The Curse of the "Puritan Ethic"

In the US the phrase "Puritan Work Ethic" refers to the general idea that if you want to get ahead in life, you need to be willing to put in the effort. "No pain, no gain" as they say. Those who sacrifice get ahead. We seem to revel in sacrifice.

And yet, if you want to really get ahead, drive your company forward, I would claim that working harder is one of the stupidest things you can do.

This is an outrageous claim, and not only because it goes against deeply embedded cultural norms. One also must be able to back it up, and logic would seem to dictate that there is no alternative to hard work. And after all, we don't want to encourage a bunch of "slacker" who don't work at all. So how can this make sense?

The key is to work smarter, not longer. There is a big difference between being busy and being effective. The mistake is to allow yourself to be fooled that just because you are putting in more hours means you are getting more done. That is just not so.

A great article in the Times Online gives some stats that are particularly revealing:

• Nearly two-thirds of managers and supervisors work overtime;more that four-fifths of senior managers work overtime
• Of these, one quarter put in between 10 and 20 extra hours per week; 6.5% do more than 20 extra hours per week; and almost 2% put in an extra 30 hours a week (yikes!)
• 23% of small business owners say they spend in excess of 50 hours per week at the office (see this article for this stat)
• 68% of all business leaders say they spend more time working then they did five years ago (see this article for this stat)
  

And what does all this extra "productivity" buy you? Here are the costs:

• More than one-third of those working just 10 hours overtime report stress-related health symptoms
• For those working 30 hours overtime, it rises to 42%

According to a study from Harvard Medical School (cited in the Chicago Tribune, Jan '07) the US spends $150B a year (that's "B" as in "Billion") on costs due to absenteeism.

Now I know, I know. We have global competition. There are something like 100M people in China who earn less than $500 per year. The sense that we have to do something to address the added pressure from competition is compelling, and the easiest response for us is to fall back on our old "Puritan Work Ethic" and just work longer. But clearly that doesn't work. Just do the math: at the current US minimum wage, a worker in the US would have to work 23.4 hours a day to equal the output of someone making $500 per year. Can you get by on only 40 minutes of sleep a day?

There is a better way. One can use work-life to train employees how to get more done in less time while taking the time to "recharge their batteries" so they can maintain high performance over the long haul. I've run multiple pilots at IBM showing the positive effects of work-life training. After work-life training, work place attitudes tied to retention consistently show dramatic increases (first illustration below) and productivity and innovation simultaneously increase (second illustration below).

So don't give in to the "curse of the Puritan Work Ethic" because nobody can work 23.4 hours a day to bring home minimum wage. That's just ridiculous.

Implementing Work-Life

I have now read this same fact enough times that I've decided to add a new label to my blog posts. I'm calling it "Implementation" and it refers to the key factors you need to take into consideration as you plan to implement work-life in your company or organization.

Just this past week, I've found two references to the same fact: that work-life cannot be successfully implemented without a corresponding change in workplace culture

Said another way, successful work-life depends upon management not just being supportive, but being role models.

Here's a pointer to a reference from Austraila, and my recent blog entry has a pointer to a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development that supports the same finding.

I'm sure I'm only scratching the surface on the data that is available, but the message (and the findings from my own work) all suggest the same thing: investing in work-life programs without investing in work-life culture change is likely to produce far lower results than you want. You need to consider how you are going to roll out formal work-life education across your entire organization so that your work-life programs actually work.

All of this reminds me of the early days of diversity training at corporations, where the only way to achieve change was to drive education across the entire company, and to insist on management compliance. Work-life, it seems, is going to follow the same trajectory.

Yay! Business Week Shows "Work-Life Balance" is Outdated!

Good grief...a "yay" from "Dr. WorkLife" for an article that says "work-life balance" is outdated?

You betcha. And the reason why is not because of the catchy Title of the BusinessWeek article that caught my eye, but rather because of the content embedded in the article. Finally we are seeing the change in expectations that will put work-life balance (or whatever new term you want to invent) on the map.

Give the article a read. It's quick. Basically it says that "work-life balance" as a term is dead because nobody really wants it. Nobody wants a life where you have to steal from one to get the other. What they want is a life where you can have both work and life at the same time.

If you've read my book, you know that it opens up with the sentence "There is not such thing as work-life balance."

Maybe what I should have said was "There is no such thing as a living well that doesn't include both work and life."

Whatever phrase you use one thing is clear. The only way forward is to have both.

Even Lawyers Benefit from Work-Life

OK, so my wife is going to kill me for the title of this blog (she is an attorney) but I couldn't resist.

But it's more than just my attempt at humor; industries like the Law (and consulting) are particularly hard-pressed to derive benefits from work-life because of their business model which ties increased profits to increased hours worked (a so called "hourly based" business model).

So I was particularly keen to see a report form the UK on law firms showing that Law firms there which had introduced work-life practices were seeing positive impacts in things like retention (lower costs) and increased ability to attract top talent.

A couple of points stood out (quotes from the article):

The attitude of employees' line management is often the most important factor influencing their perception of their employers. Employees are likely to be influenced both by the HR practices they experience and by their managers' leadership behavior. Such responses can be positive or negative. Poorly-designed or inadequate policies can be rescued by good management behavior in much the same way as good HR practices can be negated by poor front-line manager behavior or weak leadership.

Work-life balance is at the top of younger lawyers' criteria when choosing a law firm

All of which supports a presentation I just prepared yesterday (which I will give in a webinar on July 15) showing the two key factors in building a business case for work-life:

• Work-Life is a critical factor for attracting top talent. In the specifics of this article, Law firms that don't practice work-life will not get the best talent. Period.
• Work-Life can be implemented well, or poorly -- it all depends upon management.
  

In other words, you need work-life to run a profitable, competitive business, but you have to be careful to deploy it well. If you don't you'll just spend money foolishly because your work-life policies won't "take" with your employees.

Distractions: Whose Fault Are They?

A colleague recently sent me an interesting blog post from the NY Times (by Marci Alboher). The title is "Fighting a War Against Distraction" (click here for the post). It's another great example of how Blame comes in to play when we look for balance. Let me show you what I mean.

Marci's blog centers around Maggie Jackson's new book "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age". Maggie points out the statistics we've all heard:

• How we get distracted on average every 3 minutes, and how it takes nearlly 30 minutes to recover from a distraction (hmm...there's a recipe for quality work. Makes you hope your doctor doesn't get distracted while prescribing your medicine).
  
• How distractions now consume 28% of a worker's day, according to research firm Basex.
• How routine interruptions lead to higher stress (research done by the Families and Work Institute).
  
• How workers are more creative when they are focused (according to Harvard Business Review...I've seen multiple references to studies on this phenomenon)
  

Maggies main point -- and if we haven't heard it before we have all certainly experienced it -- is that the world around us seems to be manufacturing distractions at an alarming rate; so alarming, in fact, that if we don't learn as a society some effective mechanism for dealing with it we may just lose our ability to focus altogether. Those are my words, not hers, but the point is that we are all literally being driven to distraction, and that means nothing is getting done well.

Maggie poses the obvious question: should we blame the devices (the email, the blackberry, the cell phone, etc) and answers with a clear "no." I totally agree. To blame the technology is, well, blame, and as I point out in my work, blame gets you nowhere. In fact, blame is just a waste of your energy. It can never solve your problems. Try it some time. Try taking an hour to just blast away at all the things you want to blame for your problem. You will find that all you have accomplished is to have lost a precious hour of your time. You will be no closer to a solution.

What is the solution? Quite simply, you need to stop complaining about what you can't do and start asking yourself what you want to do. Of course, that is easy to say and hard to do. But I found solace in what Maggie suggests in her book; that one can literally learn to avoid distractions through practice. Here is one exercise that I routinely suggest to the folks I coach, and it works great:

• Set aside an hour to vent your frustrations, just as before. The goal will be the same: to give voice to what is bugging you.
• But this time, divide your hour in half. For the first 30 minutes, just blast away. Don't hold back -- think of everything that you want to blame for why you can't have what you want.
• As you blame, literally write it down. Pencil and paper, journal, electronic recording device, whatever.
• Then, take a 5 minute break and go back an read (or listend) to what you have just spent 30 minutes complaining about.
  

What's the point? You will be amazed at the patterns you will see in your own complaining. One of the most interesting things to me about distraction -- and blame -- is how impossible it can feel when we are in it, and how transparent it can seem when we take the time to listen to it. If you try the exercise above you will notice something very interesting. Listening to yourself complain is a very different experience. What feels so insurmountable when you are into the blame will sound completely different when you re-read it.

This is a simple way to get some practice listening to how you are blaming and, in turn, how that is creating your patterns of distraction. And once you know that, you will have a powerful tool for doing what you want with your life. Because in the end, that's all distraction (and blame) are; they are simply convenient hiding places for us to keep ourselves from doing what we are afraid to do.

What You're SUPPOSED to Know

There are just a few things that a guy is supposed to know if he's a "guy." Things like tools. When a "guy" walks in to home depot, he's supposed to know a plane from a pipe wrench. That's just the way God intended it to be. So there.

Of course, if you're familiar with my "Rule of Judgment" you'll know where this post is going. It's all about how the "supposed-to's" can lead us right down the path to imbalance. But let's have some fun getting there.

This story all starts with a slow drain. You know, the deal when you get up one morning and notice that although you've been taking a shower, it's become a bath by the time you step out.
Being a "guy" I decide "I can fix this" and off I go to rent the proper roto rooter drain snake pipe thingy that will do the trick. And here is my first clue that I should recall the old saying "discretion is the better part of valor" though I'm guyishly blind to it: I don't even know the vocabulary. I think because I took shop class for 2 weeks in middle school back in 1975 that I somehow know all the correct names for all the tools known to man. More likely, what shop class taught me is some "guy rule" that I'm supposed to know tools. Forget that I really have no idea what I'm doing; I simply cannot walk in to Home Depot and have Mr. Tool walk up to me in his little orange apron (I ask you -- guys wearing aprons?) and ask "may I help you?" and blurt out "I need some kind of roto rooter snake pipe thingy." Guys just don't do that (but hey, at least I'm not wearing an apron!).

So I rent something that looks right to me, and it's kinda like a power drill on steroids. And, dude, is it heavy; no way I can operate it one handed (aren't all drills operated one handed?). Once home, I start taking apart the tub, randomly unscrewing anything I know how to take apart. I feed mister power-drill-snake-thing into the pipe and start drilling away. I get it to feed about 1 foot before I hit a snag. "Aha!" I say "Holmes, you ol' dog, you've found the problem!" and I drill away. I think mister power-drill-snake-thing must sense my inexperience, because it bucks like a wild pig in my hands, but I manly teach it who's boss (after putting only a few gouges into the tub). After rattling the pipes for a solid 30 seconds (just so everyone in the house knows there's a guy working around here) I pull the snake back expecting to see most of the hair I've lost since last August, if not a full toupee. What do I actually get? Nothing.

What's the proper guy response? Do the same thing, only this time use more force (you know, kinda like government foreign policy). But this backfires on me when I realize mister power-drill-snake-thing isn't going down the drain at all but is instead trying to come out at the top of the tub, near the spout, by forcing out the round plate just under the spout. Oops. Guess force isn't always the best plan. At this point, Reason has finally begun to triumph over testosterone and I decide that since I don't even know the proper name for mister power-drill-snake-thing I should punt and play field position by hiring a professional. So I put away my pride and the tools and wash out the tub with a few gallons of water. Not too much water, of course, because it is still draining very slowly which turns out to be my only piece of good luck for the day. Because guess where the water is draining now: downstairs through the ceiling in the dining room and out at the bottom of the door jam between the dining room and the kitchen, on to our nice new hardwood floors.

Ouch.

A week and two holes in the downstairs ceiling later (and with my pocketbook considerably lighter) the plumbing is fixed and we can again take showers in the morning. Now, of course, I have a ceiling repair problem (because, alas, plumbers are not ceiling repair men) so my clogged drain has really just morphed into two holes in the ceiling, kinda like the pok-e-mon in my daughters' Nintendo games that "evolve" as they get more experience. I've certainly gained more experience, I just wish this really was a game and I could push the off button.

And, of course, if you've read my "Rule of Judgment" posting you'll know that's where you can find the "off button." Because what my real issue has been all along is how I have been judging myself. I've been thinking about what "they" will think, what a "real man" should know, and judging myself by that. Instead, I could have chosen to simply ask myself "am I doing what I truly want to do be doing with my time" and used that as my guide. That simple rule -- am I doing what I truly want to be doing with my time -- is all I really needed to keep me on track. Why? Because it keeps me focused, and more importantly, it helps me avoid distractions which are completely pointless. Think of how ludicrous it was for me to be sitting, alone, trying to use a power tool I didn't understand to do a job I'd never before done and feeling pressured to know what to do. Nobody else was even present! And yet, I was putting pressure on myself as if being watched by a live audience of scowling men, keeping score in some great guy log book in the sky.

So now I have two holes in my ceiling and, of course, I'm tempted to fix them myself. Hmm...I wonder if I will be smart enough to follow my Rule of Judgment this time.

Work-Life and Ethics?...Huh?

OK, this one caught even me by surprise. And you know, if you have read any of my blog entries, that I am about as pro work-life as they come. But even I had never made the link between work-life and ethics. Though once you think about it, it sorta becomes obvious. Let me explain.

A good friend passed along a link to a study done by Harris Interactive for Deloitte & Touche (Deloitte, by the way, has an awesome reputation in work-life and is clearly one of the leaders in this field). The gist of the study, at least in the report (which you can read for yourself here) was the link between a good work-life and good ethical behavior at work. What caught my eye were a couple of key stats from the survey:

• 91 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to behave ethically at work when they have work-life balance
• 60 percent said that job dissatisfaction is one of the main reasons to behave unethically
• Only 10 percent said criminal penalties would be a top deterrent to unethical behavior
• And only 16 percent said ethics training would have a positive effect on encouraging ethical behavior.

So let me see if I get this straight. If we are cranky, pissed-off, tired, and feel put upon, we will stiff the boss, screw the customer, and happily trot off to jail when we're all done. Make us angry enough, push us to the limit once too often, and we just don't care. We'll go postal with a smile on our faces. And don't give me any lip service or some schmaltzy training on ethics with some over-paid actor who really knows nothing about ethics but looks good on camera and has a nice voice trying to shame me into behaving, because I'll just assume you are doing it because you were forced to so you can check off a box that says "yup...trained all employees on ethics" and that covers your butt in case you are sued. If you REALLY want me to be a good boy, treat me with a little dignity and recognize that the job has to be part of my life, not a substitute for it, and I'll go to the ends of the earth for you.

Does that just about cover it?

Humor aside, I think it does. The quote from Sharon Allen of Deloitte puts it well. She says:

When you think about it, if someone invests all of their time and energy into their jobs, it may have the unintended consequence of making them dependent on their jobs for everything, including their sense of personal worth. This makes it even harder to make a good choice when faced with an ethical dilemma if they believe it will impact their professional success.

In other words, if your whole identity is in your job, you have probably lost your perspective which means you won't be good at your work or your life. Another reason not to get obsessive about results (see my previous blog entry).

I also think there is a positive spin to all of this. Work-life, as we all know, is not really rocket science. What it boils down to is courage. You need courage to make the right choices to keep yourself healthy, and many times those choices are hard to make (thus the courage). Ethics strikes me as similar; it's all about making the right choice when faced with an uncomfortable situation. In this fundamental way, work-life and ethics are the same.

When you think of it that way, it's obvious that work-life and ethics overlap. They both take courage.