This morning I picked up the Financial Times and stumbled upon Lucy Kellaway‘s column this morning, Switch off and stay on through worlidays. According to Ms. Kellaway:
Worliday is a bit like holiday and a bit like work. It’s the future for most professional workers, and actually, contrary to what most people would have you believe, worliday is really rather nice.
Working at Abraham Harrison is a little like an everyday worliday if you play it right and get your work done. Daniel Krueger, my Director of Client Services, is in constant contact with home base; however, he also makes plenty of time for the gym, his kids, his family, his foodie dinners, his garden, yard work, and quite a few well-deserved pops to the beach — and also winning second in a masters 35-and-over wrestling tournament along with his bantam wrestler son.
Here is the sort of thing I did when I was on worliday 10 days ago in north Cornwall. I would wake up, do a few e-mails and then go for a walk by the sea. Later, I might write an article sitting under a window with a view of a stream. After that, I’d go outside to light the coals to barbecue a sausage. Or rather, I’d look at the glowering sky and put the sausages under the grill instead.
Dan’s work-life balance is not the result of excluding work at quitting time, but rather because he’s always accessible, from just after five in the morning until around around ten at night. I like to think that we don’t take advantage of this accessibility but it is very reassuring to know that he’s monitoring client health, campaign success, and staff needs a little bit all the time.
Most professional workers have been taking worlidays for some time now. The steady advance of the concept can be traced by the rise and fall of the automatic out-of-office e-mail. Five years ago these were all the rage: if you sent anyone an e-mail in August, you would get an automatic message straight back telling you that the recipient was off on a two-week break. Then, a couple of years later, the response changed: you would still get the automated message but it would be swiftly followed by a proper response tapped into a BlackBerry from a Tuscan poolside.
This year, you will just get the message from the pool – hardly anyone sends out-of-office e-mails at all. Indeed last week I had lunch with the head of a media company who has forbidden his staff from sending them at all, on the grounds that they are both pointless and unprofessional.
And since we have virtual teams and a distributed company, his willingness to check his iPhone whenever he’s awake while being unwilling to build artificial walls to the company’s needs means that it always feels like he’s the first to come into the office and the last to leave — even when he’s picking tomatoes, besting his bench press personal best, popping off into the surf with his boy and girl, or grilling shrimp on the barbie.
This means the worliday is not family unfriendly at all as families get twice as many holidays. Admittedly they only have half the minds of their parents at any given time, but most children may see this as an advantage.
We don’t really ever know where he is or where he isn’t. All he needs is a strong Internet connection for his PC to support Skype and at least a few bars of EDGE on his smart phone and he’s good to go wherever he is — and when he doesn’t have anything on his calendar, Dan has even more flexibility.
However, the mass adoption of the worliday doesn’t mean everyone ought to be given longer holiday entitlements. It means that holiday entitlements should be scrapped altogether. The current arrangement only makes sense for people who work fixed hours – they clearly need fixed holidays too. But for professionals who have not worked set hours for decades, fixed holidays seem an anachronism.
In fact, our CEO, Mark Harrison, has made the worliday his life and, in many ways, the company has been built in his image — in our image — since we’re both offended by the office culture of seat-warming — where the physical placement of a person during work hours is considered more valuable than the quality and quickness of work completed. If you’re the sort of person who can work poolside in Mauritius without compromising the communication chain, work quality, or accessibility, we honestly believe you should. Why should there be a work state and a vacation state?
The first great thing about the worliday is that there is no stark transition between the two states. Because I work when I’m away, there is no unseemly dash before I go. Better still, the worliday means you should be able to go away more often to compensate for the fact that you are still (sort of) working when absent.
The worliday is the only sort of holidays that business owners, consultants, and entrepreneurs have really ever taken; however, within the beltway in DC, the most ambitious among us — the professional class — tend to either never take their vacation time or naturally adopt the worliday.
And, you’re really not as ambitious as you think you are if you’re not tied to a Blackberry no matter what brand of Blackberry you have, especially in this economy — taking a couple weeks of work radio silence may be OK with your employer, but is it indeed a good idea for the vacation-taker?
The danger with such a scheme is that ambitious people could stop going away at all, but that is already a danger with the existing system. Indeed, so long as people are paid for results rather than for sitting at their desks, taking a great deal of worliday seems entirely consistent with achieving a great deal of success.
The irony is that the only disciplinary talks we have had with the staff of Abraham Harrison is when our management team starts building walls to our access. Since we’re a global, 24/7 company, direct, immediate, access to our managers is all we ask, whether we actually use it or not.
While there is the flexibility to be top employee at Abraham Harrison while being on permanent worliday, the system does break down when communication breaks down. If you’re an essential member of the team, especially in the management team, you cannot be out of the loop.
We do not expect a seat warmer employee who literally is the first in and last out at the office, but when we’re 100% virtual, communication channels need to remain strong and the only mortal sin is unpredictably disappearing, breaking the client service chain, or being the last to know when something threatens to go sideways or blows up.
The worst thing that can be asked in such a permissive, trusting, worliday-friendly company is “where were you?”
For some people, the level of perceived freedom that we offer can be all the rope that hangs them. Though it is rarely because of malicious intent, sometimes the fit is wrong and that particular employee demands more structure and oversight. In order for worlidays to work, each employee needs to be self-motivating and committed to the success of the client and the team.
