Unfinished Business (23 page)

On the more creative side,
the software startup Evernote is executing its own version of a supremely flexible work environment. Evernote gives its employees unlimited vacation days. In fact, they don't bother tracking days off at all. One Evernote employee, who had recently returned from a three-week Mount Everest trip of a lifetime, told
Businessweek
in 2012, “It's a trust-based system….It treats people as if they can run their own schedule.”

Ironically, the larger challenge can be to get employees to take advantage of the vacation offered. When
the Evernote unlimited-vacation benefit was first instituted, some people took
less
vacation than they had before, because they wanted to impress their bosses. So the Evernote CEO began writing thousand-dollar checks to anyone taking a weeklong vacation, so long as she had the ticket stubs to prove it and she shared stories about her travels with colleagues. “Our employees are better after they have traveled,” the CEO said to
Businessweek
. “They are more productive; they are more useful to the company.”

I had a similar experience at New America. When I took over, many employees had large accrued balances of vacation and personal days that they had not taken but planned to cash out when they left. In fairness, many of the younger people had been working around the clock on important projects that needed to
get done, in a culture where they did not feel that they could take a vacation and still deliver what was being asked of them. I believe so strongly in the value of time off, however, that we instituted six weeks of paid time off to be used however and whenever an employee wants, subject to one caveat: you can only roll over two weeks every year. If you don't use the rest, you lose it. I got a lot of pushback from many employees who resented the paternalism. But I am looking after not just their health and well-being but also the health, well-being, and productivity of New America as an organization.

Some new companies have done away with the office altogether. Automattic, the tech company that created the blogging platform WordPress, is a “completely distributed” company. That means that every single one of its two-hundred-plus employees works from home, though they do have a physical headquarters in San Francisco so the company can get mail. Automattic employees work in 170 different cities, and they are given a monthly $250 outlay to invest in a co-working space if they'd like, in addition to a onetime $3,000 home office stipend when they join the company.

CEO Matt Mullenweg says that he is able to get the best work out of the best employees when they work from where they want to be. In an interview with the tech website Mashable, Mullenweg argued that, in an office, if people are dressed for work, show up on time, and look busy, “you assume [they] are working….At home, all you have is your output—did you commit the code, did you write the post, did you make the proposal? There's no theater of physical proximity.”

It may seem that this kind of flexibility is limited to digital age companies that create virtual rather than physical products. But a desire to reduce overhead and increase efficiency can arise in any business. After I gave a speech in my hometown of Charlottesville,
Virginia, a woman came up to tell me that she too had a completely distributed flexible workplace, that her boss had created a network whereby the office employees could all work from home. Her business? A construction company!

These attitudes and the resulting flexibility in the tech startup sector are one major reason that Wall Street financial firms are beginning to lose the competition for top recruits. In the fall of 2013
The Wall Street Journal
reported that
firms like Goldman Sachs and Barclays were responding by reducing weekend hours for their junior staffers. On the other hand,
Morgan Stanley's chief executive, James P. Gorman, was honest enough to say what every investment banker I know was likely thinking: “I'm not sure that's the right answer because I'm not sure how you stop work if there's a deal on.”

The answer is that you don't. Clients expect round-the-clock service when a deal is being done. But it is possible to come up with much more creative solutions, like letting employees take short days and days off equivalent to the amount of time they were completely immersed in a particular deal. Or create regular leaves and sabbaticals. Academics are used to working very intensively for three to four months at a time during the semester and then switching rhythms to a much more sustainable pace during breaks and summers. If even the most intense workplaces made it more possible for employees to adjust their own rhythms, individual bonuses might go down, but the quality of life and employee retention would go up.

Y
OU MAY BE THINKING THAT
the only way to find yourself in an open workplace is to quit your job and move to one, that your
boss or your company is never going to be willing to make the kind of changes that would allow you to fit your family and career together. Not so. The whole point of OpenWork is to have honest conversations that will lead to change. You can initiate those conversations and make changes yourself that will have a tremendous impact.

O
NE GOOD APPROACH FOR EMPLOYEES
is to “manage up.” Many of the wonderful people who have worked for me over the years have learned how to filter my requests and prioritize the tasks that are most important, knowing that my reach sometimes exceeds my grasp. The very best people who've worked for me have also learned how to remind me, gently, that they are human. If I give them more than they can do, or should reasonably try to do within a limited time period, they look up and say, “If I can't get to everything, what is most important?”

I'm actually very grateful when they do that, because it forces me to think through what
is
most important. Equally valuable, these employees no longer risk spending their time working on something that was a lower priority and not getting to something I was expecting and needed more urgently.

Of course, they could stay up all night for a week and try to get everything done. But then they would be less sharp and less productive, and they likely wouldn't last in the job for very long. I'm not saying that all-nighters aren't necessary from time to time; as I have made clear, I've pulled plenty. Real crises do come up, and it's important to signal that you can be counted on in a crunch. Some of us also procrastinate until the adrenaline kicks in with a sufficient rush to allow us to get a huge amount done in a short period. But working continually in crisis mode takes a tremendous
toll over time. It's perfectly fine to set limits and make clear that while you will get the important stuff done and will go the extra mile when necessary, you are not prepared to sacrifice other important things in your life to someone's fifth or sixth priority.

You may also be helping your boss become a healthier and more productive person himself. When my current assistant, Hana Passen, began working for me in the fall of 2012, I was amazed when she left the office at six o'clock even if I was still there. She had just graduated from college and she and I were getting to know each other; I would go through a long list of things to do and she would take it down but then start to pack up to go—to either rugby practice or other activities that she had scheduled after work.

At first, I found myself thinking,
I would never have left before my boss
. Quite the contrary, I would stay as late as he did and generally much later. But over the first few months we worked together, I discovered that Hana was almost always available if I needed her and got prodigious amounts done. After a while, I started wondering what was wrong with my time management that I was still there after she had left!

O
NE OF MY FORMER STUDENTS
at the Woodrow Wilson School, Fatema Sumar, worked for then-senator, now–secretary of state John Kerry on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When she returned from maternity leave after having her second child, she proposed to her staff director that she be able to work from home on Fridays in order to fit her new caregiving responsibilities together with her continuing professional responsibilities. Critically, she also said she thought she could produce
better results for the committee this way. He agreed on a limited trial basis and quickly found that she became one of the most productive members of the office. This arrangement lasted even after she had her third child, and it allowed others to make more flexible choices about when and where they worked as well.

Fatema found the courage to have a direct conversation with her boss about what she needed. You should have this conversation too—after all, you can't really expect your manager to know what you want if you don't ask for it. But there are more and less successful ways of asking. Here are some pointers to make it easier.

Do your research
. Check your employee handbook to see what the company's policies are on flexibility. If the company advertises the possibility of flexible arrangements, then your pitch should be less about whether you can take advantage of them than about how to ensure that you stay on track for promotion—even if on a slower track—if you do. Presume that the company's values are in the right place, but tackle flexibility stigma head-on.

Have a plan
. Whether you're making a proposal in line with existing company policy or proposing a customized arrangement, make sure you have a specific plan in mind that will make it possible for you to fit the different pieces of your life together. It might be working a four-day week, telecommuting on Mondays or Fridays, leaving work at 5:45 every day so that you can pick your kids up from daycare and come back online after they're asleep, or whatever other arrangements will reduce your stress and increase your productivity.

Make an appointment
. Don't just spring your suggestion on your boss at the office coffee machine. Signal that you and your partner have been talking about how to best maintain your commitments to your careers while making time for caregiving.

Highlight the benefits to your company
. Be sure that
when you map out your plan, you make it clear to your boss how this new arrangement will benefit the company as well. Explain how you think you'll be more productive. Working from home can allow you, for instance, to focus on bigger projects that require concentrated thinking for hours at a time, which can be very difficult to do in the office. If your boss is hesitant, suggest a trial period—career experts recommend three months—after which, if it's not working out, you can reassess. And be sure to agree on metrics for evaluating the results of the experiment.

If at first you don't succeed…
Asking doesn't guarantee receiving, of course. But even if your boss says no, you don't have to let the issue drop. In a
Woman's Day
article about requesting flextime, Sara Sutton Fell, the CEO of FlexJobs, suggests that if you've been turned down, bring the issue back up at an annual review. She even offers a potential script: “
I know we discussed this a while ago, and it's still on my radar. I see it as a benefit not just for me personally, but for business,” and follow it up with an explanation about what you're bringing to the table as an employee.

I'll be frank. When employees at the Woodrow Wilson School asked for more flexible schedules when I was a dean, I was willing but backed down in the face of staunch opposition from existing supervisors. The argument was always the same: “If we do it for this person we will have to do it for everyone and we won't be able to maintain any kind of control or discipline.” Or else resentment that the person in question would be getting special treatment.

At New America the question has been more one of linking teleworking to agreed standards of performance and of navigating the tensions between one set of standards for administrative staff and another for the program staff who work on policy analysis and research. In both cases, as in the State Department, the
issue has been how to make the transition from an old system to a new one. I come from an academic culture where I am used to getting lots of work done in many different places—where my office was a place I went to mainly for meetings. But for people who come from more traditional office cultures, home or a café or even a library is a place you go when you are
not
working. This transition may need to be made gradually, one experiment at a time, with clear measures of success or failure.

One final note. It's important to remember that your boss isn't necessarily your adversary; you may be pleasantly surprised at how he or she reacts to situations in which you have to adapt your work to fit your family. One week in the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg repeatedly missed or came late for Secretary Clinton's 8:45 meeting. On the fourth day, she raised an eyebrow at his assistant. But the minute his assistant explained that Jim's wife was traveling (she also worked for the government) and he was taking their daughters to school, Clinton's potential irritation turned to respect and support for his willingness to be an equal parent.

In general, your boss wants you to be the best employee you can be, and that means making you a happy employee.
British economists have even found that happy workers are about 12 percent more productive (something you might want to mention casually to your boss!). It's going to take some time to revolutionize the workplace, but every step an individual employee takes sets a precedent; the women and men following in your footsteps will thank you.

E
VEN IF YOUR WORKPLACE GIVES
you maximum control over when, where, and how you do your work, it's still up to you to put your
family first. Over a decade ago, I formulated what has been my work mantra ever since: “If you are caught up on your email, your priorities are in the wrong place.” I realized that I could spend another hour at the office every night knocking down the daily pile of email—at least a third of which was unnecessary to anyone and all of which would quickly pile up again no matter what I did—or I could go home and read to my sons before bed. When I thought about what really mattered, the answer was obvious.