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• Classic-Fiction

• People in flexible work environments don’t have enough time to get their work done.

• If people can get their work done in less time, they should get more work.

• The best customer service happens face-to-face.

• Creating more “jobs” helps us manage more work.

• Face time is necessary in order for work to get done.

• Instant availability is the measure of great customer service.

• Roles and responsibilities bring clarity to work.

• Job descriptions help people know what’s expected of them at work.

• Restructuring requires longer working hours.

• If you give people control over their schedules, they will take advantage of the system.

• Managers with direct reports cannot work from home.

• The best collaboration is done face-to-face.

In an information- or service-based economy, do these orthodoxies make sense? Or are they relics of a time when we worked in a certain way because there was no alternative? Before technology, we had to go to the office because that’s where we kept the mimeograph machine, the landline, the Liquid Paper. We invented “management by walking around” because you couldn’t leave someone a voice mail or create an internal website to monitor the progress of a project. People couldn’t work virtually because there was no virtual, only physical space and real time.

We have all these assumptions about what work looks like even though in today’s economy work looks less and less like it did twenty years ago.

Dig, if you will, these pictures: one of a woman walking her dog, another of a man sitting in a conference room with some other men.

Now ask yourself: Which one of them is working?

If it was fifty years ago you would automatically assume that the man was working. For one, most women didn’t work. For another, what kind of work could she possibly be doing while walking the dog? Also, just look at that man! He’s right there! In a conference room in an office building, a place where work gets done! True, he is just sitting there and we can’t know his thoughts, or if he’s even paying attention, or if he’s had a worthwhile idea in recent memory. Who knows? Maybe after this meeting he’s about to be fired. But he looks like he’s working.

In fact, even today, with women in the workplace, we’re still likely to make all kinds of assumptions about these two people, that work happens in certain kinds of places, at certain times, with certain kinds of people. Beliefs about work have been formed over generations and now they’re so ingrained that people don’t even question them. And yet, read almost any business success story and we promise you that the inspiration for that new product, service, or company didn’t happen in a cubicle. The stories of great brands like Starbucks or great companies like Apple start out in the world, or in an inventor’s garage, not in a conference room with eight people staring at a flip chart.

But still we cling to these old ideas even though we’re stifling ourselves. Just look at poor Addie. She’s bright and capable. She blazed through college juggling all aspects of her life. So why does her boss assume that the only way Addie can get her work done is if she is in her cube from eight to five? What is this weird thing about how Addie won’t be taken seriously if she doesn’t put on a show of work (as opposed to simply doing her job)? Why do we accept nonsense like “perception is reality”?

In fact, our assumptions about how work gets done and what work looks like are so entrenched that any alternative, even an effective one, is treated as comedy. Take this opening to a Reuters article from July 18, 2000, titled “This Friday, Make It Real Casual.”

“This Friday is the first National Work at Home Day, an occasion when there won’t be any need to feel guilty about negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal in your boxers and bunny slippers, or interviewing a chief executive while wearing just a towel.”

Isn’t that interesting? Why would someone who just negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal have to feel guilty about anything?

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