Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [14]
When people have high demands and high control, their life can be hectic but manageable. They figure out what needs to be done and when.
When people have high demands and low control, their life is both hectic and miserable. There is nothing to figure out. They are trapped in a system that piles on the demands but denies them the control to meet those demands.
This is why work sucks. You have all these demands coming at you, from real concerns like actually accomplishing the task you’ve been hired to do, to dealing with the daily nonsense of getting to work on time, sitting through meetings, standing around the break room pretending to celebrate a co-worker’s birthday, and so on. And not only do you have the demands of work, but while you’re at work the demands of the rest of your life go unattended, and you have little to no control over how and when you can meet those demands. Your time is not your own, so you do the best you can and feel like crap for not doing any one thing as well as you’d like.
The challenge then is to increase your level of control so you can effectively meet demands. We’re not advocating that people do less work. Not at all. If you have five projects, you’re still going to have five projects. What we’re advocating is that all of us, both employer and employee, acknowledge that people’s demands are getting higher and higher, and since you can’t make those demands go away, then we absolutely must give everyone more control over how they meet those demands.
If you don’t give people more control over how they meet the demands of work and life, people aren’t going to be able to give their best at either. If people can’t give their best at either you get a world much like the one we have now, where people are both unhappy and unproductive.
Fortunately, we live in a time when this is possible. Today technology gives people incredible power over time and information. In our personal lives, technology means we don’t have to wait for the store to open to buy something. We don’t have to watch our favorite show the minute it airs or come down from Mount Everest to make a phone call.
And yet when it comes to work we suddenly have to give up all these choices. We can be strong and nimble and powerful in our personal lives and yet are forced to be slow and tradition bound at work. Technology seems to have changed the game—people telecommute and do business via BlackBerry 24/7—but we are still playing by the old Industrial Age rules, the rules of the factory floor and the typing pool.
The laptop is colliding with the punch clock.
We’re not techno-evangelists. A Results-Only Work Environment isn’t about the wonders of technology. Frankly, we couldn’t care less about the latest gadget. But this is about what technology could let us do and how we’re not taking full advantage.
Most people rush to work at the same time every day when it might be more effective to work at home for all or part of the day. You eat at your desk to show you’re available, when you might be just as reachable eating your sandwich in the park down the street. You’re punished for not being present, when there are plenty of times you’ve been present and doing a lot of nothing.
We waste a lot of time playing by these old rules at work even when our personal lives point to a better way. It’s not that time and physical space don’t matter anymore, but time and space certainly matter less. We have the practical tools to meet the demands in our lives. If only we could change our minds.
Unfortunately, knowing why work sucks isn’t enough to change it. If you get rid of a broken culture there still needs to be something to take its place. That new culture is a Results-Only Work Environment, but we’re not ready to be in a ROWE yet. First we have to change all those outdated attitudes. We have