Work in Sequence

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the years when I entered the workforce, way back in the 1990’s. As a case worker in 1996 there was no email, no electronic case notes, no Outlook calendar. There wasn’t even a computer on my desk. When I started at CCP in 2000 I did have a computer and email, of course, and they allowed free communication between my office and offices around the world. Its a good thing.

So why the nostalgia? I thought it was about the pace of work, or the volume, but that isn’t it. I think it’s actually that our technology has made everything ooze into everything else. It isn’t just that the line between work and home is busted – its that the line between my work and yours is busted, too. We can see each other’s documents, reach into each other’s calendars, join each other in meetings from thousands of miles away.

There is one particular problem resulting from all this mixing and shifting and sharing that I think we can fix: the “always on” problem.

Since we now work from anywhere and everywhere, work gets done at any hour of the day or night. That is partly because when I am tucking my kid into bed, my colleague on the other side of the world is prepping breakfast for his. Add to that the shift to flexible work schedules, and people might work Sundays but not Fridays, or 6:30am until 3pm.  The result is a steady stream of emails and WhatsApp messages everyday, all day and night. If we are going to offer flexible schedules and work globally, there will be a stream of messages day and night. That is the nature of the beast. That isn’t the problem.

The problem is that people read and answer those messages at all hours of the day and night and weekend.

What can we do? What if we stopped thinking of our work with each other as real-time, but instead as sequential? We are treating all messages the same, as if the house were on fire and we had the only fire hose. But that is nonsense. Most messages are not house-on-fire. Most are just people doing their work, and handing over their piece of a collaborative task to the next actor. The message in your inbox is just a way to get that work (the document, the question, the answer) off their to-do list and onto yours. They have every right to send it when they want to send it, but you have every right to respond to it when you are working. I think, in fact, that if we want to change our work culture we have an obligation to not respond to non-urgent messages when we aren’t working. How else will we change?

We work at different times. We should not aim to be real-time, but sequential. Instead of envisioning our interconnected world as a mandate to always collaborate in real time, what if we saw it as an opportunity to tag-team in slow motion, where work is always getting done somewhere, but it isn’t always getting done everywhere?

There are two practicalities that we’d need to agree to.

First, if you need someone to respond to something immediately (it happens, even over the weekend!) use the technology at your disposal to let them know. Mark the email urgent, or send them a text instead. Otherwise, lets all agree that we expect people to read and respond to messages when they work, and not when they don’t.

Second, we have to acknowledge that hierarchy and power play a role here. Sure, I’m okay not reading an email from a peer on a Saturday, but from my boss? Am I really okay with that? We have to be. The alternative, if we want a sane workplace, is to say that no one who supervises other people can have flexible schedules (or live in different time zones) for fear their staff will feel pressured to answer their emails in off-hours. That’s nuts. But we can all recognize (with the blessing of our bosses) that everyone has their work shifts, they don’t align, and we’ll respond to all those non-house-on-fire messages when our next work shift starts.

Third, we can say clearly and out loud: I don’t want you to respond to my email when you are not working. Please.

There, I’ve said it. Who is with me?