[acb-hsp] Experiments in Workplace Autunomy

[dchandler001]

Hi.  What about people who need more structure or are less driven?  Ttype II 
personalities. for example.  Deb
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "peter altschul" <paltschul at centurytel.net>
To: "Acbhsp" <acb-hsp at acb.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2010 5:34 AM
Subject: [acb-hsp] Experiments in Workplace Autunomy


> Ode bar March 2010 wwwddodemagazineddcom
>  Daniel H.  Pink bar March 2010 issue
>  Experiments in workplace autonomy
>  Photo: Dusanzidarst Dreamstimeddcom
>  A little past noon on a rainy Friday in Charlottesville, Virginia, only a
> third of CEO Jeff Gunther's employees have shown up for work.  But
> Gunther-entrepreneur, manager, capitalist-is neither worried nor annoyed.
>  In fact, he's as calm and focused as a monk.  Maybe that's because he
> didn't roll into the office himself until about an hour ago.  Or maybe
> that's because he knows his crew isn't shirking.  They're workingbjust on
> their own terms.
>  Gunther has launched an experiment in autonomy at Meddius, one of a trio
> of companies he runs.  He turned the company, which creates computer
> software and hardware to help hospitals integrate their information
> systems, into a ROWE-a results-only work environment.
>  ROWE's are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former
> human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy.  ROWE's
> principles marry the common sense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the
> cage-rattling radicalism of American community organizer Saul Alinsky.  In
> a ROWE workplace, people don't have schedules.  They show up when they
> want.  They don't have to be in the office at a certain timebor any time,
> for that matter.  They just have to get their work done.  How they do it,
> when they do it and where they do it is up to them.
>  This appealed to Gunther, who's in his early thirties.  "Management isn't
> about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices," he told
> me.  "It's about creating conditions for people to do their best work."
>  That's why he'd always tried to give employees a long leash.  But as
> Meddius expanded, and as Gunther began exploring new office space, he
> started wondering whether talented, grown-up employees doing sophisticated
> work needed a leash of any length.  So at the company's holiday dinner in
> December 2008, he made an announcement: For the first 90 days of the new
> year, the entire 22-person operation would try an experiment.  It would
> become a ROWE.
>  "In the beginning, people didn't take to it," Gunther says.  The office
> filled up around 9 a.m.  and emptied out in the early evening, just as
> before.  A few staffers had come out of extremely controlling environments
> and weren't accustomed to this kind of leeway.  (At one employee's 
> previous
> company, staff had to arrive each day before 8 a.m.  If someone was late,
> even by a few minutes, the employee had to write an explanation for
> everyone else to read.) But after a few weeks, most people found their
> groove.  Productivity rose.  Stress declined.  And although two employees
> struggled with the freedom and left, by the end of the test period Gunther
> decided to go with ROWE permanently.
>  "Some people [outside of the company] thought I was crazy," he says. 
> "They
> wondered, `How can you know what your employees are doing if they're not
> here?`" But in his view, the team was accomplishing more under this new
>>rangement.  One reason: They were focused on the work itself
> rather than
> on whether someone would call them slackers for leaving at 3 p.m.  to 
> watch
> a daughter's soccer game.  And since the bulk of his staff consists of
> software developers, designers and others doing high-level creative work,
> that was essential.  "For them, it's all about the craftsmanship.  And 
> they
> need a lot of autonomy."
>  People still had specific goals they had to reachbfor example, completing
> a project by a certain time or ringing up a particular number of sales.
>  And if they needed help, Gunther was there to assist.  But he decided
> against tying those goals to compensation.  "That creates a culture that
> says it's all about money and not enough about the work." Money, he
> believes, is only a "threshold motivator." People must be paid well and be
> able to take care of their families, he says.  But once a company meets
> this baseline, dollars and cents don't much affect performance and
> motivation.  Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees
>>every far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or
> even $20,000
> increase in salary.  The freedom they have to do great work is more
> valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise-and employeebs spouses,
> partners and families are among a ROWE's staunchest advocates.
>  "More companies will migrate to this as more business owners my age come
> up.  My dad's generation views human beings as human resources.  They're 
> the
> two-by-fours you need to build your house," he says.  "For me, it's a
> partnership between me and the employees.  They're not resources.  They're
> partners." And partners, like all of us, need to direct their own lives.
>  We forget sometimes that "management" does not emanate from nature.  It's
> not like a tree or a river.  It's like a television or a bicycle.  It's
> something that humans invented.  As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has
> observed, management is a technology.  And like Motivation 2.0, it's a
> technology that has grown creaky.  While some companies have oiled the
> gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its
> core, management hasn't changed much in 100 years.  Its central ethic
> remains control; its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators.  That leaves
> it largely out of sync with the non-routine, right-brained abilities on
> which many of the world's economies now depend.  But could its most 
> glaring
> weakness run deeper? Is management, as it's currently considered, out of
> sync with human nature itself?
>  The idea of management (that is, management of people rather than
> management of, say, supply chains) is built on certain assumptions about
> the basic natures of those being managed.  It presumes that to take action
> or move forward, we need a prod-that absent a reward or punishment, we'd
> remain happily and inertly in place.  It also presumes that once people do
> get moving, they need direction-that without a firm and reliable guide,
> they'd wander.
>  But is that really our fundamental nature? Or, to use yet another 
> computer
> metaphor, is that our "default setting"? When we enter the world, are we
> wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged?
> I'm convinced it's the latter-that our basic nature is to be curious and
> self-directed.  And I say that not because I'm a dewy-eyed idealist, but
> because I've been around young children and because my wife and I have
> three kids of our own.  Have you ever seen a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old
> who's not curious and self-directed? I havenbt.  That's how we are out of
> the box.  If, at age 14 or 43, we're passive and inert, that's not because
> it's our nature.  It's because something flipped our default setting.
>  That something could well be management-not merely how bosses treat us at
> work, but also how the broader ethos has leeched into schools, families
> and many other aspects of our lives.  Perhaps management isn't responding
> to our supposedly natural state of passive inertia.  Perhaps management is
> one of the forces that's switching our default setting and producing that
> state.
>  Now, that's not as insidious as it sounds.  Submerging part of our nature
> in the name of economic survival can be a sensible move.  My ancestors did
> it; so did yours.  And there are times, even now, when we have no other
> choice.
>  But today economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment,
> more often swings on a different hinge.  It depends not on keeping our
> nature submerged but on allowing it to surface.  It requires resisting the
> temptation to control people-and instead doing everything we can to
> reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy.  This innate capacity for
> self-direction is at the heart of Motivation 3.0 and Type I behavior.
>  The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to
> self-determination theory (SDT).  Edward Deci, a professor of psychology 
> at
> the University of Rochester, and Richard Ryan, a former student who is now
> Deci's colleague, cite autonomy as one of three basic human needs.  (The
> others are the need for competence and the need for relatedness.) And of
> the three, it's the most important-the sun around which SDT's planets
> orbit.  In the 1980's, as they progressed in their work, Deci and Ryan 
> moved
> away from categorizing behavior as either extrinsically motivated or
> intrinsically motivated to categorizing it as either controlled or
> autonomous.  "Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of
> volition and choice," they write in a 2008 article in Canadian Psychology,
> "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of
> pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces
> perceived to be external to the self."
>  Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence.  It's not the
> rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy.
>  It means acting with choice-which means we can be both autonomous and
> happily interdependent with others.  And while the idea of independence
> has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human
> concept rather than a Western one.  Researchers have found a link between
> autonomy and overall well-being not only in North America and Western
> Europe, but in Russia, Turkey and South Korea.  Even in high-poverty
> non-Western locales like Bangladesh, social scientists have found that
> autonomy is something that people seek and that improves their lives.
>  A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and
> attitude.  According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies,
> autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better
> grades, enhanced persistence at school and, in sporting activities, higher
> productivity, less burnout and greater psychological well-being.  Those
> effects carry over to the workplace.  In 2004, Deci and Ryan, along with
> Paul Baard of Fordham University, carried out a study of workers at an
> American investment bank.  The three researchers found greater job
> satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered "autonomous support."
> These bosses saw issues from the employee's point of view, gave meaningful
> feedback and information, provided ample choice over what to do and how to
> do it and encouraged employees to take on new projects.  The resulting
> enhancement in job satisfaction, in turn, led to higher performance on the
> job.  What's more, the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals 
> extend
> to their organizations.  For examples, researchers at Cornell University
> studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy; the
> other half relied on top-down direction.  The businesses that offered
> autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had
> one-third the employee turnover.
>  Yet too many businesses remain woefully behind the science.  Most
> 21st-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are
> pawns rather than players.  British economist Francis Green, to cite just
> one example, points to the lack of individual discretion at work as the
> main explanation for declining productivity and job satisfaction in the
> U.K.  Management still revolves largely around supervision, "if-then"
> rewards and other forms of control.  That's even true of the kinder,
> gentler Motivations 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like
> "empowerment" and "flexibility."
>  Indeed, just consider the very notion of "empowerment." It presumes that
> the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the
> waiting bowls of grateful employees.  But that's not autonomy.  That's 
> just
> a slightly more civilized form of control.  Or take management's embrace 
> of
> "flex time." Ressler and Thompson call it a "con game," and they're right.
>  Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. 
> It,
> too, is little more than control in sheep's clothing.  The words 
> themselves
> reflect presumptions that run against both the texture of the times and
> the nature of the human condition.  In short, management isn't the
> solution; it's the problem.
>  Perhaps it's time to toss the very word "management" onto the linguistic
> ash heap alongside "icebox" and "horseless carriage." This era doesn't
> call for better management.  It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.
>  This is an edited excerpt from Drive: The Surprising Truth About What
> Motivates Us by Daniel H.  Pink, published by Riverhead Books.  (can) 2009 
> by
> Daniel H.  Pink.
> B) Ode Magazine USA, Inc.  and Ode Luxembourg 2009 (further information in
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