Humans Are Not Robots: Why We All Need Work Flexibility and What Company Leaders Can Do About It - Hardcover

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<div><h2>Guiding Principles</h2> <br><br> <h3>Flexibility Is for All People</h3> Flexibility is usually only considered important for the working mothers mentioned earlier, or those with some other caring responsibilities. And there are swathes of our population working in industries where <em>flexibility</em> would not be uttered for fear of being laughed out of the building, such as healthcare, manufacturing, trades and construction, retail, hospitality, and transport – basically any industry that isn’t “knowledge” work and that can’t easily be done at any time from any location. <br><br> The main theme of this book is that flexibility is for all people, regardless of their reasons, the industry in which they work, the level or type of job they have, their gender, their age, or any other boxes they fit in. It’s entirely necessary <em>and</em> possible for all people to have flexible work, and I will show you why and how. <br><br> <h3>Humans Don’t Want to Escape Work</h3> The driving assumption of <em>The 4-Hour Workweek</em> and similar books is that people want to escape work itself, but I will argue that we need work for many reasons beyond earning money. <br><br> Work fulfills extremely important human requirements for a full life, such as connecting and participating with other people pursuing shared goals, opportunities for us to understand and create and learn, having purpose and mastering skills (even flipping a burger or picking up rubbish can provide that purpose and mastery), as well as maintaining a healthy contrast to the other parts of our lives. The thing that we want to escape is long, rigid, unnecessarily stressful work. <br><br> Work, in its current form, is a belligerent, voracious monster, crashing around and devouring all of our resources, while our health, relationships, leisure, discovery and adventure, freedom, higher thought and consciousness, and other passions and interests are all huddled in the corner and under rocks, emaciated and starving, waiting for a precious weekend or holiday so they can finally be taken care of. We don’t need to destroy the monster, we just need to tame it and feed it less. There just needs to be a better balance so that <em>all</em> our needs, including those provided by work, can be fulfilled in a sustainable way. <br><br> I do call for less time at work throughout the book as a general goal because our current standard is damaging in so many ways, but the aim is not to get down to zero hours, which is harmful in its own way, or a Keynesian fifteen-hour workweek, which is just another arbitrary number. The aim is to focus on the value of work, both to the employee and the employer, and the amount of control someone has over their own work and life. <br><br> <h3>The Productivity of a Human Is Non-Linear</h3> Unlike a robot, which produces the same number of things all day every day (linear productivity), humans have peaks and troughs of productivity (non-linear productivity), and this needs to be decoupled from time and place constraints for people to fully realize their productive potential. <br><br> The value that a person can provide a company is so much more than physical presence and unending toil, and it varies from minute to minute, day to day, week to week. People are capable of improving their work and that of their coworkers, and they have the ability to innovate in abstract and astonishing ways. But that capability can only be unleashed when they are able to fill their <em>energy buckets</em> (the balanced source of human energy, fully described in Chapter 5) by regularly fulfilling all of their human needs, and it’s heavily suppressed by the level of toil and control that are inflicted by traditional work structures. Flexibility allows us to move away from this scarcity of human capital and toward abundance. <br><br> <h3>Humans Can Look After Themselves</h3> There is this weird assumption that employees need perks and awards and lifestyle training to feel “well” and engaged at work and to make better personal choices about exercise, sleep, and diet. It’s all very creepy, and not only disregards the fact that we’re living, breathing individuals who can make good decisions for ourselves but also ignores the fact that work itself is often a root cause for our poor lifestyle choices in the first place. <br><br> Businesses don’t need to educate employees on the benefits of sleep or give them financial rewards to get at least six hours of sleep a night, as some companies in Japan are doing for their employees. They just need to give them the opportunity to sleep more by ensuring that they’re not working ridiculously long hours. <br><br> They don’t need to convince employees to exercise by tracking and rewarding or punishing them based on their Fitbit stats, as the state of West Virginia in the United States tried to do to their teachers, with proposed $500 fines for individuals not tracking their health data. They need to question why their current work practices are sucking up their employee’s time and energy to the point where it becomes a Herculean task to choose exercise over collapsing in front of the TV. <br><br> I’m very much against a business inflicting itself onto an employee’s life with patronizing “we’re going to <em>help</em> you make better decisions” rubbish, offering free fruit and step challenges and sleep tracking. A main aspect of flexibility is that it gives people the space (time and energy) to make their own choices; what they do with that space is not their business’s business. <br><br> <h3>The Biggest Barrier to Flexibility Is Polite Skepticism</h3> The most common argument against flexibility, the one that I hear more often than any other, is not the absolute and angry rejection of the idea. It’s not, “That sounds friggin’ terrible; get the hell out of my office.” It’s much friendlier and more casual – “It sounds fantastic, but it’s just not for my business,” or “It’s just not feasible right now.” The argument is known as <em>polite skepticism</em>. <br><br> This type of seemingly supportive and harmless statement is in fact the biggest hurdle to freedom and sustainable lives for millions. Its subtext is, “Well, in a perfect world, sure, I’d love to give more flexibility to all my staff. I’d also love to give them each Lamborghinis and fly them to Nepal for yoga and team-bonding sessions; but it’s not really practical, is it? It’d be nice to have; but no, not for us. Thank you! [Big smile.]” <br><br> Facebook, a company whose mission is “to build community and bring the world closer together,”  recently lost one of its employees because it rejected her request for a simple type of flexibility: working part time. Eliza Khuner, a data scientist, wanted less time at work so she could spend more time with her young children. After being denied she decided to leave loudly. <br><br> She publicly challenged both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO and COO, asking for their support for flexibility: “Would you lead this company and the U.S. in supporting working parents; would you give us the chance to show you how kick-ass and loyal we can be with fewer hours at the desk?” <br><br> Both were politely skeptical. <br><br> Sandberg, a proclaimed feminist and author of the book <em>Lean In</em>, explained that “while management wanted to move in that direction at some point in the future, they couldn’t right now. Allowing part-time options to all parents would strain the rest of the team.”...