We’ve already covered how the legal profession is having a serious internal conversation about balance. Now it seems this issue is affecting doctors as well.

The word in the article that really jumped out at us was “sacrifice,” as in “[Australian Medical Association] president Rosanna Capolingua called on senior doctors to rethink their expectations of young medicos, who were not willing to make the same sacrifices for their jobs.”

The sacrifice in question is time. The idea is that if you are willing to give up your time to your job, then you must be a better worker. Those who make the biggest sacrifices (the story cites 120 hours a week!) deserve the biggest rewards in terms of money, title and prestige.

We don’t dispute that becoming good at something takes a lot of time. And it’s true that high performers do make sacrifices in order to achieve their goals. But while we should recognize and appreciate excellence, it’s wrong for us to applaud sacrifice. What really matters is the value that someone delivers. If a doctor (or any other profession) can deliver the goods in 30 hours, then that doesn’t diminish their accomplishment. If someone else wants to put in 120 hours, that’s their choice. But let’s look at what they are contributing, not how long it took to do it.

Besides, do we really want doctors who only live for work? Wouldn’t it be better (for us and for them) to be whole people with full lives?

This story about how social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are “sneaking into the office” is just a tidbit, but we were intrigued by the last line:

“As with instant messaging and wireless access, banning the technology from the office is not effective because it is likely to creep in anyway. It is better to recognize it, evaluate it, manage it and then use it appropriately.” 

We don’t have all the answers on this topic, so we thought we’d throw the question out to you.

How is technology used (effectively or ineffectively) in your workplace?

How would you like to see technology used?

Finally, if we let technology lead the way (as opposed to us making rules about how technology is used) how might we behave differently in terms of work?

The other day we ran across some interesting numbers from a Watson Wyatt survey. It seems that a percentage of the companies surveyed are aware that certain aspects of their work cultures cause stress, and that employee stress is having a negative impact on the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, in each category, the percentage of employers who are actually responding to this problem is always lower than the overall awareness level. (One wonders if they would call the fire department if their office park were engulfed in flames.)

It’s galling that an organization could acknowledge that their company is a stressful, counterproductive place to work and yet not do anything about it. But that’s not the part of the survey that got us all riled up. Instead, we’re wondering about the companies that DON’T EVEN KNOW they have a problem.

Only 32% can see how a lack of work-life balance is hurting their people and their business? Are you kidding? Less than half can see that working longer hours, and doing more work with fewer resources, is a problem? Pardon our French, but WTF?

It’s this kind of incredible blindness that motivates us to continue to speak out on these issues. It’s this kind of blindness that has us calling for a revolution in how we work. We can’t expect the leaders at the top to wake up to the realities of working in the 21st Century. It’s up to us to make the workplace a more sane and humane place for everyone. No one is going to give it to us.

One of the challenges of talking about the culture of work is that people can assume that finding a better way is not a “must have” but a “nice to have.” Reducing people’s stress, or making maternity/paternity leave policy more humane, or almost any other “work-life balance” issue can be viewed as important but not essential. The business of business trumps all.

As this story from Minnesota Public Radio suggests, that is about to change. As Boomers retire in record numbers, we are approaching a time when there will be record shortages of workers. The most talented of those workers are going to enjoy an incredible amount of say in how they work. Even the the average worker is going to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to picking jobs that offer them more than the daily grind.

The decision every business faces today is whether or not you want to lead through this change, or play catch up. We’ll be blogging more about this issue in the coming weeks, but we wanted to add this thread to the conversation. It’s true that a Results-Only Work Environment is a nice place to work. But nice isn’t enough. We are approaching a time when employee control will be essential to survival.

Love stinks. Or maybe love bites. Or maybe love does something else to you. In any case, a marketing company in Japan is now offering “heartache leave” for employees who are facing a sudden increase in “me time”.

The amount of heartache leave you’re eligible to take is scaled according to your age. If you’re under 24 years old, you can take one day off a year. Staffers aged 25 to 29 are allowed two days a year, while employees 30 on up get three days off a year.

As CEO Miki Hiradate says, “Women in their 20s can find their next love quickly, but it’s tougher for women in their 30s, and their break-ups tend to be more serious.”

It all sounds so . . . reasonable.

Change is painful, isn’t it?

We’re not surprised at all at the findings in this study. We see it everyday when we speak at companies with traditional work environments. People who have less freedom resent the people who have more.

But what interests us about this piece is the paragraph toward the end that proposes the solution:

“[B]y ensuring greater face-to-face contact between co-workers when all employees are in the office and granting greater job autonomy, employers may be able to counter these problems”, according to the study published in the journal Human Relations.

So we’re supposed to ensure greater face-to-face contact, but also grant greater job autonomy? In other words, the way to react to the changing face of work is to make people do what we think is best for them (greater face-to-face), while also letting them decide what’s best for them (greater job autonomy). Huh?

We’re not criticizing this kind of mixed message. Given where we are in this global change in how we view work, it’s not surprising that there is confusion.

Our traditional attitudes about work make tempting solutions to our workplace problems because they give us comfort. They are the devil we know. Our emerging attitudes about work are the devil we don’t. Even though give people more control is better fit with the business and the personal realities of a global, 24/7 world, embracing this idea is a little scary.

But here is one thing we know: we’re never going back. The traditional eight-to-five, in-a-cube world of work isn’t dead, but it’s dying. So the question for those miserable souls watching other people enjoy their freedom isn’t how to make them feel better about being left behind, but how to bring them along with us.

The most e-mailed article (registration required) on the Times website right now is a must-read for anyone who wants a snapshot of how much upheaval there is in the global workforce.

The gist of it is that those two time-honored jobs (doctor and lawyer) don’t have the luster they once had. As the piece notes, “pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining” but there isn’t the same level of social status that there used to be.

“Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.”

The story goes on to talk about tech billionaires and investment bankers as the new cool, but we’d argue that you could take the money and status elements out of this story and it would still hold up. Flexibility, creativity, autonomy. This is what everyone wants from work.

It’s not because people are spoiled. Or have a short attention span. The reason is that control has become a form of currency. Freedom is a form of compensation. And when you look at what a grind both the legal and medical professions have become, it makes you shudder. People would rather have a life and we don’t blame them.

There is a very sad story that’s been going around about a Toyota worker who died–on the job, at 4 am–of overwork. As this version notes, he had put in 106 hours of overtime the month he died.

The Japanese word for what happened to Mr. Uchino is karoshi. Karoshi first surfaced as a phenomenon in the 1980s and the media takes it semi-seriously. A worker’s death is not taken lightly, but the idea of death from overwork often comes off as an oddity, an extreme consequence of the (sometimes) extreme work culture found in corporate Japan.

We say that while the outcome is extreme, the fundamental forces behind karoshi are not unique to Japan, nor are they to be taken lightly. People die at work in Japan because of stress. Even if stress isn’t literally killing us in the rest of the world, we would be foolish to think that the stress of playing the game of work doesn’t take its toll.

The American Institute of Stress has a nice page on the economic and social effects of job stress. The AIS nicely expresses the human and business costs of stress, but we’re not waiting for the right number to come along and tell us that work is broken. And we’re also not going to wait for work to start killing people. A Results-Only Work Environment means that people don’t have to tolerate harmful work stress. There is an alternative and the time has come for people to use it.

It’s Election Day today, but will you get the chance to vote? Or will you be too busy, too stressed, too pressed for time? Would you like to vote, but fear coming in late or leaving early? Are you frustrated that something so basic (the right of people in a democracy to vote) should be made so difficult?

Over the years, people have proposed a number of solutions to the problem of voting. There is the idea of making Election Day a national holiday. Every few years, Wisconsin Senator Herbert Kohl introduces a bill to change Election Day to a weekend. There is also the Vote by Mail Project, which is an effort to give voters more options for how to vote. These are all good ideas, but each has been met with either apathy or political resistance.

The flaw with these solutions is that they fail to address a deeper problem that all working people face: for 40+ hours of their week, they don’t have control over their time. In a Results-Only Work Environment this isn’t a problem. As long as the work gets done, then people can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And that includes voting.

Yeah, but what happens if someone is out voting and I need to reach them?

Some of these issues can be handled with technology. If you have a cell phone, you can be reachable while you’re in line at the polls. You can also address these concerns with planning. Just as teams cover for each other when someone is sick, traveling or in a meeting, you can plan for individuals to be gone for an hour or two at a time. That could mean collecting people’s contributions for a meeting beforehand.

Election Day does not take us by surprise. It’s parked in the same spot on the calendar every year. There is no reason why we can’t take some time to vote and continue to do our jobs.

Give people control over their time and they can exercise their rights as citizens, and that’s better for business and for our country.

A nice piece in this Sunday’s New York Times (registration required) about the politics of the modern workplace. The writer focuses on the current presidential campaign, but makes a larger point about the “historic opportunity” we are facing in freeing people from their assumptions about where and when work gets done. He asks:

“[W]hy shouldn’t more middle-class workers whose jobs can now be done remotely have the option to structure their own hours and still enjoy the security of a safety net? Why shouldn’t data-entry clerks and graphic designers and actuaries and reservations agents — anyone who spends his days staring at a terminal in some sterile environment straight out of Office Space — be able to work in shorts and spend more time around the kids?”

Exactly. The answer is that there is no reason why not. What’s been missing until now is a new social and mental framework to replace the old, broken model of face time and putting in hours. That new framework is a Results-Only Work Environment. When people deliver results and are rewarded for outcomes, then they don’t need to put in face time. Businesses benefit from more productive, engaged and focused workers. Employees benefit from having more control over their time. Good news for what the article calls “the modern, untethered workforce.”