Close
Enter your
text here

Leadership

Reading Between the Lines on the 4-Day Work Week
 Reading Between the Lines on the 4-Day Work Week 1024 512 Jason Lauritsen
1

Last week, Quartz published a piece about a New Zealand company that has implemented a 4-day work week policy.

This company offered the shortened work week without any reduction in pay or other benefits. They tested it and then implemented it broadly when they found that it didn’t cause any decrease in overall performance for the organization.

The owner of the company, Andrew Barnes, is bullish about these results and wants every company to try it. But, he offers some words of caution not to talk about this effort in terms of employee well-being. Instead, he advised that you talk about it in terms of productivity.

Here’s a quote from Barnes about how they rolled this out:

“We sat down with each team and we said, ‘Right, let’s agree what is the base of productivity that you’re delivering now,’” he says. “And then the deal was, provided you delivered on the productivity goals, you would be gifted a day off a week.”

This is a cool story. It highlights what is possible when organizations think differently about work.

Is this really about a 4-day week?

While I think it’s awesome that this company is proving that some of our assumptions about work (i.e. the 5-day work week) are limiting, I think the article is misleading for anyone who might want to pursue something similar in their own organization.

The 4-day work week is the kind of gimmicky silver-bullet we love to read about and debate. The gimmick is a distraction.

If you read between the lines, here’s what you find echoed in this article.

  • This company found that employees could produce the same amount of output in 4 days that they had been producing in 5.
  • When given this challenge (or opportunity) to work more effectively, employees stepped up. When surveying employees before and after the 4-day week trial, they “found that 78% of staff felt able to manage work and other commitments after the trial, compared to 54% before.”
  • The policy is less about a 4-day week than it is about autonomy and flexibility. The leaders essentially told employees that if they can get their work done in less hours, they could have those extra hours back.
  • And please don’t say this effort is about employee well-being if you want to be taken seriously because nobody (particularly leaders) cares about that. (Forgive my sarcasm, but this seems to be what they chose to lead with).
  • The key to making this transition happen swiftly is an owner or CEO who gets it or has a eureka moment.

My Take

Conversations about a shortened work week are colored by how we think about work. It highlights a fundamental conflict in management philosophy. The practice of management was born during the industrial revolution where the objective was primarily to maximize the productivity of employees per hour. A majority of organizations today are still rooted in this belief.

The objective of work processes is to motivate and/or coerce the maximum amount of productivity out of each hour the employee works. 

In this model, the number of hours the employee spends working is viewed as vital to achieving performance expectations. Your role as an employee is less about achieving specific outputs as it is about seeing how much you can contribute. The manager’s role is to get the maximum amount of value out of the employee.

This way of thinking is prevalent among leaders. It’s this way of thinking that makes the “discretionary effort” model of employee engagement so attractive. It’s oriented towards getting more and more out of the same investment in people–to maximize productivity for the benefit of the organization.

An alternative way of thinking about work is that employees are hired to fulfill specific roles with clear expectations for the value they contribute to the organization’s success. This role clarity drives compensation, management evaluation, and other work processes. This way of thinking about work might be summarized this way:

The objective of work processes is to ensure that employees are clear about the expectations of their role and that they have everything they need to succeed.  

In this way of thinking, a manager’s role isn’t to get the maximum about of productivity out of each employee. Instead, it’s about ensuring that each employee is crystal clear about what is expected of them and then supporting them in achieving those goals successfully.

If an employee can complete their work in less than 40 hours per week, good for her. She’s met her expectations, so what she does with those extra hours is up to her. If she’s able to do her work in 25 hours/week, then that likely means she’s either due for a more challenging role or the role she’s in is poorly designed. Or, maybe she’s just super efficient at her job and everyone’s happy.

These two very different ways of thinking about work are really what the discussion about the 4-day work week is truly about. If your leaders believe that their mandate is to create a workplace that extracts the maximum amount of productivity from employees, then you are dead in the water before you start.

I suspect that’s why the article led with the insight to talk about this effort as “productivity” and not well-being. The implication seems to be that perhaps you can trick your leaders into the 4-day work week. But, if you don’t address the underlying belief that the goal is to maximize employee output, how long do you think it will take before your leaders realize that if employees can be 20% more productive in four days a week, imagine the productivity if they get back that fifth day?

Instead of trying to trick your leaders into this experiment, focus instead on building a better system of performance management that clearly defines expectations and creates systems of measurement and feedback to help managers effectively manage to those expectations. Once your organization and its leaders are more clearly oriented around thinking of roles in terms of defined performance expectations, the conversation about greater autonomy and flexibility will become much easier.

P.S. This has everything to do with employee well-being, even if your leaders aren’t ready to invest in it yet.

 

SHRM isn’t the Problem, I am.
 SHRM isn’t the Problem, I am. 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

Let me first say that I can’t believe I’m about to write this post.  After all, I’m supposed to be the radical, status quo crushing HR leader who runs around in his spare time calling himself a Talent Anarchist.  If anyone should be chucking rocks at the establishment, it should be me. Instead, I find myself compelled to defend the institution.  Weird.

Over the past month or so, our beloved professional association, SHRM, has taken a beating around the blogosphere.  There have been several articles on TLNT (here, here, and here) regarding some snafu’s at the board level.  Mark and Laurie at www.voiceofHR.com hosted a series of posts from prominent HR bloggers who detail their recommendations for what SHRM should do in 2011 (some great ideas, a lot of criticism).  And then there were several of the folks at Fistful of Talent who, after having session proposals rejected by SHRM for the annual conference, have decided to host their own conference in Vegas the day before the SHRM conference kicks off.  It’s been a rough stretch in the online world for SHRM lately.

I’d like to pile on.  I was even tempted to do so.  But, I’m not sure that SHRM is the problem.  Let me first say that I’m not a fan of how the SHRM board has been handling their business lately and I’ve gone on record publicly saying as much.  That aside, as an HR executive, I’m thankful for SHRM daily.  Most members of my HR team are SHRM members.  Several either have PHR certifications or are pursuing them.  We use SHRM resources to get answers and perspectives to HR issues when we encounter things we haven’t seen before.  I appreciate their email newsletters that help me keep up to date on what’s happening at macro levels around key issues in HR.

I’m also thankful for the SHRM structure that has facilitated the creation of the two active and healthy local SHRM chapters we have in Omaha and Lincoln.  These chapters provide affordable, regular developmental and training opportunities for my staff and the other HR professionals in the area.  And, all of this is provided to us for less than a few hundred dollars a year.  A pretty great bargain in my opinion.

The discussion and the angst with SHRM is indicative of something much bigger.  As I’ve read through these online discussions, here are the thoughts that have come to mind for me.

  1. HR is at a turning point.  It’s become increasingly evident to everyone in the world of business that competitive advantage is ultimately about the people.  This is creating an incredible demand for smart, business savvy HR leaders who can step forward and take the lead–not just in the HR department, but in the organization. Problem is, most HR leaders either aren’t capable or aren’t competent to make this transition today.    This is creating some incredibly intense pressure on current HR leaders and they aren’t sure what to do.  
  2. Because of this friction being created between market demand for HR talent and the supply of strong, HR executive leadership, something’s got to give and we all want someone to blame.  So, we turn our attention to SHRM.  If only they would be more strategic, or more proactive, or more embracing of social media deviants, or [fill in the blank]. This is a load of crap.  SHRM isn’t the problem.  I am. We are. 
  3. HR will only rise to it’s potential and it’s calling when HR leaders decide that they must first change.  The problems in HR aren’t new.  HR was born out of administrative requirements forced upon organizations by regulation.  These early personnel departments created a dumping ground for all things administrative and touchy-feely.  Problem is, we never shook this stuff off.  HR leaders have to be where the buck stops.  They have to redefine and re-imagine what the corporate HR department does and how it creates value for the organization.  (While I’m on my pulpit, it’s not about changing the name of the department.  Human Resources is a perfect name for what we do.  If you think changing the name of your department will fix your problems, you are delusional).  
  4. Note to HR Leaders and Bloggers, SHRM does not exist to serve you.  SHRM will never be a place for those leading the revolution.  They, like any large organization, have to appeal to the middle of the bell curve.  Should they role model some progressive behavior like social media?  Probably.  But remember that a majority of our profession is just coming around to the idea that social media is here to stay.  If SHRM gets too progressive, they risk alienating the core of their membership.  Not a reason not to innovate, just something that I’m sure is tough to balance if you live on the inside of the organization.
  5. We need to be careful in the arguments we make.  Mark Stelzner specifically took SHRM to task for having two consecutive CEO’s who didn’t hold an HRCI certification of some sort.  Really?  Mark is a brilliant guy and I normally shout “Amen!” to most of his posts, but he and I diverge here.  Are we honestly going to stand up and say that we value certification and technical skill over the competence to get the job done? Or, that a CEO can’t advocate for a certification he doesn’t have?  The PHR certifications are designed for people who are practicing HR.  I don’t want an HR practitioner running SHRM, I want a CEO.  I don’t give a flip about certifications if you can get the job done.  Let’s find a CEO for SHRM who has vision, leadership, business savvy, integrity, courage, and a burning desire to advance the profession of HR.  And once this person is hired, I’m hoping they spend time running the organization, not studying for a certification.  

I guess at the end of all of this, I can summarize my thoughts like this.  I hope that SHRM continues to do what they do well and that they continue to strive for improvement.  But, SHRM isn’t going to transform the profession of HR.  That’s up to us.

One versus Many
 One versus Many 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

The holy grail in HR seems to be to find a system or process that will impact every employee and affect change uniformly across the board.  We strive to build performance management and talent management processes that can be applied at every level across the company.  We look to find a way to get all managers to embrace the same best practices and become better leaders collectively.  We spend money on consultants and technology that seem to hold the promise of this elusive holy grail.  We want a clean, easy and elegant solution to our organization’s people problems.  


The problem is that HR is about working with (and changing) people.  People are complicated and messy.  I, just like everyone else, still spend hours in pursuit of the elegant process-driven approach to broadly changing employee behaviors because these approaches have merit.  But, the underlying truth of the work we do in HR is that each person is unique and they change on their own terms and at their own speed.  And, much more importantly, change within an organization actually happens one person at a time.  

This is where my thinking has taken a turn in recent years.  It’s not a new thought, it just took me a while to arrive here.  Given that our role in HR is to impact employee behavior company-wide while change in behavior happens one person at a time, we appear to have a dilemma.  However, when you break down how organizations of people work, there are key players within the organization who have broad influence on how others in the organization choose to behave.  In essence, if you get these people to change, the rest of the organization will follow.  Here are a few of the key groups:
  1. Executive leaders.  Clearly, the group with the most significant influence.  But, we don’t always have access to these folks.  
  2. Emerging leaders.  Those who are either formally or informally identified as the future leaders of the organization.  This group may be the most significant because not only do they have influence today, but their influence will grow in the future.
  3. Informal leaders.  These are the employees who may not have formal titles, but who others look to for what to do in times of change or conflict.
  4. Connectors.  Those employees who have relationships that are broad and stretch across divisions.  These connectors have the ability to spread ideas quickly due to their network.  
HR is a busy profession with lots of demands on our time.  So, we aren’t going to have the luxury to literally work with each employee one on one in the organization.  The big payoff is focusing efforts on the key groups of people outlined above and focus on strategies to influence them..  If you want to get everyone to do a particular thing a certain way, get these groups to do it and the rest will follow.  


Change happens one person at a time.  The key is to start with the right person.  


If you’re in, be in
 If you’re in, be in 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

I recently read a blog post by a blogger who is an HR professional by day.  In the post, she said something to the effect: “I have a love/hate relationship with HR.”  This struck me the wrong way.  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it chapped my . . . well, you know.

You see, I used to say silly things like this when I was new to HR.  I didn’t respect HR early in my career.  I was a hardcore headhunter prior to coming into HR and part of my training had been that all HR people were either worthless or washed up–they were failures.  In the headhunting world, HR is nothing but an obstacle between you and a commission check (hey, that’s how I was trained).  So, when I made the jump to HR, I had a little identity crisis to work through.  I had an love/hate relationship with HR at the beginning because I wasn’t bought in yet.  My expectations were way out of whack with the reality of HR.

But now it’s different.  When you work in HR, you are HR.  If you have a love/hate relationship with HR, you have a love/hate relationship with yourself.  You have an identity crisis and a self-esteem problem.  Imagine how you’d feel if your child’s teacher said that he had a love/hate relationship with education.  How in the world is your organization supposed to respect you if you aren’t even sure if you respect yourself.  Aaarrrggghh!  Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!  

There’s a saying that you have probably heard many times.  From the first time I heard it, it has rung in my ears:

If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem.  

Not only did the words, “I have a love/hate relationship with HR” come from a practicing HR professional, but from one who blogs to the world professing to help others be better at HR.  While I’m sure that this particular blogger would argue that she’s helping HR move forward, but I think that this type of mindset is part of our problem.

If you are in HR, be HR.  Love the work.  Love the profession.  Love the people.  Yes, we are flawed.  Yes, we have a lot to improve.  But, so does every other discipline.  Instead of trying to distance yourself from HR, start being the solution.  Model the way HR should be.  Have a vision for the future of HR and share it with others. Hold yourself, your team and your peers to incredible high standards.  Mentor, teach, lead, grow.  That’s what we need in HR.

I am HR.  So are you.  Start acting like it.

Culture is Hard to Define, Do it Anyway
 Culture is Hard to Define, Do it Anyway 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

I recently sat in a facilitated discussion about the development of emerging leaders with a group of my peers from large employers in my area.  During the course of the conversation, one particularly seasoned HR leader at the table offered up that one of the most critical characteristics of the emerging leaders within his organization was “cultural fit.”  When pressed about what that meant, he explained that culture is something that’s very difficult to define.  The obvious follow up question is “if you can’t define it, then how do you measure for cultural fit?”  He responded that it’s just something you can tell about the person.  I glanced around the room as he said this to see nodding heads around the table.  (I am not making this up.)

As I sat a bit stunned to have just heard this exchange, the discussion continued.  In less than ten minutes, the same person brought up that attitude was a very important characteristic in their emerging leaders.  When asked to speak more about that, he said . . . wait for it . . . “it’s really hard to define, you just can kind of feel it.”  Un.  Freaking.  Believable.

So, to summarize this HR executive leader’s comments: They know that cultural fit and attitude are critically important components for identifying those people who will make or break the future of their company.  However, they have no reliable way to measure these things in others, so instead they fall back on the old reliable HR tool, “gut feel.”  Is it any wonder that HR isn’t considered a legitimate player at the executive table with this kind of thinking?

I wish this were an isolated or fabricated story.  Sadly, this type of scene is playing itself out in HR departments in companies everywhere.  Too many of us have fallen into the trap to believe that if something is hard to define, that it’s not possible.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Here’s a list of things that are hard to define:

  • Leadership
  • Culture
  • Purpose
  • Values
For some reason, it seems that the things that matter the most are also the most difficult to define.  However, each of these can be defined.  This work is not for the faint of heart because it’s big, ugly, scary work to take on because despite the power that definition brings in alignment and focus, the effort will be met with resistance.  This resistance comes because the process of definition not only requires the organization to define and commit to what it IS, but also what it IS NOT.  This process takes out the gray area of culture or leadership where it’s easy to hide if you aren’t playing within the rules.  
So, yes, it’s hard to define culture.  Most people won’t even try.  Be different.  Do it anyway.  
HR as Role Model
 HR as Role Model 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
0

Being the expert feels good.  It means that you get to render your judgement about others actions and hand out advice freely.  In HR, we are frequently called upon to be the expert when it comes to employees.  And boy do we love to give out advice on how others should do things.

The big question is whether we are credible experts.  Are we both providing expertise but also “living the way” in our own teams?  Being the role model of best practices is one under utilized way that HR can shape change in an organization.  Advocating for employee development?  Make sure you are doing world class development within HR.  There’s no better way to get others attention than to utilize your expertise to transform you own team.

As I think about the following issues that seem to be hot in our HR world, how are we role modeling the change we would want to see?

  • Employer Brand — How are you branding HR?  How are you branding yourself?
  • Culture – Are you defining and managing to an intentional culture in HR?  Do you know your core values?
  • Social Media – How are you using the tools within your team to drive innovation, connection, and learning?
  • Performance Management – Are you working with a process in HR to plan performance and hold people accountable?  Does HR do quality goal setting?
  •  Diversity – How are your actively creating and embracing more diversity within in the HR team?  
The list goes on.  The point is, that one thing that you can influence most as an HR leader is what happens with your team.  Be the example and practice the change you desire in your own shop before you take it on the road.  By being able to show how you made something work and talk about the results, you gain real credibility and power to influence others to do the same.