fear into the rank and file.”

But even though the boss button is a kind of a joke, its very existence makes us feel . . . well . . . kind of embarrassed. The idea that a grownup can’t spend a few minutes checking scores and highlights out of fear of being scolded is not only ridiculous, it’s insulting. It makes us think of permission slips and hall passes and the word “tardy”.

What do you have to accomplish before you’re allowed to be in control of your life?

How old do you have to be before you can be trusted?

And most important of all, is UNC going to win it all?

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.

Check out these reader responses to a question asked by the Toronto Star about whether or not the government should determine whether or not stores should be open on statutory (or legal) holidays. There is an interesting tension here between people who want the government to step in and keep stores closed (for the greater good) and those who want to leave it up to businesses to decide for themselves.

We think this is a discussion worth having. Granted, the 24/7, global economy has made day-to-day life more challenging. Is the answer a top-down solution? Do we need government or company policies that protect us from our overcharged lives? Or do we need a grassroots solution, where people are given more power and control to find their own path?

We know where we stand on this issue. How about you?

Don’t get us started on sleep. The National Sleep Foundation just released their annual Sleep in America poll (for a summary check out this AP wire story) and once again it shows that people are tired, tired, tired. According to the story, “[r]oughly one-third of those surveyed said they had fallen asleep or become very sleepy at work in the past month.”

As the story also notes, people are working longer hours and so they stay up later to be with their families. But they also have to get up (on average) at 5:35 a.m., presumably so they can get to work “on time” . . . and finish sleeping.

It seems crazy to even have to say this, but if you’re an adult who is getting your job done, then you should be able to eat and sleep when you need to eat and sleep. In a Results-Only Work Environment, you get to choose when you sleep. As long as the work is getting done, then no one judges how you spend your time.

But setting aside ROWE for a moment, we’d like to explore another aspect of this story. The survey found that people needed another 40 minutes of sleep at night. What would happen if everyone got their missing 40 minutes a day and worked 40 minutes less each day? Do you think business would suffer? What if they worked an hour a half less per day? What about two hours?

If you clicked on that link then you’ve read that we already spend big chunks of the workday not working. We bust ass to get to work “on time” and then we spend part of the day pretending to work. It’s a ridiculous game that everyone at some point in their life has played. Everyone knows it’s a joke.

Here’s the real question: if we’re all grown-ups, why, when it comes to work, do we act like such children? If you really think about all the wasted energy and all the white lies and self-deception, isn’t it kind of embarrassing?

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!

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.

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.

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

We were about to reply to Terese Blanck’s comment to Telecommuting, Jealously and You, but then we thought our answer was worth its own post.

Terese wants to know:

“Does [ROWE] work for all types of personalities? Does the employee who is young and needs more direction still show results? Are there main personal traits that must be present in order for this to work such as self-directed, engaged and passionate about your work? Also, how does a receptionist feel who must be present at work…do you make some type of arrangement for this role as well?”

This questions points to what we feel is one of the most insidious aspects of the traditional workplace: the idea that control over your job is only for the select few. The traditional workplace teaches us that only some people (upper-level employees, employees with more seniority, employees who show the most can-do spirit) get the privilege to run their own lives. Everyone else needs to be put on a schedule, crammed in a cube, and watched over.

But you do not have to be special to be in a Results-Only Work Environment. You don’t have to be more focused or savvy or passionate or anything. It’s for everyone.

The reason is that a ROWE is not that different. You’re still going to work and doing your job. You still have meetings and solve problems and communicate with customers. None of that changes.

What changes is that if you want to go pick up some dry cleaning at 2 pm, you just go do it and don’t worry about it. You don’t have to announce it to your team or get permission, because you’re getting your work done and that’s all that matters. (The same goes for the receptionist. Someone covers for the receptionist now, when he or she is sick, or at lunch, or in a meeting. So it’s no different.)

In fact, as you continue to think about and explore the idea of a ROWE, we’d encourage you to think about how ordinary a Results-Only Work Environment is. It’s really just like the rest of your life. You know, those hours away from work when you actually get to be an adult.