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!

This recent piece in BusinessWeek is about lawsuits involving overtime, but we can’t help but read it as an example of the 900-pound gorilla that’s in the room whenever our culture talks about work. Even though the article talks about “archaic workplace stereotypes”, it stops short of the real point: We still approach the flexible, fluid, 21st Century global market with the same 19th Century attitudes about time.

Just look at this:

“The issue of when the workday begins can get complicated. Delivery truck drivers, utility workers, and service technicians, for example, now regularly download their route assignments or appointments from their homes by computer each morning. Should they be paid for this time? Should this be the start of their workday?”

In a Results-Only Work Environment the answer to these questions are “No” and “Who cares?” The real question we need to ask ourselves is this:

Why are we still measuring outcomes in terms of time? Now that technology lets you work wherever and whenever you want, why do we still use the clock as a way of measuring performance?

Work has changed. In a 24/7 global economy, the idea of an 8-5, 40-hour week is silly. So let’s start acknowledging the gorilla in the room. Or, at the very least, let’s stop using it as a warm, hairy place to take a nap.

We’re going to go out on a limb and say something controversial: We want people to live.

We want the workforce to be filled with alive, mostly healthy people. And yet, according to this story on sleep and health, a third of the population of the U.K., and over 40 percent in the U.S., regularly sleep less than five hours a night, and that lack of sleep can be deadly. Get that little sleep and your risk of “cardiovascular death” doubles.

Studies like this make us wonder: How much worse does life have to get before people push back? How much freedom and control can our jobs take from us before we say “Enough”? It’s not as if employers aren’t getting anything out of the employer-employee bargain. You are doing your job, not collecting charity benefits. And yet people are giving up sleep in order to work longer hours in the hopes their “dedication” will be rewarded.

In a ROWE, your work performance is not judged based on time. If you need sleep, then you can get sleep. There is no need to be up at 6:30 a.m. just because you have to be at work at 8:00 a.m. You can take a nap in the middle of the day. As a result, you work when you’re rested and ready to contribute, and you rest when you need to rest. As long as you get your job done, you are not a slave to the clock.

Make sense?

We were recently at the 10th annual Forbes Executive Women’s Forum in Washington, DC. We heard some good insights into what is traditionally called “work/life balance”. We also heard some stuff we frankly couldn’t believe. Like how women should consider freezing their eggs so they could focus on their careers.

It reminded us of a story we saw a few years back in San Francisco magazine. The assumption is that if you want both a career and a family you should freeze your eggs, focus on your job, then unfreeze them when you’re established enough to have the time to raise a family.

So why stop at eggs? Why not just freeze our kids until it’s more convenient to watch them grow up? Or freeze your spouse until it’s easier to have a meaningful relationship?

We’re not judging people for having this conversation. We’re judging our culture for allowing this conversation to take place at all.

We only have to make these kinds of choices if we give ‘face time’ and putting in hours the same weight as actually getting your job done. In a Results-Only Work Environment, the choice between career and family isn’t as stark. You can be good at both. If you are delivering the goods at work, then you have the freedom to work from wherever you want and whenever you want. People in a ROWE can be there for their kids and their company.

We don’t have to freeze our lives. What we can do is change the conversation. Have you heard people say insane things about postponing their life in order to further (or even keep) their job? Let us know and we’ll discuss them in a future post.