Managing a Four Hour Work Week

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, or check out the distractions section of this blog, will know already that today was the first day of my being outsourced to AT&T from IBM.

My role in AT&T will be managing a team of about 24 people. Almost twice as big as the team I managed before.  This will mean I need to  lay the ground rules early to ensure no-one is wasting my time or theirs. Some classics from Tim Ferriss will be implemented as office policy.

The issue that many people have trying to work the 4HWW is that their manager is stuck in what I call the “Way of the Cubicle“. The Way of the Cubicle is the ancient art of believing that you are most productive at your desk, phone glued to one ear, typing on a keyboard with one hand and shoving your lunch in your gob with the other. Way of the Cubicle devotees are often late middle aged, who seek ways of proving that you, their minion, are doing “work”.

An example that was passed on to me by a friend was their Way of The Cubicle boss not being a big fan of work-from-home type arrangements. He was paranoid that all that would happen is the worker would watch Oprah all day and basically bugger about doing nothing. So he proposed (as they were all programmers) that he would write a program that would take a screenshot of the worker’s screen randomly,  several times an hour.

It might be just me, but doesn’t that just smack of wasted productivity doing something like that?

Anyway back to the office where I am the boss. The new “rules” that I will be implementing are

• Meetings are a last resort
• If you cannot avoid convening a meeting ensure the agenda with planned outcomes is in the invitation or I will not accept
• Meetings should be between 1pm and 3pm
• All staff will block out lunch time and eat somewhere away from the desk/floor

My last team were technical implementors and so I abolished strict starting and finishing times and allowed the team to set them themselves. Unfortunately my new team are a couple of operational support teams that have specific hours and SLAs to meet so I can’t really allow that.

I can however, empower the team to start making decisions that they have not been permitted to in the past.

The goal of all this is to actually keep my team away form me while I do the mundane work that needs to be done without interruption and thinking/strategy time.

More on this subject after implementation.