E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Engineering Life Work Integration

I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well need to do so! As we may be missing far too much of what really matters… because of work.

Like I said above, the video is a short, crisp and rather powerful awakening call for all of those knowledge workers out there who may feel that their job is eating up not only all of their work time, but also most of their personal time, along the way, too! Now, I understand the video has got some strong language, but I think Pam gets the point across very nicely and in a tone that while I understand may not be getting through for some folks, I think it’s all just too down to earth, and rather realistic on helping everyone understand where we are and how we may need to keep on challenging a good number of the presumptions that we have always been taking for granted in a business environment when talking about work time AND personal time.

“Go the F*ck Home: Engineering Work/Life Balance” is a rather provocative watch, for sure, but well worth the time to discover the real consequences of working overtime, of giving up your time, just like that!, for free, of constantly being used (and treated!) as an asset, of showing how there are better, smarter ways of getting the job done, of re-focusing on what you would need to do and do it!, in the time that you have been allotted, so that you, too, could get a life. I loved her comment about naming more than two things that we all get to do outside of work and if you can’t name more than two, you have got a problem. Indeed! Too much work time, too little play, personal time! Priceless!

You see? It looks like the best option for all of us is to have an escape plan, something else to do, other than work, to occupy our time during the course of the day, when we are no longer working, and still have the feeling we are achieving something meaningful. And all of this going all the way to the top, including management!, who should be acting as leading examples, in the first place, helping their employees understand that they, too, have got a life and therefore should leave work, and do something else, before they would come to realise that their knowledge workers may be rather unhappy with their overall jobs, just as much as they themselves. When we all know that happy employees are the ones who produce the better outcomes: happy customers. After all, if Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg can do it, why can’t everyone else, right? What’s our excuse?

And if you need an escape plan, how about having a vacation? That would probably help out everyone out there start up with making that separation between work and personal life, right? And stick around with it altogether as well, upon your return. After all, we all know how beneficial, relaxing, chilling, unwinding and healthy it is to take a good long vacation, of, at least, two weeks disconnecting from everything for optimal results (Yes, even my own boss is confirming that!). Even better, we all know and embrace the many other good benefits from having unlimited vacation days, as I have also blogged about in the recent past sharing the experience of the delightful Maggie Fox from Social Media Group So why not do it? No, don’t worry, contrary to what most people would think, knowledge workers, in general, would not slack off. Why? Because they are hard working professionals, remember?, the ones you hired in the first place, the ones who you have trusted all along to do the right thing, i.e. getting their work done. So they are not going to abuse it. All the other way around! They are going to become even more productive and effective at what they do and work harder, because they are the first interested parties in keeping things that way!

Ohhh, that you cannot take vacation, because you can’t afford it? Even your work project won’t allow it? Well, let’s take it into the next level… How about *not* having any vacation, nor off sick time altogether? Let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s wipe out the entire concept of taking a vacation from the workplace and instead, like my good friend Kevin Jones blogged about just recently, let’s introduce this rather fascinating and refreshing new policy: “Need it, Take it“, which goes pretty much as follows:

“If you need time off, take it.  If you are sick, stay home.  Just continue to do amazing work“

Yes, I know, if you have been reading this far you are probably thinking I am just crazy. But why not? Why couldn’t we just live without vacation days and, instead, shift gears ourselves and change mindsets thinking that you may not need to have a fixed vacation period eventually, but, maybe what you need is just taking the time off, when you need it, for the time you consider responsibly enough to take off and just go ahead and do it! Knowing that it will happen when you know it will have the least impact on the business. Your business.

Smart companies like Evernote are already doing it and proving that it can be done and I guess at this point in time you may be wondering what you would need to do in order to make it happen for yourself, right? Well, something relatively simple: just ask! You know, like I have always been telling people, if you don’t ask, you already got the “No!” for an answer; if you do ask and get a “No!” for an answer, that’s just totally fine, remember you already had it. But if you get a “Yes!” for an answer you may find yourself you are right on track and you got it! A win-win situation for everyone, because when you get that “Yes!” you would probably be *the* most interested party in keeping things going that way. And I can’t blame you. I would do the very exact same as you would be doing. In fact, I have already been doing it myself for the last 8 years working AND living in Gran Canaria. Remember, for many years I didn’t ask, so I had a “No!” already. But then, one day, I eventually asked, took the risk, a good chance that things could work out, and, I got it! I got the “Yes!” and two weeks later I moved permanently to Gran Canaria where I have been living and working ever since. And still having a blast!

But if you don’t ask, if you don’t provoke that conversation to take place, it will never happen. So you are back to square one. And I am not sure what you would think, but I do believe it’s worth while taking the risk of asking away (your immediate management or whoever else), because in a way you are also helping your management line to understand how they need to shift gears themselves and instead of measuring your performance by the amount of hours and days that you work, they would probably be much better off measuring your overall outcomes, your deliverables, your output, and understand fully how, in a good number of times, you would be providing that extra level of top quality value by taking time off to focus on what you need to focus on: yourself. Re-energise, charge your batteries and come back for more!

After all, it’s a beautiful, wonderful world out there and every extra hour that we spend doing overtime or not having that time off for ourselves to do other things as part of that personal work life integration strategy you should all start working your way through on it, you are losing out. And you are losing big. As big and mind-blowing as this:

Don’t you think it’s worth while asking after all? Don’t you think it’s a good time now to take your life back and instead of talking about work life integration you start living more that life work integration for yourself and for what really matters?

You bet!

40-Hour Work Week – The Magic of Sustainable Growth

Over the course of time you come to realise how there are a number of different articles published out there that you know are going to have a higher impact than others on how you perceive various different things, whether personal or work related. But what happens when you stumble on perhaps the most essential and critical article you have come across in a long while that manages to question a good number of the things we have been taking for granted at work for years? An article that dares to question how the business world has been functioning and operating over the course of decades by claiming, loud and clear, how companies keep ignoring 150 years of invaluable and precious research on how we become most effective and productive while at work. Are you prepared to be challenged, too, about your core work beliefs? Really? Are you sure? I mean, are you really sure? I can tell you it’s going to hurt, but maybe we need it that way, as one of those massive, unprecedented wake-up calls that may mark the beginning of something new and rather powerful: a smarter knowledge workforce.

A few days back I bumped into this very intriguing and rather helpful article put together by Jessica Stillman under the rather provocative title of “Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless” where she points us out to a superb piece of writing done by Sara Robinson at Salon under the suggestive heading of “Bring back the 40-hour work week” where she questions something that I am sure most of us knew, deep inside, from all along, but that very few have dared to even bring up as a topic of conversation. Specially, at work. Basically, when was the last time you worked 40 hours a week? Or, more importantly, does working more than 40 hours per week make you more effective and productive at what you do? Well, Sara claims on that article that, contrary to what we may all believe in, it doesn’t. In fact, working over 40 hours per week is the most unproductive thing you can do to damage not only your work or your colleagues’ work, but also yourself, as a knowledge worker AND as a human being. And she has got 150 years of powerful research to back up that argument!

Whoahh! What do you say to that? I mean, really, what can you say to that? Right there, after having gone through that absolutely stunning piece (Long entry, for sure, but well worth reading every single word of it!), I came to the conclusion that in the 15 plus years I have been working in the corporate world I have never managed to make only 40 hours a week. And, notice how I am using the word manage, because I feel it fits in quite nicely in the whole context of how we have been taught over the course of decades that if you are only working those 40 hours a week you are just basically being underutilised and pretty much lazing around (Perhaps, nowadays even by checking out all of those social networking sites!). Well, it’s actually quite the opposite! You have just been abused left and right by the system into making you believe that working overtime is not only an expected behavior, but a desired one! By our employers, of course! But here’s the twist, by ourselves, knowledge workers, equally so, too! And that’s where things have gone horribly wrong. Apparently.

I can strongly recommend you make the time today to read through Sara’s dissertation, as I am sure you will then be thanking her for sharing it across in the first place and for being capable of opening your eyes, and brain!, to the unthinkable, specially, in today’s current financial turmoil: you don’t need, you shouldn’t have!, to work more than 40 hours a week to be effective and productive. So stop doing that today! Stop working those unpaid hours that research has proved don’t contribute much to your overall performance, or to the overall business outcomes!, and for a good number of reasons. Stop working longer hours than you should and you will even feel much better as a result of it eventually. Although it looks like things were not like that a while back.

Sara mentions how this work behaviour, and expectation!, probably, comes from something that’s been implanted in our work brain from all along. To quote:

[…] But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.

But you eventually find out, through the hard way, you don’t survive it. And then what? That’s exactly what Sara covers successfully in her write-up. Like I have mentioned above, it’s a rather long column that she has put together, but in it she covers, in-depth, where the traditional 40 hour per week work schedule comes from (From the most of the unexpected places, I can tell you!), how and why it was established on that timeframe and how the whole concept of working overtime and staying productive is a myth. A myth we have been told to believe in all along, but that it doesn’t have any scientific validation it actually works. It doesn’t. At all. It makes us all sloppier at what we do. It drains our physical body, our brain, our capacity to collaborate, share our knowledge, innovative and think clearly; it damages not only our very own health, but also our very own healthy, and much needed!, relationships with the outside-out-of-work world: family, friends and relatives, etc. etc.

In her commentary, Sara gets to build up the case how the 40 hour a week work schedule got started with the labour based workforce, and how when we made the transition into the knowledge based work we pretty much ignored that good practice thinking we could demand more of our knowledge workers, because, you know, after all, they are no longer working hard with their hands, but with their brains, so there is this assumption you can get more out of that than whatever you have thought about it. In reality, it’s worse! Apparently, knowledge workers can only produce good quality work in a range of 6 to 7 hours per day. No more. Yes, I know! Really!!

I didn’t know that myself either! Fascinating! But it gets even better, because she then gets to build the case of when, how and why did we destroy the healthy and rather productive 40-hour week. Now, this particular section from her piece I find it really disturbing and rather uncomforting, because, in a way, she comes to claim how we, ourselves, knowledge workers, were the ones who demolished such well established industry standard of only working a certain amount of hours, before our work and output both start deteriorating. Very sobering piece for everyone out there to read through, ponder, reflect, and evaluate whether you yourself feel that you have contributed to it. I know for myself I surely have and having read the whole thing I’m glad I have now got an opportunity to do something about it.

That’s just what she gets to cover next with some very powerful and inspiring counterarguments. “Can we bring it back?” Should we bring it back? That we is not only knowledge workers themselves, but employers alike. According to her, for employees:

“[…] The fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time? Will you ditch dinner and grab some fast food? Skip the workout? Miss the kids’ game this week? Sleep less? (Sex? What’s that?) And how many consecutive days can you keep making that trade-off before you are weakened in some permanent and substantial way? (Probably not as many as you think.) Changing this situation starts with the knowledge that an hour of overtime is a very real, material taking from our long-term well-being — and salaried workers aren’t even compensated for it“

For employers, she adds:

“[…] the shift will be much harder, because it will require a wholesale change in some of the most basic assumptions of our business culture. Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a “good manager” is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like “productivity” and “motivation” are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them. If the crew is working 40 hours a week, she’ll be told to up it to 50. If they’re already at 50, management will want to get them in on nights and weekends, and turn it into 60. And if she balks — knowing that actual productivity will suffer if she complies — she won’t get promoted“

Goodness! I am not sure what you folks would think about those two quotes, but I fear that she has described, tremendously well, and rather accurately, how the business world operates today, in 2012!!, and even more so when you start considering the current financial crisis and how precarious working conditions have become in most countries. So how can we rebel against that? How can we change the tide and revert back to what research over the course of 150 years has proved that it works just all right? I bet most of you out there would feel it’s not an easy task. Sara would agree with you on this regard, I would think. In fact, she offers a good number of options, and potential solutions, that would be worth while considering and pondering further. Go and read those, while over here I am going to take the liberty of adding a couple of suggestions myself on how we, both employers and knowledge workers, can get things back on track and into the right direction if we would want to survive further in this 21st century Knowledge Economy.

For employers:

Stop measuring the performance of your employee knowledge workforce by the amount of hours they put together on completing tasks or by their sheer physical presence at the office. Instead, measure the deliverables, the outcomes, the outputs, what they eventually provide as value-add to the company, i.e. to your customers, and if they can do that in, say, 4 hours, don’t add on them new tasks or additional work to do. Remember, there used to be a time when knowledge workers worked in a single project, with a single team, with a single mission and a specific set of goals. Bring that back, since you can only stretch productivity up to so much, before it takes a big hit on your overall business, which I am sure is the last thing you would want to do.

Also, it would help if businesses would, finally, understand that their knowledge workforce are, actually, people, knowledge workers, and not just some resources or assets that they can shuffle around freely at their will. Those knowledge workers have got many more better things to do than being treated like those resources you can place here or there at your own leisure, just because you feel you are entitled to. Well, may be not. There is a formula out there that’s been around since the 19th century (in Britain) that pretty much describes it rather nicely: “eight [hours] for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works. It’s a formula that needs to come back, because, as Sara mentions: ”[…] the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help” (Their as in industries and branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress).

For employees:

It’s going to be even harder and tougher altogether. I am sure you folks would have a good number of suggestions of what we, both employers and employees, could do about this important topic (And I would love to learn more about them in the comments!), but I sense that one of the key, important things that we could do, as knowledge workers ourselves, in order to make this happen, is to, finally, put a stop to that silly attitude of competing against each other to see and prove who is better in order to claim that well deserved promotion. When we all know, in most cases, no matter how hard you work, how competitive you have become with your colleagues, by protecting and hoarding your knowledge, assets, skills and expertise, or by how much you have managed to put down your peers so that you can stand out that, there is a great chance that you won’t get promoted. And then? Where does that leave you? … Exactly!

Yes, you may get promoted, but you may not. The thing is that while I’m writing these words there is a single key concept out there (And it is not slacking off work, nor stop working altogether, just in case you were thinking about that! heh) that we need to have plenty more of in our corporate world to help us understand how we are much much better off helping each other than fighting each other. Everyone out there would probably want to become an executive or a senior technical leader at some point in time, but, time and time again, in the age of the Sharing Economy, in the age of interconnectedness, of earning their trust by merit (More than anything else you may have done in the past!), of transparency, of engagement, of passion, of intrapreneurship, even, etc. etc. I can imagine how fighting others is not going to be very helpful, never has, eventually!, nor will it help you advance that much faster. And, definitely, stopping others from excelling at what they do, so you can come on top, will take a whole lot more than 40 hours a week. Indeed, in order for us to revert back into that 40 hour a week work mentality where we continuously aim at helping each other becoming better at what we already do, we need plenty more of Servant Leadership. At all levels, but starting with you, not everyone else, but you.

So, eventually, I couldn’t have agreed more with Sara’s conclusion on what’s at stake over here, in today’s business world, if we don’t take any action about it and just move on with what we think is the workplace of the future. I sense it’s got to be better than this, much better than this, because what’s at stake right now, and in the next few years, is our mere survival as knowledge workers, as human beings:

“For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies [Or any company], and the future of the country [any country], this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth“

A few times in the past I have been talking over here in this blog about striking for smart work and sustainable growth in our knowledge based societies and after reading Sara’s last few words from her conclusion I can only say it’s now our job, our duty, perhaps, to make it happen, and the sooner, the better; we probably cannot even wait much longer, specially (to quote her:) … “If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck” [Emphasis mine to which I would add as well that it's probably not even worth it any longer. It never was in the first place]

So, have a good guess into what I’m going to start doing from next week onwards …

How about you?

The Co-Operative Ethical Plan – Good For Everyone

First, we have the Circular Economy. Then we have the Sharing Economy and, upon my return from my last business trip to Antwerp (For #BLUG) and London (For the Melcrum Digital Summit), here we have got what I call a pretty cool, inspiring, thought-provoking, mind-blogging new initiative that takes the whole concept of sustainability and growth in a responsible manner into a new level. One where it’s proved that it can be done, where it needs to be done, if we would want to survive accordingly in the next few years, as a species. Welcome to The Co-Operative Ethical Plan 2012 – 2014 (and beyond)!

It was a couple of years back, perhaps even longer than that, when I first read from my dear good friend Rob Paterson about that noble, innovative movement of localising global businesses, essentially, referring to that perspective of how, more and more, we are going to experience how everything is going to be run locally, business wise, except perhaps for a handful of rather large corporations that seem to be well established in the global markets, and we are entering that phase where local businesses would strive not only for good, healthy growth, but also a sustainable one; one where they would live to support the growth of their local communities, which in return, would help local businesses become more profitable, in a much more open, transparent, collaborative and community-driven manner. And that can only be a good thing, seeing where the other way has taken us so far.

Well, I come back from those recent business trips, which I will be talking about shortly as well, not to worry, and lo and behold, I bumped into this absolutely delightful YouTube video clip, of just under three minutes, which describes what I would think Rob had in mind for that kind of localised sustainable and profitable business. The Co-Operative.

Checking out their web site’s Join the Revolution entry could not have had a better mantra to live by: “we launched our groundbreaking Ethical Plan with one clear goal: to be the most socially responsible business in the UK” [Emphasis mine] and it looks like they are aiming big because they are also planning on inspiring other people from all over the world. And I suspect they would succeed doing so, because while watching through the YouTube video it sounds like they are already well under way to make it happen. And I thought that, instead of me telling you all how they plan to make it work and provide us with a better, more sustainable, and socially responsible business world, I will leave it down to them to convince you of the rest, like they did with me, when I watched that clip. If not, judge for yourselves:

Truly inspiring, don’t you think? A couple of weeks back I put together one rather thought provoking blog entry under the controversial heading of “Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver” and I guess, after having watched that video clip and the amazingly good commentary that sparked the post, that, to me, Social Business has now got a new mission. And a much more important one. Like I mentioned elsewhere, very soon I will be moving on away from the term Social Business (Leaving it for what it was meant to be all along in the first place!) and instead I will be using another concept I have grown to be very fond of to try to reflect what I mean with all of this social networking for business. But, for now, if open, trustworthy, public, transparent, agile, democratic, engaged, adaptive, empowered, interconnected, socially sustainable, etc. are what social businesses are all about, I guess The Co-Operative has just shown us all how it can be done. Successfully. And still while aiming for driving profit and growth. For everyone.

Yes, I guess you can call me a utopian, a true Hippie 2.0 of sorts, but can you imagine the corporate world behaving in the very same way? Can you imagine what social business would be like eventually? Let’s not imagine it then. Let’s make it happen! Let’s show and demonstrate what true, real, successful social businesses are all about. We have got nothing to lose, but a lot to gain… Our very own survival as a species… Welcome to Humanity 4.0!