Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [31]
Well, you can guess what happened. Abruptly cutting out Wednesdays as a day to meet was not as easy as it sounded. Naturally there were times when people genuinely needed to meet on Wednesday. So when those people did so they were violating company policy, putting more stress on employees, and making people feel cheated out of their time.
So what did the company do? They trained people on how to have a really short meeting if you simply had to have a meeting on No-Meeting Wednesdays. So that meant only six PowerPoint slides to keep things short, but then they had to train people on how to give short PowerPoint presentations because that’s not always easy, and so on and so forth. Halfway through the program there was more time spent training for, and in meetings and conversations about, making No-Meeting Wednesdays work than the time people were spending meeting on Wednesdays.
Also, just because people had their Wednesdays free didn’t mean that there were any changes to the overall culture of meetings. True, you could get more work done on Wednesdays, but the work done on Wednesdays didn’t look like work the way a day filled with meetings did. Nothing looks like work like a meeting, so people felt as if they weren’t getting credit. For the more politically minded, not having meetings to schedule or to cancel out on meant they couldn’t work on their image as a playmaker. They longed to cancel out on meetings or send a proxy to show their power and importance.
And then there was the guilt. People felt guilt for breaking the rules by scheduling meetings on No-Meeting Wednesdays. Guilt for not knowing what to do with themselves when they didn’t have meetings. Guilt about thinking about this stupid idea in the first place as opposed to getting some work done.
Why can’t we sustain this kind of change? We can’t sustain this kind of change because programs like No-Meeting Wednesdays can’t possibly address the root problem. No time-management seminar is ever going to solve the problem of people not having control over their time. A seminar can give you tips and tricks. What people need is power.
What a ROWE requires, as we’ll see in the coming chapters, is adaptive change. Adaptive change means that people’s underlying attitudes and beliefs change along with their behaviors.
Think about TiVo. TiVo has to do with watching your favorite shows at any time. What TiVo gives you is control. You watch TV on your own terms, without commercials (or with, if you’re into that), when you want, with whomever you want. TV is no longer on the network’s terms (Must See TV Thursdays) but on your terms (I’ll watch your show whenever I damn well please).
So people think about TV differently. They sample more. They hoard and store multiple episodes so they can watch them in batches. They might watch a late-night TV show only for the interview segment or only for the opening monologue. The key here is that no one tells people how to behave with TiVo. There is no right or wrong way to watch TV on your own terms. Rather, there is a tool that gives freedom, and then people figure it out for themselves, and they do it not by reading a TiVo instruction book but by experimenting with what works best for them and also by networking with other TiVo lovers to find out how to optimize their television-watching experience.
Another way of thinking about a Results-Only Environment is that it’s a TiVo for your work. You give people the power and the control over their time. You also give them the ultimate in accountability: Meet expectations or you’re in trouble. As long as everyone in the organization commits to these two ideals, then the change that results will happen organically.
We’re not going to lie. Adaptive change isn’t easy. While you’re going through this kind of change the future state is being discovered. You are moving into an unknown, even if it’s an intended unknown.
When