Business Insight Zone

How many of us really think that we must be in the office every day for eight hours to do our best work? Or to get our work done at all? Probably not many.

Well, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson feel your pain, and they’ve proposed a whole new way of thinking about the working life in their forthcoming book, which is titled, bluntly enough, Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It.

The core of the book is their concept of the Results-Only Work Environment. Under their system, you and your company treat each other like grownups, capable of navigating the world of work without a million-bazillion rules about when and where you must show your face. Why? Because showing your face at a certain time and place doesn’t have any necessary relationship to how well you’re doing your job.

We’ve all knows folks who show up for work every day, “wear the flair” for the company, attend every meeting . . . and never make a dime’s worth of difference in how well the organization performs. Hey, maybe you’ve been that person when you were stuck in a low-excitement job.

The point is, time-serving does no one any good, because good work, profitability, social impact, and all the other things we say we’d like to accomplish don’t come from simple time-serving. (Ponder this: Martin Luther King was killed when he was 39 years old. It doesn’t take long to make an impact, if you put your guts into it.) No, results come from putting your energy into what you do.

Often this can be accomplished in short bursts. We tend to rediscover this in the few days before we leave for vacation, when mountains of work magically get done — or discarded — without hesitation. That’s when we cut out what Chris Brogan calls “fluff” and really get down to the brass tacks of our work.

What’s needed is a better approach to measuring how work gets done in your world. I came across the ROWE material by reading a post from Darren Barefoot that reminded me of Paul Graham’s thoughts on the subject:

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they,re neither working nor having fun.

It’s not a mistake, of course, that so many high-achieving workplaces (Google, Bloomberg, Container Store, etc.) are peopled with employees who are both working and having fun. That’s a far sight better than all those Office Space-like offices that kill results while also crushing the human spirit out of their denizens.

I’m looking forward to Cali and Jody’s book — I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve read it.

Meanwhile: how well does your workplace run from the standpoint of “Results-Only”?