Link: Giving up 9-to-5 gets people to focus on doing the work, not the time

The End Of 9-To-5: When Work Time Is Anytime : NPR

What do you know: Give people freedom to manage their schedules and work load, and they not only get the tasks done, they get them done more efficiently.

Overall, the connection between time spent and value produced needs to be severed. Just because you invest 40 hours (or more) on something does not mean it has worth, but quantity holds a powerful sway. I still hear “I put in 80 hours this week” spoken with pride. I could spend 80 hours making my breakfast, but the result of satisfying my hunger would be the same if I took 10 minutes to do it.

The program is called results-only work environment, or ROWE. The group’s site describes it as “a management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence.”

One of the program’s founders said, “80 percent of companies’ lost productivity is from ‘presenteeism’ — when someone is physically in the office but mentally somewhere else.”

Business Week wrote about the same thing. From that article, a sociology professor says, “most companies are stuck in the 1930s when it comes to employees’ and managers’ relationships to time and work. .. ‘Our whole notion of paid work was developed within an assembly line culture. Showing up was work. Best Buy is recognizing that sitting in a chair is no longer working.'”

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