BACK TO WORK - OR A BIT LESS OF IT

What happened in Paris has put a lot of things into a sharper perspective like work/life balance.  It’s a subject on a lot of agendas right now. The debate includes Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, insisting her workforce comes to the office rather than working from home and Lucy Kellaway, the sparking FT writer, advocating the return to the 9-5 working week as a way of increasing productivity, innovation and morale.

In the Harvard Business Review researchers discovered the tipping point of competence was a 56 hour week. After that they remarked darkly not only was the work done no good, it almost certainly had to be redone or reversed. Or worse; it created problems that doing nothing at all would have avoided.

According to the Times on Saturday the number of men working part time is now topping    1 million, up three times since 1992. Quite successful and greasy-pole-climbing men are abandoning their hundreds of thousands of pounds, the Michelin stars and the 70 hour weeks for occasional consultancy, school runs, helping with homework and DIY. Work has for some become a paid hobby. The other side of this equation is that wives can get to work too and fulfil their own ambitions.

Indeed working for yourself as opposed to a big corporate allows you to work when you feel like it. Lunches, shopping when it’s less crowded, reading a book or going to an art gallery begin to be part of a broader education programme rather than being seen as goofing off. Maybe what justifies all this is the brain doesn’t stop thinking when our body isn’t stuck behind an office desk.

But there is a cost and Lucy Kellaway is eloquent on observing that having a real job in a real office allows you to build a much more interesting time between nine and five than working on the kitchen table can ever do.

In the end it comes down to this. Is what you do worthwhile, interesting and inspiring? The best advice on this comes from Netflix that extraordinary, newish company with a market capitalisation of over $40 billion. Only ever hire and work with stunning people they say.

Is this foolishly idealistic? Perhaps but the best memories I have ever had of work has involved brushing up against and interacting with great talent.

Because the conversation about how hard we work is the wrong one; it should be about how good the work we do is.

Quality not quantity always wins.

WHO'S MY BOSS AND WHERE ARE THEY?

Imagine you were a child and you had two mothers who lived in different countries in neither of which you lived yourself one of whom wanted you to be a musician and the other wanted you to be a long jumper. They called you on the phone from time to time and sent you texts and e-mails. Occasionally you met them at big Mothers of the World meetings or saw them on Skype.

It would be my guess you might end up a bit screwed up.

But this pretty well describes the world in which the modern international executive lives. And as things within their organisation changes he could keep on getting new mothers with different agendas or worse his old mother might be removed in a “Mother Delayering Programme” to be replaced by a Super-Mum who’s located the other side of the world and doesn’t speak the same language as you do.

The reality of course is that most of us are learning new ways of working. Some people I know work mostly from home apart from meetings and travelling. The old concept of clocking in (mentally if not really) to an office where your status was measurable by the square feet of your room and the looks, personality and popularity of your PA and where you focused on your own country as opposed to operating in regional clusters, is over.

But does it really work? Or like that virtually orphaned child with their matrix mums are we creating a world devoid of the real interpersonal management and mothering skills that involve real human contact and seeing the whites of people’s eyes?

An HR Director I talked to last week believes remote and matricised management is causing all the problems that he’s encountering in implementing a big change programme. At Yahoo when a new CEO was appointed she found virtually everyone worked from home. They were all very miffed when she insisted they came in to the office and talked to each other. She patiently explained that the business was in crisis and that the only way she could see them sorting it out was together.

If we really believe that our people are our most precious asset we’d better spend more time with people making them work better.

Increasingly the competitive differentiator is in the quality of people and the service we get from them. If you own a restaurant there’s no point in improving the food if the service is terrible. The Ivy in its good old days was like eating in a good friend’s home where the food was OK but it was the style, service and ambience that made you feel really good.

People are needy. We just are. And it’s the way our bosses mother us and coach us that will make us better at what we do and the company we work for become more successful. Time we spent more time together talking, listening and collaborating.