Here’s the bottom-line bonus about all of these changes. Bowing to our demands makes business sense not just because companies need to keep us, but also because we become more productive employees. The unintended consequence took Capitol One by surprise. “People in the workforce have specific needs, and if they feel like you’re going to work with them on those needs you can attract people and you can retain your best performers, which is probably the place we actually started thinking about this,” admits the company’s senior vice president Judy Pahren. “But then we found a much larger benefit. What we actually found is that it made people more productive. We discovered that this really helps productivity and job satisfaction at the same time.”
Across the Atlantic in Britain, the Cranfield Univeristy School of Management conducted a two-year study with seven blue chip firms, including KPMG, Microsoft, and Pfizer (no fuzzy firms these) to measure the business impact of allowing employees to work on alternative schedules: 44
• The majority of flexible workers increased the productivity of their performance, both in terms of the quantity and the quality of their work.
• The majority of employees said they were less stressed with a schedule they could control and they were more productive.
• Employees working flexibly were found to be more committed and more satisfied.
• The alternative work schedules were found to make the companies more competitive.
It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Employees who have the time to contribute to their communities, and who are heavily involved with their families, are actually better employees. We are indeed more committed and more productive and more loyal.
Certainly Geraldine Laybourne, who ran Nickelodeon and then the Oxygen network, didn’t need any studies to show her that. Over lunch in a corner office high above Manhattan’s East Side, she explained she was constantly experimenting with work practices, even decades ago, to encourage motivation, innovation, and loyalty.
“I had one guy in marketing who I thought was having trouble concentrating on big ideas. He was just coming in, spending terrible hours, and not producing,” she remembers. “I told him he had to stay home on Fridays. ‘You have to stay home and think. You cannot come in on Fridays!’ ” she told him, laughing. “So there were a lot of kooky things we did.”
And at Oxygen, years later, she could finally create with utter ease the environment that nurtured the handpicked female talent she thought was critical to the company’s success.
“We liked to hear about the kids. If you had to go to a play, you didn’t have to hide that.” She shrugs. “At one point at Oxygen we
had twenty-four babies—twenty-four vice presidents out on maternity leave at the same time. And we had two senior vice presidents who were part time.”
You can probably think of a moment when you’ve been so well treated at work you were inspired to do even more.
katty I recently renegotiated my job at the BBC. A new boss arrived from an American network to shake up our evening news. The job I was offered was less prestigious than my previous job, and I was of two minds about whether to take it at all. I had a couple of other offers so was in the luxurious position of being able to walk away if I didn’t get the terms I needed. It’s fair to say I was a disgruntled employee! So I went into the meeting pretty militant; I would work flexibly or not at all. My specific condition was that if I wasn’t needed on air for that evening’s show, I wouldn’t go in to the office that day. I expected at the very minimum a mutter of resistance—but to my surprise, I didn’t even get a silent raised eyebrow. "That’s fine,” he said. And he kept to his word. No appearance on air, no appearance in the office. But here’s what’s interesting, and what I hadn’t really anticipated: it’s a freedom I am so grateful for that when I am needed I happily put in the extra effort. I win and the program wins.”
We’ve all heard those stories about women who sneak out of work in a blizzard to go to the school play but leave their coats hanging over their chair in the office so their boss won’t realize they’ve left the building. It’s tragic how pathetic the tyranny of the office can be. We slip out anyway, but we resent our employers for it. It is far better to allow people freedom, and win their gratitude, not their resentment.