May 2008 - Working for results

As a union shop steward, what journalists quaintly call “father of the chapel,”
I recall negotiating in 1978 what I and my then editor knew to be a sham productivity deal in order to get around the Labour Government’s 5 per cent limit on pay increases.

Like many other workers at the time, we wanted better wages and the company was willing to pay more. It just needed a little creativity over productivity. So we drew up an agreement on paper and put our names to it, each of us knowing that it was a piece of nonsense.

There was a newspaper to fill and the journalists filled it. It is the reality of most jobs: there is a job to do and, by and large, we do our best to ensure that it gets done. The arrangement only breaks down when either insufficient staff or insufficient skills are allocated to do the work.

The time taken to accomplish chunks of work seems less of an issue than the length of the working week and far less than pay rates. Governments and employers have agonised for years over pay. A brief history of pay policy has just been published by Incomes Data Services to celebrate the 1,000th issue of the IDS Pay Report.*

In the days when the Financial Times had dedicated labour pages with a team of journalists reporting on industrial relations, the IDS Pay Report was essential reading. It’s instructive to be reminded of policy development because it’s easy to forget such interventions as the statutory wage freeze of 1966 and the fears created by “wage drift” when locally-negotiated pay deals were perceived as undermining national wage agreements.

Piecework - payments-by-results for completing work in a set time - was seen as a destabilising influence because workers had found ways of manipulating the system, typically by working well within themselves when the rates were being calculated. What did employers expect?

Time on the job is one factor over which employers have been able to exercise only limited control. So why do they bother?

The question is asked in a new book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It** by American authors, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, who describe themselves as “creators” of the Results Only Work Environment, to which they refer using the acronym, ROWE.

I’m not sure whether such a claim is justified but they should be congratulated, nevertheless, for pointing out something which should be obvious to all employers, but which isn’t – that what matters most is getting a job done well and on time rather than the time it takes to do the work.

Most paid work today, as IDS recognises, continues to be structured around agreed pay rates and a minimum time commitment in the workplace.

But these sorts of arrangements often no longer fit the requirements of the job. Many office-based jobs today are allowing time for work to be undertaken at home. This is not just a matter of convenience for the employee. Those who are dealing frequently with people in other countries can find themselves regularly working unsocial hours across time zones.

Home working is sometimes portrayed as a perk. It is not. It is about fitting the other commitments in your life around your work. Indeed I’m not sure how useful it is to refer to “home working” anymore because it shouldn’t matter where we work or how long a job takes if the work is done to the expectations of the employer.

This is exactly the argument of Ms Ressler and Ms Thompson who make some timely points about the way that micro-management and clock-watching are destroying people’s ability and willingness to complete good work.

“We go to work and give everything we have and are treated like children who, if left unattended, will steal candy,” they write.

“We go to work and watch someone who isn’t very good at their job get promoted because they got in earlier and stayed later than anyone else.

“We got to work and sit through overlong, overstaffed meetings to talk about the next overlong, overstaffed meeting.

“We see talented, competent, productive people get penalised for having kids, for not being good at office politics, for being a little different….We play the game even though we know in our hearts the game doesn’t make any sense.”

Well we don’t all play the game. I stopped playing it about seven years ago - officially – when I gave up my job. Unofficially I hadn’t played that game for years and neither had many of my colleagues. Fortunately we enjoyed a work environment that cared most about results, but it was still structured around an office where petty politics could intervene.

The authors make various assumptions about work as drudgery that may be true of some jobs, but not all. Perhaps I am too far removed from the system to agree with an argument that the “dismal nature of work” is the norm. But I do agree that there has to be a better way of doing things and that the solution does not lie in concepts such as “flexitime” and “work-life balance.”

Their argument is to create a laissez-faire workplace where people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. “You get paid for a chunk of work, not a chunk of time,” they write.

The idea is not new and while some employers will give the nod to the concept, many will dismiss it as unworkable. Typically the response goes something like this: “It’s all very well, but you still need someone in the office. Someone has to answer the telephones, and what happens when everybody wants to be off at the same time?”

According to Ms Ressler and Ms Thompson such fears are misplaced. People behave responsibly about their work, they argue, when they are trusted to achieve results without too many concerns about when or where they get the work done. The proof is in the ROWE system they have instigated at Best Buy, the US consumer electronics retailer, that has led to productivity gains of 41 per cent and reduced staff turnover by 90 percent in some divisions.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the creation of a results-based workforce is the determination of expectations. This requires a deep understanding of the job by managers who should understand the quality of work when they see it. But how many of them do? As the IDS report points out, even on pay, employers tend to look for a “going rate.” Discrimination on the basis of excellence remains rare. As the ROWE authors remark: “We’d rather have order than excellence.”

*IDS Pay report 1000, subscriptions available at www.incomesdata.co.uk
** Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson is published by Portfolio, $23.95

See also: Better ways of working