

The Traditional Workplace is Broken - fusionman
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1249-the-traditional-workplace-is-broken

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jcromartie
There's not a lot of substance here, although I agree. It seems that the
reasoning behind the way the workplace functions is: "because I said so."

I work at a job where nearly everyone could work remotely and be just as (or
more) productive. This won't happen because it would be too upsetting to the
way things are for the conservative people in power.

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rw
Being in power tends to mean one has responsibility to others. To not piss
them off, making few or no changes works well.

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denglish
I think everyone agrees the status quo for most companies isn't working. The
hard question is how do you change it? Simply 'challenging' your workers is
not really enough (although a good start). For smaller innovative companies
there isn't a lot of bureaucracy yet, and the chances are the founders have
had a direct part in hiring all the staff – with a vested interest in picking
the top quality people they can. And with top quality staff of course you
naturally give them the freedom and flexibility to be as effective as they
can.

The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy
kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they
‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is
great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate
too.

Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that
I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into
many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the
management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.

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fusionman
I love the thought of improving the workplace for productive and quality
individuals. There is nothing worse than stifling creativity and imagination.

That said, I wonder how this model works if you are running a business that
employs people that may not be as smart or motivated as say the 37Signals crew
or Google, which probably means most businesses.

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davidw
I think this was fairly vacuous. It's easy to say "too much bureaucracy", but
harder to implement in the majority of companies. I'll believe it when
37signals starts doing consulting to make your ordinary, average small/mid
size business "get real".

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fusionman
this is my point...great when you have several highly motivated creative
people (like 37signals), but what about "most" companies? I have several
friends who would absolutely take advantage of this type of atmosphere by not
doing sh*t. They would be fired in smaller companies, but lost in the shuffle
of larger ones. Now you are focusing on house cleaning.

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unalone
Wait. Are you saying that your friends' being able to get away with not doing
shit is a GOOD thing for larger companies?

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andreyf
_It's no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff
done._

I can see this being hard to justify...

