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“It’s really too bad that you’re not here every day. Sometimes it feels like we have to work harder to make up for your not being here.”

“There are some Fridays when it would be nice to be able to stop by your cube and ask you a quick question.”

No one can point to any concrete failings on Addie’s part. She is still doing her job and making her deliverables, and between her cell phone and e-mail she has never missed a beat. But still there is no such thing as a clean day. She doesn’t get credit for the hours she works on Fridays and even though she’s getting her job done on Fridays she feels a mixture of worry and guilt that she’s not in the office. She knows people are talking about her behind her back and even worse she has internalized a lot of these complaints. Even though these comments seem to be based on envy more than on any real dissatisfaction with her or the job she is doing, Addie finds herself imagining conversations in her head and preparing defenses for her behavior. She works extra hard to have lots of ideas and insights so when someone lets loose a sarcastic “Oh, you’re here today!” she has a genuine idea as a comeback. The worst part about this for Addie is that it’s making her question her competence. Even though all of this misery is based on attitudes about time and beliefs about how work gets done, she mistakes it for performance. There is a pall over her entire life.

She is, in short, drowning in Sludge.

The kind of flak Addie took from her boss is modeled after the problems that started to surface halfway through the Alternative Work Program. Even though AWP wasn’t a true Results-Only Work Environment, the power it gave employees to choose their schedules did make a big difference. The 320 people in the pilot reported lower stress and increased engagement and higher productivity. Overall, they were happier than they ever had been at work.

Or at least until they had to interact with other people in the company who weren’t in AWP. When the employees in the pilot program were with one another everything was fine. They had adapted to their new way of working. Their managers supported them. But once they stepped outside the AWP bubble all those good feelings went away, because the rest of the culture not only didn’t support what they were doing, but even tried to undermine them.

“How can you expect to support retail if you’re never here?”

“Oh, you’re on that flextime thing. So do you get anything done?”

“AWP sounds nice, but you’ll never get promoted if you’re not here.”

Like flextime policies around the country, AWP turned out to be a giant judgment generating machine. But the difference this time is that we recognized what was happening. We could see from the very beginning that if this idea of giving people more control over their time was going to work it had to happen companywide.

By the time AWP was winding down, Jody was brought on board as the corporate change agent responsible for working with Cali to take this idea to the next level. Jody’s background included work on the Strategic Alliance team, whose responsibility it was to develop partnerships with other companies. Jody’s specific role was to develop processes for overcoming cultural differences between the company and its alliance partners. Jody understood the importance of culture in making real changes. If you tried to train people to behave differently without addressing the underlying culture, you were lost. The unwritten rules would trump the written rules every time.

It seems like a small thing, but as we saw in the last chapter, culture doesn’t have to be in the foreground to be powerful. As we started discussing how AWP could grow into something larger we knew that Sludge was the key to everything. As long as there is Sludge, work will continue to suck. But if we can challenge our outmoded attitudes about time and how work gets done—if we can eradicate Sludge—then we can move toward a new way of working and thinking about work.

Getting