Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Download 1.9 Mb. View original pdf
|
| “Nothing is more important to my success than controlling my schedule. I’m most creative from five to nine AM. If I had ab oss or coworkers, they would ruin my best hours one way or another.” SCOTT ADAMS Dilb ert creator Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible. If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative, and even encourage unethical behavior. If one is expected to bill more than two thousand hours per year former US. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once said, there are bound to be temptations to exaggerate the hours actually put in.” 13 The billable houris a relic of Motivation 2.0. It makes some sense for routine tasks—whether fitting doors onto the body of a Ford Taurus or adding up deductions on a simple tax form—because there’s a tight connection between how much time goes in and how much work comes out. And if your starting assumption is that workers default setting is to shirk, monitoring their time can keep them on their toes. But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable. Imagine requiring inventor Dean Kamen or actress Helen Mirren to bill for their time. If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption—that people want to do good work—then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it. Already, a few law firms are moving in this new, more Type I direction—charging a flat rate rather than a time-based fee— with the presiding partner of one of New York’s leading law firms recently declaring, This is the time to get rid of the billable hour.” 14 If the billable hour has an antithesis, it’s the results-only work environment of the kind that Jeff Gunther has introduced at his companies. The first large company to go ROWE was Best Buy—not in its stores, but in its corporate offices. Like Ms 15 percent time, Best Buy’s ROWE experiment began as something of a rogue project launched by Ressler and Thompson, whom I mentioned earlier and who have since become ROWE gurus, taking their message of autonomy around the world. Best Buy’s headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota, are airy, modern, and replete with a concierge, cafés, and dry cleaner. But the company had a reputation for punishing hours and intrusive bosses—and it was paying the price in lost talent. Best Buy’s then CEO Brad Anderson quietly agreed to Ressler and Thompson’s weird proposal, because it encouraged people to contribute rather than just show up and grind out their days.” 15 Today, Best Buy’s headquarters has fewer people working a regular schedule than it has those working a ROWE un-schedule. And even though retail electronics is a brutally competitive industry, Best Buy has held its own both in the marketplace and in its quest for talent. Reporting on the company’s ROWE results in the Harvard Business Review, Tamara Erickson writes: Salaried people put inasmuch time as it takes to do their work. Hourly employees in the program work a set number of hours to comply with federal labor regulations, but they get to choose when. Those employees report better relationships with family and friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity has increased by 35%, and voluntary turnover is 320 basis points lower than in teams that have not made the change. Employees say they don’t know whether they work fewer hours—they’ve stopped counting. 16 Without sovereignty over our time, it’s nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives. A few Type I organizations have begun to recognize this truth about the human condition and to realign their practices. Moreno doubt, will follow. In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model Ressler told me. No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s time to throwaway the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.” Download 1.9 Mb. Share with your friends:
|