DEC. 4, 2015 — And on the fourth day, God questioned his productivity and called in management consultants.
Well, no, but practically from the beginning of time bosses have tried to get more work out of their employees, while employees have complained how screwed up everything is at the office. The struggle to reconcile these forces is what management theory is all about: the quest to create a more efficient workplace.
Judged by the popularity of MBA degrees and books on leadership (“Good to Great,” “How to Win Friends and Influence People” etc.), executives want to learn the secrets to good management, but the truth is there is no perfect formula for making bosses and workers happy. We’re certain that’s so, having noticed two of the latest trends: the company with no bosses, and the company with a six-hour workday.
Hold your applause. You probably won’t experience either, and you definitely won’t get both. Honestly, you’re better off with your current bosses and schedule (no, really).
The “no bosses” concept, known as “holacracy,” is receiving a high-profile tryout at Zappos, the Internet shoe company. It’s a serious effort to spur entrepreneurial thinking at a large organization, despite the hilariously bureaucratic name. Instead of operating in a top-to-bottom hierarchy, a holacracy assigns workers to self-governing circles, distributing decision-making across roles instead of titles. It’s even more complicated than it sounds.
“I’m personally excited about all the potential creativity and energy of our employees that are just waiting for the right environment and structure to be unlocked and unleashed,” Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO, wrote employees when he announced the destruction of the company’s traditional structure. That’s about the only easily understood sentence in a very long email. Hsieh, who penned his own book on corporate culture, included an essay from a management expert who praised “autocatalytic, self-organizing, non-linear, and adaptive systems.” No wonder a reported 14 percent of Zappos employees bailed out.
If you’ve ever thought you could get more work done if there were fewer distractions, you might be interested in the Swedish experiment: three hours of work, a lunch break, three more hours and then out the door by 3:30 p.m. The idea is that a lot of time is wasted (10 a.m.Facebook break, anyone?) during a traditional eight-hour day. So be disciplined and productive, then go home. Art director Erika Hellstrom told the BBC she loves the schedule: more time to garden during daylight hours, and she feels less stressed.
The idea may work for highly structured occupations like nursing — an elderly care home in western Sweden is trying the idea — but it’s hard to imagine treating every day like a timed test. Talk about stress. And you probably have to hire more people. The best lesson to draw from the idea is that if spending less time at the office isn’t the answer, neither is spending more time. People who pull 80-hour weeks are hurting themselves, their co-workers and their families — if they have one.
Harry Kraemer, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a former CEO, told us the fundamental issue in the operation of a business isn’t the structure of the organizational chart or the number of hours in the day, it’s unlocking the potential of each employee: “The real goal is how do you develop people who can influence and motivate people to get things done.”
CEOs try everything: dotted line structures, working remotely, flextime, sabbaticals and in-house baristas. They build companies into conglomerates then spin them off into independent units. If someone tries the six-hour day, someone else will get rid of regimented vacation time.
Then managers will try to explain the new rules. And employees will grumble.
