“Employers are recognizing that it is helpful for employees to have boundaries. … People can learn to shut things off. It’s not easy, and it requires dedicated effort.” –Stewart Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management

There was a time when people bragged about always being available; how no matter where they were or what they were doing they were reachable.

Some still do, but many more are (or have) quietly burned out and are just going through the motions.

The spark is gone and that has put a major damper on innovation, creativity, productivity and caring, or engagement if you prefer.

While many companies still encourage that mindset others are moving to change it.

Companies from Atos, the French information technology services giant, to Deutsche Telekom to Google have recently adopted measures that force workers toward a better work-life balance, with scheduled breaks from the Internet and constant connectivity.

In a bid to combat employee burnout, staff at Volkswagen will be limited to only receiving emails on their devices from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they leave for the day, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time.

As opposed to warm and fuzzy work-life balance attitudes, these efforts are grounded in hard-headed, pragmatic, selfish business sense.

If people burn out, become less innovative and productive or have to deal with upheaval in their personal lives as a result of being always on it costs the company cold, hard cash.

Less innovation and lower productivity makes the company less competitive.

Replacing people is not only very expensive, but irreplaceable institutional knowledge is also lost.

Smart companies take care of their assets and these days that means both controlling connectivity and changing the culture, so that turning off is no longer a mortal sin.

Join me tomorrow for a look at what you, at any management level, can do.

Flickr image: Mr Fogey

A few weeks ago I read an article in Business Week about corporations using security surveillance to check on people taking sick days. It was a list of high profile absences that I wanted to share with you and that gave me the idea for Oddball Facts as an occasional alternative to Quotable Quotes.

Of course, sometimes employees are at work when they aren’t; in other words, the body is present, but the mind is absent, which can have dire results.

Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, radio operators, Titanic: The duo were tasked with handling radio messages for the ship’s 2,220-plus passengers. Unfortunately, they didn’t heed significant iceberg warnings.

Typically, inexcusable absences focus on line workers who call in sick when they aren’t; most people assume that it’s more prevalent in lower levels and mostly on unimportant days, but that isn’t always the case.

There’s a commercial running these days for a cold remedy that features quarterback Drew Brees; the take away is that some people can’t miss a day’s work. But consider another sports figure that didn’t see it that way.

Manny Ramirez, MLB superstar: Playing for the Red Sox in 2003, he was out sick during a series against the Yankees. Though not sick enough to stop him from socializing with the Pinstripes’ Enrique Wilson at the Boston Ritz-Carlton bar.

Remember Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned? He didn’t have anything on this CEO.

Jimmy Cayne, former CEO, Bear Stearns: The Bridge Grand Master famously departed for a tournament as his firm—and its nearly $400 billion in assets—flirted with bankruptcy and sent Wall Street into chaos.

Many companies allow employees to work from home, even management on occasion, but how long would Wall Street tolerate the president of a troubled company who worked a third of the time from home, let alone a vacation home? Not long, you say? It didn’t seem to bother them when it was the President of the United States.

George W. Bush, former President, brush-clearing enthusiast: During two terms, Bush spent 487 days at Camp David and 490 at his Crawford ranch. One-third of his Presidency was thus spent “working from home.”

Flickr image credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Its studies show that [word deleted] workers are looking for flexible jobs that have “a climate of respect, work-life fit, supervisor support and learning opportunities.”

Would reading this sentence lead you to expect yet another story about the work expectations of Millennials?

If so, you would be wrong.

The sentence comes from a Wharton article called The Silver Tsunami that discusses the value older workers bring to employers.

Now consider these ten points on how to manage from a recent BNET post

1. Don’t be the boss. At least, don’t appear to be
2. Don’t be dismissive, help them learn new skills.
3. Use their experience.
4. Understand differences in lifestyle.
5. Validate them.
6. Know what motivates them.
7. Talk to your employees.
8. Don’t’ be intimidated by them.
9. Introduce a mentorship program…
10. If [word deleted] employees do step out of line, reel them…

Sounds a lot like advice on managing Gen Y, doesn’t it?

But it’s not; it’s advice on how to manage when employees are older than the manager.

Do you see where I’m going here?

Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials.

They are all people; people with similar desires and foibles, although usually expressed in different terms.

And they all want similar things from their managers: respect, challenge, opportunities to grow, work/life balance—the same things you probably want from your boss.

And it’s your job to provide them to everyone.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

Hat tip to Dan McCarthy who cites a study by Deloitte and asks whether best practices are reality or illusion.

Their research shows that luck alone can account for above average corporate performance for many years.

I haven’t read the study, but I did read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and there is a lot to be said for luck.

Not the kind of luck that wins a lottery, but the “right time, right place” kind.

I saw it first hand during my 20+ years headhunting. When the economy was hot and talent scarce anybody could (and did) become recruiters because companies were so desperate they hired almost every warm body that even vaguely fit the opening.

During the expansion of the nineties, what percentage of a stock rising was skill and how much market serendipity? By the same token how much of the rise was leadership skill and how much a market that not only lifted all boats, but also responded with outsize euphoria to anything that sounded good?

This applies just as much to individuals.

I’m not saying that skill isn’t important or that it won’t offset many factors, but so is timing.

The problem is that you can’t choose when you are born or what the economy will be like when you reach the corner office or get that great promotion; you can only do your best with the situation in which you find yourself.

So when you do look to others for pointers and best practices, be sure that the economy and their circumstances are the same as yours or at least parallel enough to be worthwhile.

Think about it.

Image credit: TheBusyBrain on flickr

See all mY generation posts here.

See all mY generation posts here.

This might come as a shock, but there is no Eleventh Commandment stating, “Thou shalt place thy career above all things in thy life and draw all sustenance, mental and spiritual as well as economic, from it.”

For decades I’ve held (and preached) the career-as-part-of-life MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) as opposed to the reverse. Life is LARGE; career is but a small part of the whole.  A major problem is created when the adjectives (and, therefore, the attitudes) are reversed.

Steve Roesler has a great post on a better way to look at your work and your life.

“The issue of work-life balance is about what kind of a life you want to have. Work plays a part in that. Decisions that you make about life determine how much work and what kind of work you do. Spending time getting clear about who you are and how you are talented is time well-spent. You may not even like the answer at first. It may conflict with expectations from you, your family, the community, and even society at large.

Maybe that’s the place to start. For those who work best with a label, perhaps Life Integration would offer a better target than Work-Life Balance.”

I like that—Life Integration.

Very few people choose how to die, but too many don’t choose how to live.

They allow the expectations of parents, educators, friends, colleagues, movies, society-in-general and the ever ubiquitous ‘they’ to choose for them.

Most will deny this publicly, but anyone who honestly remembers the power of peer pressure in school will privately admit that it doesn’t cease to exist upon graduation; in fact the pressures increase dramatically while becoming more covert.

Few successful people care to admit that the goals for which they are working and even how they spend their non-work time are more about fitting in than personal desire.

They chase the goals and do the things that ‘everybody’ is doing in the name of being ‘with it’. And that includes “work/life balance” and “having it all right now.”

So the net time you are ready to tear your hair out STOP; stop, take a step back and honestly determine whose goals you are trying to reach.

The answer may surprise you.

Image credit: arkitekt on sxc.hu

Now see why age never matters

Image credit: coda on flickr

I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.

“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”

It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)

Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.

Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.

Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?

What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.

As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.

If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.

And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.

There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.

Image credit: bonewend on YouTube

Image credit: robchivers

Want to know what people are really thinking about the hottest topics in the workplace? Then check out Business Week’s massive discussion of the top six topics.

The six topics are the result of voting by 8500 people; they are

• Work-Life Balance
• Staying Entrepreneurial
• Time Management
• Negotiating Bureaucracy
• Toxic Bosses
• Generational Tension

“…now we’re looking for solutions. Starting today, you can submit comments, essays, pictures, or videos chronicling the challenges you face in any of the categories—and how you’ve tried to resolve them. At the end of June, BusinessWeek writers and editors will use the material, along with the input of experts, to produce a precedent-setting multimedia package—with content and videos online beginning Aug. 14, the Special Issue in mailboxes Aug. 15, and broadcast segments appearing on BusinessWeek TV Aug. 16 and 17.”

My apologies for bringing this information to you so late, but you still have today. And I will bring you more on the discussion as it develops.