Scott Berkun's Blog, page 44

What work traditions need to go away?

One theme of my upcoming book is questioning aging work practices. Particularly ones followed our of tradition without evidence they contribute to quality of work.

Here’s a list of work practices that should be reconsidered: is there any evidence these contribute to work performance in any way?

Dress codes (ties, skirts)
Measurement by time, not performance
Casual Fridays
Hour long meetings by default
Mission statements
9 to 5 work day
unpaid overtime
The cc: line on email (this was suggested 4 times)
Corner offices
Conference calls
Unequal pay
Anti-morale morale events

This list was generated from replies to two twitter posts .

While I’m happy to hear gripes about practices done poorly, ideally I’m looking for practices that have no value no matter how well they’re done.

What work traditions do you think need to go away?

 

Grand summary of posts on Remote work & Yahoo

With my upcoming book about my experience at WordPress.com, where everyone works from home, I’ve been following the Yahoo announcement closely. Here’s a rundown of the better posts I’ve seen about their policy change and notable responses:

All Things D reports that the Yahoo ban on remote work will only effect a few hundred workers, primarily service reps.
Here is a copy of the actual memo CEO Marissa Mayer sent out.
The Economist reports results of a recent survey of 11,000 workers. 20% work from home frequently, and 7% work from home everyday. They also quote Virgin CEO Richard Branson saying “Yours truly has never worked out of an office and never will.” While Donald Trump said “Mayer was right to expect Yahoo employees to come to the workplace vs. working at home.”
There are a growing number of successful companies that are nearly 100% distributed
Is Yahoo’s remote work ban worse for women?
Daring Fireball says Yahoo needs a kick in the ass (pointing out remote work hadn’t helped them much so far)
The Daily Beast offers “What I expect Yahoo to learn is that telecommuting is not the problem—it is a solution.”
Shanley Kane believes “A world of startup privilege hides blithely unexamined underneath an insipid, self-reinforcing banner of meritocracy”
Cisco’s Telework week starts on Monday
CNN quotes Foursquare Co-Founder Dennis Crowley taking the middle ground “It is great to offer employees flexibility if they need to be off for a day or so, or for an afternoon”
37Signals, who have an upcoming book called Remote, suggest Yahoo isn’t doing well enough to have hard rules.
Does Remote work boost productivity? Yes for creative tasks according to one study.
For NPR, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg points out “it’s difficult to transition from being reliant on in-person interactions to being just as effective in a distributed fashion — it’s something you can’t do halfway”
The Washington post reports the U.S. Patent office is heavily distributed

I took the middle ground defending both remote work and Marissa Mayer.

If you know of other excellent responses please leave a comment. Thanks.

In Defense of Remote work (and Marissa Mayer)

Recently Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer decreed that working from home would be banned at the company. In a company memo she wrote:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Any unilateral decision by an executive about how creative people work is a mistake. To presume to know what is best for hundreds of professional adults is to make yourself a parent, and make your employees children. The most talented employees who prefer autonomy will leave. The less talented and more dependent employees will stay.

Smart, motivated professionals will always be the best judge of what tools, methods and work habits will result in their best performance. However they are obligated to perform well. The employer’s obligation is to give employees a landscape that enables them to do their best work, and feedback about how they’re doing. If they’re not performing up to a standard, a CEO or an executive has every right to critique, criticize or take action.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home” is a criticism I doubt she has data for, but it might be true at Yahoo. Not all remote work plans are managed well. It depends how good a job Yahoo does of integrating remote workers in with the fold. I don’t know if she looked at how companies that are 100% distributed do it and what Yahoo could do better. I doubt it. If she did she’d realize remote work as a concept is probably not the problem.

The best action for leaders is to focus on performance problems, not tools or benefits. “We are not working up to the standard we need to meet” would be a perfectly fine criticism. She could have asked employees to better justify their choices “We have data that suggests many remote workers are abusing their privileges”, and target the abuse rather than remote work itself. This would both put the focus on performance, and let employees reconsider choices on their own.

In Mayer’s defense, she is the CEO and knows more about what’s going on in her company than we do. We’re on the outside looking in. A shock to the system might be precisely what Yahoo needs and targeting remote work was a specific way to get her message of “wake up and shape up” heard loudly. There are reports of remote work abuse, but it’s hard to know if this is more than what’s typical at any large company. Who knows what the real problems are or what her real agenda is. Step one of forcing an issue, getting attention and raising debate has been played well by her. Remote work may very well be something that returns to Yahoo in the future after whatever problem she’s focused on has been solved.

How many companies are 100% distributed? (Research Summary)

By Shawn Prenzlow, Research Ninja

I’m continuing to research topics for Scott’s upcoming book. One hard to pin down topic is how many companies are 100% distributed?

The most obvious, and famous, example of this is Automattic. With over 130 employees, everyone works from the location of their choosing. Teams get together in person regularly as needed for individual projects. But no one has to schlep to the office every day. That’s my definition of workplace Nirvana.

Because of Automattic’s size and incredible community support, they’re the most frequent reference in articles. What is surprising is after hours of research, I’ve found that writers and reporters rarely mention any other company.

That’s right: Time and again, articles on distributed work models reference Automattic and no one else. Just the one company. Full stop. Over and again, I’ve found myself staring at a screen in mild disbelief. Once in a while, an article might also reference GitHub or 37Signals. But those articles are exceedingly rare.

So who else is out there? Surely there must be others.

The answer is that are others, but they’re hard to find. It’s possible the distributed model becomes is harder to manage as a company’s size increases, meaning  companies who use the model are smaller-sized businesses without much press or media coverage.

Soft Criteria: If you think you’re distributed, leave a comment.

Harder Criteria:  Bonus points if you meet the following:

Company size of 20 or more employees
Employees  geographically distributed (for example, in at least several states or regions, if not countries)
The company is a for-profit company

Here’s are some companies we’ve identified as having a distributed model:

37Signals
Automattic
Genuitec
GitHub
Kalypso LP
MCF Technology Solutions
ProofHQ
Treehouse
Copyblogger (source)
YouNeedABudget
StackExchange (50/50)

Do you know of others, even if they don’t meet all of our criteria? Please leave a comment.

On What Your Culture Really Says

There’s an excellent rant on startup culture making the rounds called What Your Culture Really Says by Shanley Kane. Here’s an excerpt:

Toxic lies about culture are afoot in Silicon Valley. They spread too fast as we take our bubble money and designer Powerpoints to drinkups, conferences and meetups all over the world, flying premium economy, ad nauseam. Well-intentioned darlings south of Market wax poetic on distributed teams, office perks, work/life balance, passion, “shipping”, “iteration,” “freedom”. A world of startup privilege hides blithely unexamined underneath an insipid, self-reinforcing banner of meritocracy and funding.

It’s not a balanced article, but it is an exceptional one. It’s a sharp, smart rant/critique of many trendy start-up practices, from remote work, to 20% time, to joyous resistance to meetings. It calls bullshit on the entire tide of practices that are popular enough now that the wider business world has taken notice.

My next book is about a company that has most of these practices and cultural values: WordPress.com.  I read Shanley’s article three times.

Most trends in business history were largely followed by people who are drawn to shiny objects. They hear about some new fancy thing and they run to copy it for no other reason that it’s the new trendy thing. This generally fails, but there’s always another new trendy thing to follow. Shanley wrote:

Meetings are evil and we have them as little as possible. What your culture might actually be saying is… We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings. We tend to avoid projects and initiatives that require strict coordination across the company…We are heavily invested in being rebels against traditional corporate culture.

She’s on the money about the rampant anti-corporate thematics in many companies. Being anti-something doesn’t create a healthy culture all on its own. If the primary cultural value is simply not being something else, it’s unlikely to last long. The reason many cultures end up in this place, as she points out, is they’ve had bad experiences. And rather than do the emotionally harder work of sorting out which elements of meetings, or hierarchy, or a dozen other conventional trappings of companies they worked at previously, were good or bad, te entire concepts are thrown out in their entirety. And just as blindly, new, hip, trendy concepts,  are accepted in their entirety with a similar lack of scrutiny.

As critical as it is, I read her peace as a call for critical thinking about the relationship of practices to cultures. Healthy culture is harder to obtain than a checklist of trends.

Her article is largely a list of questions anyone considering these practices should ask, and I recommend giving it a full read.

How do you hire for culture?

Bob Sutton wrote bravely about the No Asshole Rule, and how talent should never excuse destructive behavior. It’s a rule many companies are afraid to follow and they pay later. By the time leaders realize there’s something broken in the culture, it’s hard to fix. Avoiding assholes is certainly progress for some companies, but but that’s not enough to create a great place to work.

One of the amazing things about my experience at WordPress.com, and a theme in my next book, was the common good habits everyone had: generosity, thoughtfulness and craftsmanship. Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schnieder, the leaders at WordPress.com, put the culture and its values ahead of many considerations. Great cultures have a higher bar and to both start and grow good ones requires sacrifices many impatient CEOs aren’t willing to make.

Jason Cohen, founder of  WPEngine wrote this recently:

You can train someone how DNS works, but you can’t train someone to naturally have empathy for a customer.  You can train someone with specific ways to interact with an irate customer, but you can’t train someone to genuinely care about helping that irate customer. At some point along the way, we’ll make a mistake, and it’s our responsibility to handle it with humility…You can train skills, but you can’t train attitude, and the attitude is going to make the real difference in that situation.

…If you can’t train attitude, then you have to hire for attitude.

Hiring for culture is harder than hiring for skill. To hire for culture you first have to understand the culture you have, which is difficult since you’ve always been in it and likely don’t see it for what it is. What you think your culture is and what it really is might be very different. And even if you’re clear on your culture’s values, you have to be willing to say no to talented candidates for reasons beyond talent. And perhaps hardest of all, you have to find ways during an interview to assess a candidate’s values, which is much harder than assessing their talents.

A common shortcut is evaluating candidates based on the question “Is this someone I’d want to work with everyday?” That question is packed with many implicit values the culture you work in already contains. However following that too closely has problems too. It can lead to stagnation, or even discrimination. Organizations need people with different attitudes to stimulate growth. No matter how healthy a culture is eventually there are powerful defenders of the status quo. It takes a new coworker with fresh perspective to show  how stagnant you’ve become. Part of what keeps all cultures healthy is the introduction of new people, ideas and assumptions. As companies grow keeping the right balance is hard to do. You need to protect what you have, but continue to plant new kinds of seeds.

How do you hire for culture?

How many people really work from home? (research summary)

By Shawn Prenzlow

A few weeks ago, Scott hired me to help with research for his upcoming book. The plan is to share what we find as we go and you get to tell us what you think.  You can help validate or debunk our findings: Do they match your experience? Have you found research that proves something different? Do you know of other trends or data that we haven’t discovered?

Comment and let us know.

First up is the results from the question Scott posed for the Research Assistant contest: “What percentage of companies allow telecommuting of any kind?”

In general, my research showed that the search term telecommuting was tied to employee statistics, or breakdowns by industry or job type – but not to percentage of businesses. I am guessing that this is due to the difficulty of crisply defining what a “business” is; Fortune 500? Fortune 1000? Any business?  Include self-owned and home-based businesses? As such, it would be hard to get a baseline without some specificity.

After several searches using variants of telecommute and following leads and links, it seemed like a better direction to search on the term flexible workplace. This new term provided better results.

Here’s what I found:

 “Another nationally representative survey of employers illustrates the trend of differential access to flexi-place benefits within organizations. While 30% of organizations allow some employees to work at home either occasionally or regularly, only 3% of organizations allow all or most to do so.”

Source: Flexible Work Arrangements: The Fact Sheet,  Workplace Flexibility 2010 Georgetown University Law Center

Which seems to trend with the following:

“…approximately 10 percent of workers telecommuted in the mid-1990s. The rate of telecommuting increased slightly to 17 percent in the early 2000s and then remained constant to the mid-2000s”

Source: The hard truth about telecommuting, Monthly Labor Review,  June 2012

Now, let’s get more specific:

21% of all medium / large businesses (100+ employees) support some level of informal telecommuting. This covers 470,000 telecommuters.

14% of all medium / large businesses (100+ employees) support some level of formal telecommuting. This covers 240,000 telecommuters.

65% do not support any telecommuting.

Source: Transportation Implications of Telecommuting, U.S Department of Transportation | Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA)

And:

45% of the US workforce holds a job that is compatible with at least part-time telework.

50 million U.S. employees who want to work from home hold jobs that are telework compatible though only 2.9 million consider home their primary place of work (2.3% of the workforce).

Regular telecommuting grew by 61% between 2005 and 2009. During the same period, home-based self-employment grew by 1.7%.

Based on current trends, with no growth acceleration, regular telecommuters will total 4.9 million by 2016, a 69% increase from the current level but well below other forecasts.

76% of telecommuters work for private sector companies, down from 81% in 2005—the difference is largely attributable to increased WAH among state and federal workers.

(Unless otherwise noted, all telecommuter statistics refer to non-self-employed people who principally work from home.)

Source: The State of Telework in the U.S., June 2011, workshifting.com

But what about world-wide telework trends?

“Telecommuting is particularly popular in India where more than half of workers were most likely to be toiling from home, followed by 34 percent in Indonesia, 30 percent in Mexico and slightly less in Argentina, South Africa and Turkey.”

Source: About one in five workers worldwide telecommute, 2010 poll

But here’s what most of us want to know: Which are the best US cities for people to work from wherever they want (and apparently, in their PJs)?

“The same survey also found that Atlanta outranks other major cities when it comes to letting information employees work from home in their pajamas. Part of this can be explained by Atlanta’s growing position as a telecom and IT gateway to the Southeastern U.S., so these type of jobs naturally lend themselves to telework.”

Source: Microsoft Tracks Telework Trends, Ranks Top Cities for Home Workers, June 2011

What do you think? Does this information match your own experience? Do you know of better sources and statistics that support or refute these finds? Tell us!

Announcing guest posts by Shawn Prenzlow

A few weeks ago I put out a call for a research assistant for the new book about my year working for WordPress.com.  I hired Shawn Prenzlow, and as we talked over lunch we both thought it’d be a great idea for her to post her research here on the blog as it comes together.

I’ve never had anyone guest post here before and wanted to make sure I warned you about it – she’ll have her own by-line at the top of her posts.

She’s smart and funny and I’m hoping you’ll find these research oriented posts interesting. The spirt is to share as we go and invite you to ask questions, or help us find better answers.  Stay tuned.

Used copies of Mindfire selling for $300+

I’m happy to announce that Mindfire 1.1 will be here shortly. Over 150 minor corrections have been made, making this the best possible edition of the best collection in existence of my best work from this blog (You can of course access my best posts of all time for free).

The print edition is currently listed as out print via amazon, but that will change shortly as the logistics of getting the 1.1 edition in the pipeline take place.

A curious side effect is the backlog of used copies for sale has been emptied, raising the lowest price to $309. And ‘new’ copies list at $711.  If you have a copy you want to sell perhaps now is the time to do it? The used market on amazon is a mystery to me, and I never know what to make of the prices I see there.

Two ways to write: with your gut or with your head

An amazing comment from Charley Daveler on my post How to Write a Book:

You can tackle a book in two ways: with your gut or with your head. Most authors flip flop back and forth constantly, though they tend to favor one over the other. If you want to write with your gut, i.e. by instinct/from inspiration, disregard the idea of “should” and just go for it. This technique has its negatives as well as benefits, but the most important thing to remember is that even if it’s terrible, keep going; you can always fix it later.

If you want to work from the head, i.e. using logic, which you might considering the intellectual subject matter, then first ask yourself your goals, which you’ve already done to some extent. Start developing a specific vision (though it does not need to be fully formed to start), ask yourself how you want your readers to feel, and what you want them to take away from the read.

Read the whole comment here.