You have your work life and your home life, and unless you are one of those mythical beasts whose vocation is their avocation, or you are independently wealthy and can afford not to work, never the twain shall meet. For most of us, work and life seem to share an inverse relationship; a mutually exclusive, zero-sum game where you can’t get ahead in one without falling behind in the other. Nobody wants to be the dorky dad tapping away on the Blackberry during his son’s little league game, but when it means putting food on the table or hitting the bread line, there you go—if you don’t tap away, little league is going to be the least of your worries.
Long ago the oracles told us that technology would make things as quaint as a cubicle and as oddly antique as a commute things of the past. But these were the same oracles that told us we’d be flying around in jet cars by now—jet cars run on water or typical household garbage. And so those fanciful predictions of old about our work habits are just that—garbage. The American work ethic simply won’t permit it.
More like the American work ethic simply hasn’t grasped the true power of technology. The paradigm is two steps behind the curve. The reason for this? Face time.
Much of American corporate management is still stuck on the notion that only one thing guarantees results: time plus physical presence. By results, I mean productive work, and by time plus physical presence, I mean workers present and accounted for in cubicles—veal pens—for the maximum number of waking hours per day. Tie in a commute to and from the salt mine to the suburbs, and it’s easy to see how for most people, the work life beats the home life handily—almost academically. After all, there are only so many hours in the day.
Time + Physical Presence = Results. Theoretically understandable, yes, but almost laughable when you see it on paper—or in pixels—because it seems so old-fashioned. Today’s technology is ubiquitous, especially today’s communication technology. If you can’t be productive with a modern set of gadgets, you might be hastening your own obsolescence—a hunter and gatherer in a business world dominated by information workers.
So why, then, hasn’t technology given us a Norman Rockwell or Leave it to Beaver lifestyle?
Face time accounts for a large chunk of the reason. Unfortunately, in the corporate world, perception is still paramount—paramount more, perhaps, than production itself. If your boss is of a certain age, or a certain mindset, it just looks bad to him, or her, if you’re not in your cube when he—or she—walks by . . . it’s no more complicated than that. And if the guy in the next cubicle is there when the boss walks by, it just looks better for him that he’s there and you’re not—even if you get more done in five hours than that guy gets done in forty.
Here’s the conundrum in a nutshell: this April, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio eliminated a decades-old Ohio policy of flex time for its workers. Why? Because one Friday afternoon, Hugh Quill, the director of the department of administrative services, noticed that many employees were not at their desks. So in the name of greater productivity, and greater customer service, Strickland killed the program, thereby forcing government employees to spend more time actually sitting at their desks.
I wonder if Strickland ever considered the link between physical presence and productivity, or physical presence and good customer service. Obviously, it seems he took it for granted that both were possible only via physical presence.
But we know, instinctively, that this is not the case.
Before instituting his new policy, Strickland should have asked himself three questions: What does good productivity look like? What does good customer service look like? Can I use technology to help me achieve what I want?
Clearly, Governor Strickland missed an opportunity to use technology to make life better for both his employees and his customers—the taxpayers of Ohio. After all, most people interact with government to get things done. To perform transactions, in other words; routine, everyday transactions that enable them to then forget all about the government and get on with their business.
Today’s technology—especially rich internet applications (RIAs)—are incredibly adept at performing transactions of the type that used to be performed exclusively by government customer service agents. Instead of issuing a face time decree, Strickland could have, instead, invested in designing, building, and supporting web-based tools that allowed his customers—both his employees and the taxpayers of Ohio—to perform transactions that didn’t require a live government employee on one end of the line. And not only that: he could have invested in designing, building, and supporting web-based applications that helped his employees communicate in order to work better. Don’t forget—employees are customers, too.
A RIA solution, designed with the user experience in mind, could have delighted Strickland’s employees and the taxpayers of Ohio at the same time. Taxpayers would have been able to perform government transactions when they wanted to, when they needed to—beyond the traditional office hours of business. And with RIAs supporting their work activities, the government employees could have been more productive even when not physically at their desks. RIAs could have helped them keep their flex time. After all, RIAs don’t have families. They don’t give a fig about the work/life balance.
