Humans Are Not Robots: Why We All Need Work Flexibility and What Company Leaders Can Do About It - Hardcover

Hawkins, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1947540041 ISBN 13: 9781947540040

Publisher: Maven House, 2020

Synopsis

<div><b>A hopeful vision of the post-covid-19 world of work and society, with practical guidance for how to get there.</b><br><br>In this entertaining, thought-provoking, and comprehensive guidebook on work flexibility, Robert Hawkins builds on new and old management theories, case studies, interviews, and his own personal journey from rigidity to flexibility to show leaders how to free hundreds, thousands, millions of people from a way of working that doesn’t meet expectations for modern life. <i>Humans Are Not Robots</i> provides theory and evidence to show the urgent need for flexibility for all and then offers practical guidance on rolling out sustainable and successful (and profitable) flexibility campaigns.<br><br> Hawkins explores various types of flexibility, including remote work, flexitime, compressed workweeks, and job sharing, as well as those not commonly discussed (reduced hours with full pay, return-to-work internships, flexibility in manufacturing, healthcare, construction). He delves into the science of human needs theory to demonstrate how the traditional nine-to-five workplace creates unsustainable lives and shows that, with even small changes, leaders in any industry can use flexibility to: <ul> <li>Make work a vital and fun part of life again</li> <li>Boost productivity, engagement, and innovation</li> <li>Reduce gender inequality and domestic violence</li> <li>Delay retirement of workers and mitigate the issues of an ageing population</li> <li>Fight obesity and reduce the burden of poor health on individuals and health systems</li> <li>Ensure that people maintain needed skills and relevance in the face of increased automation and uncertainty</li> <li>Impact climate change</li> and do all of this while increasing profits. </ul> Part philosophical and scientific journey, part how-to guide, <i>Humans are Not Robots</i> provides readers a deep-dive into the world of work flexibility to learn how to fully unlock its power. Essential reading for leaders of any organization, the book presents a stark and beautiful vision of what people’s lives could be, and the idea that this can be achieved <i>right now.</i> </div>

About this title

About the Author

Robert Hawkins is a partner in the consultancy The FlexAgility Group, recently working with the Australian Department of Defence and Optometry Australia. Robert views flexibility not as a "nice to have" but an essential right that enables people to live sustainability. He has written on flexibility for FlexJobs, Remote.co, and 1 Million for Work Flexibility and is an ambassador and lead contributor for Flexible Working Day, an international day to celebrate and showcase the benefits of flexible work for both people and organizations. He chaired and presented at The Flexible and Agile Work Summit in Sydney in 2019. He holds a B.Eng., Chemical Engineering, from the University of Adelaide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

<div><h2>Guiding Principles</h2> <br><br> <h3>Flexibility Is for All People</h3> Flexibility is usually only considered important for the working mothers mentioned earlier, or those with some other caring responsibilities. And there are swathes of our population working in industries where <em>flexibility</em> would not be uttered for fear of being laughed out of the building, such as healthcare, manufacturing, trades and construction, retail, hospitality, and transport – basically any industry that isn’t “knowledge” work and that can’t easily be done at any time from any location. <br><br> The main theme of this book is that flexibility is for all people, regardless of their reasons, the industry in which they work, the level or type of job they have, their gender, their age, or any other boxes they fit in. It’s entirely necessary <em>and</em> possible for all people to have flexible work, and I will show you why and how. <br><br> <h3>Humans Don’t Want to Escape Work</h3> The driving assumption of <em>The 4-Hour Workweek</em> and similar books is that people want to escape work itself, but I will argue that we need work for many reasons beyond earning money. <br><br> Work fulfills extremely important human requirements for a full life, such as connecting and participating with other people pursuing shared goals, opportunities for us to understand and create and learn, having purpose and mastering skills (even flipping a burger or picking up rubbish can provide that purpose and mastery), as well as maintaining a healthy contrast to the other parts of our lives. The thing that we want to escape is long, rigid, unnecessarily stressful work. <br><br> Work, in its current form, is a belligerent, voracious monster, crashing around and devouring all of our resources, while our health, relationships, leisure, discovery and adventure, freedom, higher thought and consciousness, and other passions and interests are all huddled in the corner and under rocks, emaciated and starving, waiting for a precious weekend or holiday so they can finally be taken care of. We don’t need to destroy the monster, we just need to tame it and feed it less. There just needs to be a better balance so that <em>all</em> our needs, including those provided by work, can be fulfilled in a sustainable way. <br><br> I do call for less time at work throughout the book as a general goal because our current standard is damaging in so many ways, but the aim is not to get down to zero hours, which is harmful in its own way, or a Keynesian fifteen-hour workweek, which is just another arbitrary number. The aim is to focus on the value of work, both to the employee and the employer, and the amount of control someone has over their own work and life. <br><br> <h3>The Productivity of a Human Is Non-Linear</h3> Unlike a robot, which produces the same number of things all day every day (linear productivity), humans have peaks and troughs of productivity (non-linear productivity), and this needs to be decoupled from time and place constraints for people to fully realize their productive potential. <br><br> The value that a person can provide a company is so much more than physical presence and unending toil, and it varies from minute to minute, day to day, week to week. People are capable of improving their work and that of their coworkers, and they have the ability to innovate in abstract and astonishing ways. But that capability can only be unleashed when they are able to fill their <em>energy buckets</em> (the balanced source of human energy, fully described in Chapter 5) by regularly fulfilling all of their human needs, and it’s heavily suppressed by the level of toil and control that are inflicted by traditional work structures. Flexibility allows us to move away from this scarcity of human capital and toward abundance. <br><br> <h3>Humans Can Look After Themselves</h3> There is this weird assumption that employees need perks and awards and lifestyle training to feel “well” and engaged at work and to make better personal choices about exercise, sleep, and diet. It’s all very creepy, and not only disregards the fact that we’re living, breathing individuals who can make good decisions for ourselves but also ignores the fact that work itself is often a root cause for our poor lifestyle choices in the first place. <br><br> Businesses don’t need to educate employees on the benefits of sleep or give them financial rewards to get at least six hours of sleep a night, as some companies in Japan are doing for their employees. They just need to give them the opportunity to sleep more by ensuring that they’re not working ridiculously long hours. <br><br> They don’t need to convince employees to exercise by tracking and rewarding or punishing them based on their Fitbit stats, as the state of West Virginia in the United States tried to do to their teachers, with proposed $500 fines for individuals not tracking their health data. They need to question why their current work practices are sucking up their employee’s time and energy to the point where it becomes a Herculean task to choose exercise over collapsing in front of the TV. <br><br> I’m very much against a business inflicting itself onto an employee’s life with patronizing “we’re going to <em>help</em> you make better decisions” rubbish, offering free fruit and step challenges and sleep tracking. A main aspect of flexibility is that it gives people the space (time and energy) to make their own choices; what they do with that space is not their business’s business. <br><br> <h3>The Biggest Barrier to Flexibility Is Polite Skepticism</h3> The most common argument against flexibility, the one that I hear more often than any other, is not the absolute and angry rejection of the idea. It’s not, “That sounds friggin’ terrible; get the hell out of my office.” It’s much friendlier and more casual – “It sounds fantastic, but it’s just not for my business,” or “It’s just not feasible right now.” The argument is known as <em>polite skepticism</em>. <br><br> This type of seemingly supportive and harmless statement is in fact the biggest hurdle to freedom and sustainable lives for millions. Its subtext is, “Well, in a perfect world, sure, I’d love to give more flexibility to all my staff. I’d also love to give them each Lamborghinis and fly them to Nepal for yoga and team-bonding sessions; but it’s not really practical, is it? It’d be nice to have; but no, not for us. Thank you! [Big smile.]” <br><br> Facebook, a company whose mission is “to build community and bring the world closer together,”  recently lost one of its employees because it rejected her request for a simple type of flexibility: working part time. Eliza Khuner, a data scientist, wanted less time at work so she could spend more time with her young children. After being denied she decided to leave loudly. <br><br> She publicly challenged both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO and COO, asking for their support for flexibility: “Would you lead this company and the U.S. in supporting working parents; would you give us the chance to show you how kick-ass and loyal we can be with fewer hours at the desk?” <br><br> Both were politely skeptical. <br><br> Sandberg, a proclaimed feminist and author of the book <em>Lean In</em>, explained that “while management wanted to move in that direction at some point in the future, they couldn’t right now. Allowing part-time options to all parents would strain the rest of the team.” <br><br> And Zuckerberg? Khuner wrote that “he was sorry I was leaving, but echoed Sheryl. He said he’d like to offer more options for parents, but the trade-offs in serving the greater community were too great. Maybe later.”  <br><br> Maybe later. <br><br> Not right now. <br><br> Not for us. <br><br> It’s just not feasible at the moment. <br><br> Sorry. <br><br> [Big smile.] <br><br> The urgency for flexibility is not clear to everyone. It’s a nice-to-have instead of a house on fire, or a <em>burning platform</em> in corporate lingo. (Also notice both Sandberg’s and Zuckerberg’s assumption that flexibility is only needed by parents.) <br><br> But it <em>is</em> urgent; the urgency is just not obvious. The link between the traditional, rigid workplace and many severe and immediate issues we face as individuals and as a society is just not easily seen with the naked eye, in the same way that the link between smoking and lung cancer wasn’t easily seen until doctors and statisticians looked deeper in the 1940s and 1950s; and even they were confronted by polite skeptics (and orchestrated propaganda) for decades. <br><br> The first part of this book shows the polite skeptics that the platform for flexibility is indeed on fire; the rest of the book shows that it’s possible and profitable to put that fire out. <br><br> <h3>Small Changes Can Make Big Differences</h3> What often lies beneath the polite skepticism is the assumption that flexibility is extreme – a radical change that gets in the way of everyone’s work, costs millions, and kills collaboration and teamwork. There’s a belief that it’s unsustainable – an overinflated bubble due to burst at any moment, at which point everyone can <em>just get back to damn work! </em> <br><br> But flexibility is not extreme or radical. What’s extreme is doing the same thing in the same place at the same time every day, forty to sixty hours a week, and then squeezing everything else in life into the remaining gaps. Flexibility brings work and life back to something more sensible. <br><br> And because of the extreme nature of our normal workplaces, and because of the complexities of human nature, small workplace improvements can have profound impacts on people’s lives and their productivity. Reducing the workday by one hour can have a huge effect on life sustainability, or working from home one day a week can boost engagement and productivity while making a real difference to traffic and pollution. <br><br> Even just taking the time to <em>listen</em> to what your employees want, and then giving them some feeling of control and autonomy over their daily activities, can have benefits that far exceed any corporate wellness program. <br><br> <h3>The Fundamentals Are Universal . . . </h3> Although this book is contextually aimed at countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand – because they have the biggest similarities in work and life cultures, having originated from the same British industrial roots – it’s written in a way that has universal relevance to any country inhabited by people who work. <br><br> For instance, France has been at the forefront of protecting workers’ rights since . . . forever, exemplified by their thirty-five-hour workweeks and their willingness to protest any hint of oppression. But with proponents of hard work and capitalism pushing for increased workweeks, even France needs a reminder that flexibility is critically important for sustainable lives and good business, and that focusing on the number of hours worked is making the assumption that humans are robots. <br><br> And at the other extreme, in South Korea – known to be one of the most overworked countries on the planet – the message of flexibility is a savage fight for people to have any semblance of life outside of work. Their government has started on the journey to address the country’s inhumanely long and rigid workweeks by reducing the maximum workweek from sixty-eight hours to fifty two, but they still have a long way to go. There’s a company that literally locks people up in a faux prison (at the prisoner’s request and on their dime) for a day or two so they can have some respite from busyness and clocks and mobile phones. The belligerent beast of work is flourishing in South Korea, and it’s sucking lives dry, and it needs to be beaten back with a whip and a chair. <br><br> No matter where on Earth we are, we are humans, and we have fundamental needs that must be considered when structuring how we work. And the issues addressed by increasing flexibility are global. Traffic jams, gender inequality, stress-related health problems, and wealth inequality afflict every country that has people (and roads). <br><br> The fundamentals in this book can be applied worldwide. <br><br> <h3>. . . But Their Application Can Always Be Improved</h3> It would be the height of foolishness if I thought I knew exactly what flexibility should look like for every company, and it would be arrogant to think that others won’t be able to vastly improve on what I’ve written in this book. <br><br> I give the science for why flexibility is so powerful, at a fundamental level, and I give several examples of what has worked and what could work better. And I ask why companies exist at all: Is it just to make money? Or is it to boost the quality of life, improve the world, <em>and</em> make money? <br><br> In other words, what follows are the fundamentals of why and how we can improve work, from my point of view and experience, backed up by evidence; now let’s go and together test and improve on the ideas discussed in this book. </div>

Edition details

• Publisher: Maven House
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1947540041
• ISBN 13: 9781947540040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318