Creating the calm corporation

It doesn't have to be crazy at work
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
HarperCollins Publishers
230 pages,Rs 499
 
The authors of this book say, and perhaps you have experienced it too, that the corporate environment is turning crazy. Deadlines for completing assignments are getting shorter, teams are shrinking, and the workload on each employee is rising. Even though many people today work longer hours on weekdays and put in extra effort during weekends, they flounder. Higher stress levels are leading to higher employee churn. The authors, who are co-founders of a US-based software company called Basecamp, contend that it doesn’t have to be this way. By making the right choices, it is possible to build a company that is perhaps less ambitious, but is profitable, gentler on its employees, and true to its customers. 

 

A key reason for the current craziness is the “high growth at any cost” mantra that has overtaken the corporate world. Like medieval emperors, who were said to be consumed by earth lust, today’s corporate leaders suffer from ambition hyper-inflation. They often set arbitrary growth targets. The entire workforce then becomes obsessed with meeting the numbers. In this quest, many suffer burnouts. Often shortcuts are taken, books cooked, and integrity and customer satisfaction sacrificed. If the numbers for one quarter are achieved, they are ratcheted up further for the next quarter, and the nightmare begins all over again.
 

Employees are also unable to complete their tasks within the designated eight hours per day and 40 hours per week because the office has turned into a minefield of disruptions and distractions. It has become almost impossible to work uninterrupted for a few hours. First, there are the meetings. The authors say that companies squander their employees’ time and attention span in meetings as if it is a limitless resource. When 10 employees attend a meeting for one hour, that is 10 hours wasted. Second, there are the communication devices, like phones, emails and chat tools, and the culture of instant response that companies foster devour workers’ limited time and attention span. Third, the open office is a noisy space where accomplishing any work that requires hard thinking is a challenge.

 
It is to have better control over their time, pace and the environment in which they work that many people today prefer to be consultants rather than full-time employees, even if it means taking a 50 per cent salary cut. 
 
What then are the answers to these issues? One, of course, is to scale down growth ambition. Instead of worrying about constantly expanding their market share, corporate leaders need to be okay with being consistently profitable, and need to give equal weight to goals like having happy employees and satisfied customers. Of course, doing this is only possible if the decision makers have control over their destiny. The authors say that they deliberately avoided taking money from venture capitalists to avoid the pressures that inevitably follow in its wake.

 
The authors also suggest minimising the time spent on status-check meetings. At Basecamp, employees write daily and weekly updates of what they have achieved on the Basecamp software (a tool that helps teams meet their communication needs), and that’s it. 
 
Companies also need to provide greater flexibility to their employees in the matter of how much time they spend in the office. The traditional thinking is that if an employee is not in office he is not working. The authors counter-argue that a lot of employees do not work even though they are in office all day. Supervisors, they say, should focus on whether their direct reports deliver on what they promise.      

 
Another idea that many companies, especially the younger ones, will find worth emulating is that a company’s organisational structure, culture and practices should not be cast in stone. Great software, the authors say, is built through iteration, and so is a great company. Treat your company, too, as a product. Try something new. If it works, retain it, and if it doesn’t throw it out. Do not stick to practices just because “it has always been done so around here”.
 
To create a serene office environment, employees need to conduct themselves as they would in a library and be mindful of disturbing others. They also need to respect the fact that a colleague may be engaged in important work and will reply to their message in a few hours, instead of badgering her right away. 

 
Many of the ideas in this book are eminently sensible and practicable. They are worthy of consideration because they come from a duo that has created a successful global company. Even if you could implement some of these ideas at your team level, you could create an oasis of calm. It doesn’t matter then if you lack the influence to do anything about the craziness besetting the corporate world at large.