By Paul Rupert – President, Rupert & Company
Maybe we all hear the Inaugural address we want to hear. The one I heard President Obama deliver spoke strongly and clearly to the champions of the more flexible workplace. “What?” you say. He didn’t even mention telecommuting!
Well, yes and no. In fact he went to the heart of the matter, not the periphery. He grounded his speech in the fundamental tenets of the American promise – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He appealed to our proud history of working together to achieve great things. He launched his second term by pledging four years of promise and change that will touch us all.
No doubt any epochal changes will touch many of us. But most of us live our lives, seek small liberties and pursue our happiness in demanding schedules that are far removed from the grand sweep of history. Indeed, for several decades, as flexibility consultants, we have worked with dozens of companies and hundreds of thousands of employees who have sought greater liberty in the workplace through enhanced control over where, when and how we work.
It is a continuing irony of American life that we are democratic and self-scheduling in our public lives and autocratic and tightly scheduled in our great workplaces. There are two powerful tributaries that feed this workplace reality: the first is our journeys through school and the second is our nation’s long workforce evolution from picking cotton to telecommuting.
First, the schools. They are not just the home of the “3 R’s.” For our first two decades of life, they are a tutorial in control. At one end is kindergarten with total teacher direction and regimented students. At the other is graduate school built around self-direction. Elementary, junior high, high school and college each strengthen the shift from outer to inner direction.
And then? We go to work. And while change is occurring and some flexibility is emerging in our workplaces, many do not resemble the step past college or graduate school when it comes to scheduling. Rather, they are studies in control, rivaling the lower grades for their rigidity.
Why is work the way it is? This brings us to the second great influencer: the evolution of supervision and work itself over the centuries. Our dominant ways of working have evolved their own powerful control systems. Certainly conflicting tendencies have existed at every turn. But broadly speaking, we see autocratic control at work in slavery, indentured servitude, imported coolies, farmworkers, sweatshops, assembly workers – and in our time, endless miles of cubicle dwellers.
In each era, and in each setting, millions have sought liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But first they sought to live – and thus they worked under the best conditions available. Just as we do. But because we have advanced educations in an advanced economy, today we seek greater control over our schedules. To better live our lives, to push the frontiers of individual liberty and to increase our personal happiness, we want flexibility in the workplace.
Our goals mirror the relentless advance of work and working conditions. Flexibility began with flextime for the whole work group, and evolved into the greater individual choice of programs for alternative, then flexible work arrangements.
And this has been progress – a move forward in which pockets or a preponderance of autocratic scheduling remains. The time has come to heed the President’s refrain and take that large next step of working together to achieve big changes. Workplaces will remain controlled from the top as they should be.
But it’s time for a workforce schooled in democracy to promote collaborative scheduling – to enhance life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not by the proliferation of hall passes and one-off deals, but by negotiating employee to manager to team as adults. Companies seek engagement. There is no better way to get it than through the mutual respect embodied in collaborating on the best possible way to get the work done.
Given the history of control in our schools and workplaces, the idea of a great leap in true collaboration on schedules might seem frightening to some. In such moments it is important to remember another powerful river that flows through our proud history. However we work at work, in our private time we, as millions of individuals, have always been, and remain, relentless doers, innovative builders and great schedulers.
We coordinate on our own our time and talent to build churches, schools and homes for the poor. We collaborate to extinguish fires, rebuild after disasters and distribute food to the hungry. We do all this in the pursuit of our collective happiness – and without top-down scheduling. We are Co Schedulers at home and in the community.
2013 is a perfect year to begin the shift toward Co Scheduling at work. The economy is on the mend, change is in the air and flexibility as program seems to be plateauing. Future issues of The Co Scheduler will offer tools and strategies to reinforce this direction and enlist your support in inaugurating the change ahead.
The Co Scheduler 