@Martina: I agree with you, I don’t think people should have to go in every day into the office. In fact as I maentioned- I don’t think they should have to go into the office unless there is some objective necessity for them to do so, or unless they want to. I do think the vast majority of people should be able to have days/times when they do not have to concern themselves with work.

Cheers,

Keith

I agree there needs to be boundries – if you have a job, make sure you do it right – I’m just saying you don’t have to go to your office every single day to work for someone else. Better, have your own company (home based business) so you can work for yourself. That way you can include your whole family and share the responsibilities – connect personal and business life. My whole life, everyone in my family was working for some hudge companies, and weekends were the only days we could see eachother. Perhaps, that’s the reason I prefer working together with my family – at least, we can be together.

There are:
A) employees who want some boundaries or limits – work time is work time and personal time is personal time.
B) employees who want fewer boundaries – they have a career more than a job, a passion more than a paycheck, and all that. They think of ideas and ways to help their company or their industry in their sleep, in the shower – they enjoy it and don’t need to put it aside.

But there sadly are companies, and I know some of them so they do exist, that expect a third type of employee, those who are:
C) on call at most any time at night or on weekends – but ruled by policies, not able to handle personal matters when needed during the day, and micromanaged or just not insipired/motivated. That doesn’t work.

I like boundaries, so I’m not on call 24X7. I don’t like the scenarios where “Work any 80 hrs/week you want, we’ll pay you for 40.”

-kh

Your topic Trackback Test ” MInTheGap was interesting when I found it on Monday searching for work at home tech…

a great discussion indeed. Couple of points though. Historically one’s work has always been ultimately destructive. Think of Mark Twain’s description of gold mining in the California rush or Engels writing about the cotton industry in Manchester in the 1840s. Traven on the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Tressel’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The very idea of a work-life balance is both post-industrial and Benedictine. That said..

I come home from work full of anger and hate and the wish to crush a colleague. I pick up my guitar, check it is in tune and play one chord; just one chord. Peace, flowing like a river.The act of doing, of making music in its most personal form brings me back to the other part of humanity. We are such complex and complicated creatures.

John

I am interested in how a good mix of work and personal life interests can help us to survive and thrive under unavoidable prolonged excessive stress. The mere ability to “switch off” from stressful issues and enjoy a passionate personal interest has huge stress management values.

While you can’t deficit-budget time, it’s possible to deficit-budget mental energy. A few minutes a day can sustain energy for long periods of time, so long as those minutes are spent doing something that enjoyably expresses the your true self, simply because it makes you feel good about yourself. It’s about choices of where you allocate your mental energies.

What sort of interests might these be? Each person will have unique answers. You can read an article of mine on this at http://www.workleisure.com/resources/EnergyManagement.html

We all have to make choices, where to work, how hard, how long, etc – whether from home or a physical location away from home. We all have to make choices about our social and family lives, we all have to make choices and sometimes don’t know which will work best for us or our employers.

As a “boomer” I feel that the “younger generations” believe that you can do anything on your own. This may be true but could you do it better as part of a team? Independent thought is great but collective thought in my opinion can acheive better results – who will play “devils advocate” on your ideas?

I have worked in a “physical brick and mortar building” and I have worked from a home office. Either one had the tools I needed to accomplish my job. The difference is that you lose social connections, you lose some of the the motivational efforts that others can provide and sometimes their motivation gets you jump started even if it’s not focused on you.

The “virtual world” is upon us – for better or worse. I see the high school students much less frequently together on the streets socializing – are they really that well connected by technology? Or is that the current myth? Less real life person to person physical interaction – good or bad? Marriage nuimbers going down, birth rates declining, I guess you still can’t make a baby over the internet – yet?

To question 1, the interesting thing here is that Kevin is discussing the potential dissolution of traditional time/space constraints . . . yet is focusing diligently on them. This could be a Boomer outlook that is not shared by late Gen-X, early Gen-Y. Such is an irony in and of itself because Boomers consciously consider the constraints . . . while newer generations don’t see these constraints as being quite so fixed. I often see Boomers writing articles or giving presentations that question traditional (business) norms with an introspective outlook . . . while late Gen-X and early Gen-Y seem to approach these topics as less introspective and more conscious reality.

To question 2, what I find interesting is that the notion of the ‘American Organization’ no longer exists – there was a time when we could recruit the best talent around the world to come to work for organizations based here in the U.S. However, in the large majority of cases, the Global Economy has negated what used to be known as the ‘U.S. based organization.’ Geoffrey Colvin wrote a very interesting article about this phenomenon in 2005, “Can America Compete” (http://spot.colorado.edu/~lookabau/Documents/CanAmericaCompete.pdf)

For me, an elephant in the room is that there are larger-scale RPO (or sourcing) firms that are heavily centralized in one location; they operate with fixed time and space constraints; one building, one suite of cubicles, etc.. Why? Because their HR Clients (typically Boomers at the decision making level) see them as more ‘legitimate’ enterprises because of their time/space constraints. While I am not focusing on this today, I have (in the past) established teams of Sourcers/Recruiters who were the best at what they did, yet worked at home. This telecommuting, heavily decentralized model worked better than the old-school COE (Center of Excellence) model . . . yet the decision makers were often more comfortable conforming to traditional time/space constraints. Personally, I always asked myself why an organization would sacrifice results in lieu of these constraints, yet I came to acknowledge the realities of things we can’t change. It will take time – In my humble opinion, time/space perceptions may change slightly moving forward, but until the Boomers retire or are moved out of decision making capacity in HR, we will not see wider acceptance of decentralized Recruiting/Sourcing Models.

Why? Because most Boomers don’t necessarily agree with Kevin. And in that sense, Kevin is a Boomer who is more thinking like late Gen-X, early Gen-Y, than the larger majority of the Boomer population.

Kevin, kudos again for a very interesting article that has led to even more interesting discussion :)

1. Yes, it’s about an entire change in the way we think about work. Instead of compartmentalizing work and separating it from fun, family, etc. I beleive work will become integrated/intertwined or whatever we want to call it into the fabric of family life. And that won’t be perceived as bad.

2. Proven, no. But are there high performing virtual teams? Sure. Ask Cisco, Google and a hundred other companies with distributed, virtual work. Easy to make happen? No. Frought with difficulties? Yes. We are just getting started in this new way of working and we have a lot to learn. The first factories weren’t very efficient either.

Kevin, two questions:

1) Isn’t this about more than just working virtually: arent we talking about the autonomy to schedule around that little league game take a 10 min call at the game, or do what needs to be done to serve both masters ?

2) Is it a proven notion that virtual teams of the best and the brightest will actually outperform more traditional or hybrid teams, who share physical space and all of the sub rosa social interactions that lead to esprit de corps and effective leadership?