Introduction
Forget the old concept of retirement and saving for the future – there is no need to wait and every reason not to. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing first-class world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with no management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.
— Marketing Blurb, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)1
Why This Book?
THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK, written by Tim Ferriss in 2007 as a guide for people who want to escape their normal jobs and have “more life,” tapped into something big.
Whenever I had my copy out in public, a stranger would often give me a sly, sideways smile to show that they too were discovering the secret recipe to freedom. Or sometimes, if they were a little braver, they would walk up, interrupt my lunch, and ask me if I had found my muse – a side hustle designed to create a passive income allowing this escape from the normal working world. Not a lot of books create this bridge between strangers. Not a lot of books tap into a shared feeling, a shared desire, a shared pain. Not to this extent.
Over 2.1 million people in the United States alone bought The 4-Hour Workweek,2 hoping that they too could each find a niche product for a niche audience, test the market, start selling the product, and then automate and outsource the entire process so all they had to do was sit on a beach in Rio and check their ever-growing bank accounts (once a week, on Monday mornings). The premise of the book was not to help people become billionaires, or even millionaires, it was to help them make enough money to replace a traditional salary so they could free themselves from the traditional workplace.
I was one of those people. But it wasn’t until years later that I started to wonder why we felt like we needed to free ourselves in the first place. Why were people’s normal jobs and normal workplaces so painful that the idea of escaping them warranted interrupting a stranger’s lunch just to check the progress of their muse? No one ever comes up to me when I’m reading The Lord of the Rings to see if Frodo has finally destroyed the One Ring. No, there’s something much more real about this pain. There’s a collective knowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our lives and the way we work.
Some of us did manage to escape our normal jobs. I’m sure thousands of ex-accountants and ex-plumbers produced wonderful side businesses that mostly look after themselves – with online sales funnels and virtual assistants in Mumbai – and now they’re sitting back at a café in Madrid, sipping sangria, laughing at the old ways.
But many of us are still trapped. Many read the recipe, tried, and failed (me included – it’s called The Spectacular Men’s Underwear Failure of 2014; you get the picture). Many scanned the book, scoffed, and put it back on the shelf, thinking it was a bit far-fetched. Many never saw the book and are not aware of mini-retirements or muses and still work their usual jobs because it’s all they know. And some – most – are those normal people who just want to make as much money as they can, in an ordinary and secure way, to provide food, a place to live, financial security, and the occasional holiday to Bali for their family without the stress of wondering when or from where their next paycheck is going to arrive. Most of us have always depended on normal jobs, and most of us will always depend on normal jobs.
But, again, these normal jobs are painful.
We are all bound in friendship through this universal foe. We work hard and long weeks, and easily connect with strangers by merely saying “TGIF!” With our normal job, we sell our lives, our freedom, our humanity, to make a living and survive. This way of existing is unsustainable and damaging to our world, and, as we’ll find out later, completely unnecessary and not even profitable for the businesses that we work for.
But things are changing.
Globally, a social revolution – specifically regarding work: the way we work, the amount of control businesses have over us, and the realization that the way a business is managed impacts our lives and the world outside the sliding doors – is slowly getting louder.
The drums of discontent are uniting in a chorus that’s saying it’s not enough for a few lucky individuals to have a life of quality, that this life should be available to us all.
Women, for the most part, are beating those drums. This half of the population, who have fought so hard for so many years to be taken seriously in the working world, are now saying, “Something is still not right. I should be able to pick my kids up from school and eventually be the CEO or a director. Why the hell not? And why am I still doing all the housework?!”
They’re seeing that even though they have increased access to flexibility at work, they’re still doing the majority of the housework, still hurting their careers because they’re being perceived as uncommitted slackers (and being called working mothers when no man in the history of the universe has been called a working father), and still feeling guilty for using flexibility when everyone else is stuck in the office.
More women than ever before are starting businesses, partly because when they’re their own boss they aren’t constrained by rubbish traditions. They find that they really can have and do it all when they have the power to manage their lives – work, kids, sleep, and everything in between – in a holistic way.
And it’s not just women. Millennials (and the upcoming Gen Zs), in typical millennial fashion, are demanding more of life and their bosses and the people around them by asking that simple yet often demonized question: “Why?” As in, “Why am I forced to sit here till five? I finished everything I had to do two hours ago.” Or, “Why do you do it this way? I can write a program that could do it in a fraction of that time.” Or, “Why should I care? How does this job impact the planet?”
This well-informed and broad-minded generation knows, in their heart of hearts, that work is more than just about making money and retiring at seventy. They want to live now. They want to experience the world now. They want to contribute, to make a difference, now. And then go home. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to.
And it’s not just women and millennials. Men around the world are having existential crises. They’re angry and stressed and dying early and they don’t know why. They want to spend time with their kids, the way their dads never did with them. They want to create and rest and play rather than toil endlessly before some stress-related condition puts them in the grave. Many don’t even realize what they want because they’re too tired to think about what they want; they just know something is missing, and it damages them and the people around them.
The traditional workplace, with its long and rigid hours, has created a stunted version of men, men who “win bread” but have limited abilities in household management and caregiving and other important parts of life. And men are facing an unusual type of discrimination that hurts both them and their partners – flexism:3 requesting flexibility but being refused at much higher rates than women because “they don’t really need it.”*
Humans are voting with their feet. Freelancing – the gig economy – and its close cousin entrepreneurship are growing rapidly. Millions of people all over the world are leaving their secure, well-paying jobs to journey into the Wild West – finding their own customers, making their own money, looking after their own taxes, not having sick or parental leave, and, for those in the United States, not having health insurance – with nothing but caffeine and hope.4 The lack of social security and unpredictability of income are small costs for that taste of freedom, to be in control of their own lives. These people are fighting for their chance to have flexibility.5
Not everyone will truly make it as freelancers or entrepreneurs, though. What about those who don’t? And what about those who can’t work for themselves, either because their skills or profession don’t enable them to, or they’re just not entrepreneurially inclined? There’s a lot more to running a business than just doing the work itself. And what about those who don’t even want to be freelancers or entrepreneurs? Should the many people around the world with normal jobs continue to cope with non-freedom and rigid, low-quality lives?
The 4-Hour Workweek and countless other self-escape and self-flexibility books were a great start to help some individuals escape rigid workplaces, and to get many to question their place in the world and what they want from life. But the next questions are overdue: Why can’t we all have freedom? Do we really need to escape our normal jobs to get it? Or could our normal jobs be more accommodating to life so we can have both security and freedom? And if this is possible, what’s stopping it?
This book answers those questions. This is The 4-Hour Workweek for everyone else. I’m not trying to help individuals escape the rat race, but to challenge the existence of the rat race, and to argue that work itself adds incredible value to people’s lives beyond money; it just needs to change.
This book was written to guide current and future leaders into changing whole organizations – to free hundreds, thousands, millions of people from a way of working that doesn’t meet our expectations for modern life. It’s one thing to be an individual who is finding out how to personally escape and work flexibly, and something very different to be a manager or owner of a business who
1. feels compelled to provide flexibility for their workers (or even themselves) in the face of a thousand other pressures, and
2. is trying to put in place sustainable and successful flexibility practices for all employees and managers while still operating a business.
This book helps leaders by providing theory and evidence for the urgent need for flexibility for all and then provides practical guidance on rolling out successful (and profitable) flexibility campaigns.
Who the Hell Am I?
Anyone who claims to possess expertise in an area should probably have some credibility to back up their words. There should be a reason someone would listen to me over anyone else who is also writing on the same topic, or even take notice of the topic itself. Do I have a doctorate in flexibility? Or business? Or workology?* Have I built a multi-national company that leads the way in flexible work practices? Do I have the fifteen to twenty years of business or consulting experience generally required to be a thought leader in the area? Have I ever even visited Harvard? Well, no.
First and foremost, I am me – a person; a human; Robert. I learned the hard and ugly way, roughly after my second or third retrenchment during my “normal” career, that attaching my identity to my profession is a restrictive and dangerous way to perceive myself. “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m an engineer.” “Cool [I’ve secretly now judged you to be a worthy person to talk to and be associated with because you’re educated and have a respectable job].”
Although I have worked as an engineer, a process improvement manager, a casual laborer in a bread factory, a lifeguard at a swimming pool, a duty manager at Subway, and a freelance editor and writer and consultant, I don’t refer to myself by any of these titles. No. I am a unique arrangement of universe-energy. I’m a team of thirty-seven trillion cells, each one refined through billions of years of evolution (and each one agreeing with you that this paragraph is starting to sound like pretentious crapola).
A million different things make me who I am: likes and dislikes and loves and hates; things that make me happy, things that make me wildly upset; a missing toe on my right foot. I care about certain things and certain people; I couldn’t give a shit about others. I’m good at some things, bad at more. I eat; I have sex; I sleep; I write; I make things; I look at clouds; I read news on the toilet; I watch Netflix; I learn; I have dreams and goals. But mostly, I’m a human.
What I have, in relevance to this topic, is enough experience in enough workplaces in the right positions to see that the whole “work” thing, in its current form, is bullshit; and I have enough passion and desire and knowledge to do something about it.
It only took a couple of years of working the normal nine to five to know that something was wrong, to know that it’s not right to feel terrible and exhausted on a daily basis, to crave weekends, and to turn a desperate shade of blue every time Sunday night arrives.
It only took a certain number of coworkers and friends with dead eyes and poor health, who were also craving the weekends or upcoming holidays, to know that something was very wrong.
This was when I was in the trenches as a manufacturing engineer and starting down the route of process improvement (increasing efficiency of machines and people, ultimately to make more money by reducing wasted time and resources). I could already see some terrible flaws in the way we manage others, the biggest being why we need to “manage” others at all.
The feeling of injustice got caught in my throat when I saw grown adults being treated like school children, but with less trust. They were being controlled and coerced into doing the “right” things at work; and this was killing their desire to do their best work, creating an us-versus-them scenario where there was always opposition between the two. In so many ways, businesses were stifling the very productivity that they were paying specialists (like me) so much money to achieve. Why was this happening?
I started to develop and test my own theories about productivity and management, both on myself and on unsuspecting people above and below me on the ladder. These theories mainly focused on energy. Most of us didn’t have enough energy to truly give a fuck, or even to think properly. People already had great ideas and a desire to change and do better, but management pressure and long hours didn’t leave space (time and energy) for these qualities to be fostered.
I broadened my focus to include waste, and I realized that the way business operates is wasteful, not only to business itself, but a waste of life bordering on criminal. To see adults sitting at a desk trying to look busy because they’re “not allowed to go home yet” makes me want to cry.
No one gains anything from these practices; or rather, we – individuals, business, society, the environment, and everything in between – all lose because of them.
During my experiments in different work environments (office, home, factory, etc.) I found that the human side and the work side of a person are inseparable, and they influence each other (sometimes for good, sometimes for bad). I discovered that using up less time and energy improves productivity. Yet the way people are managed doesn’t take into account this phenomenon. Instead, people are used as though they’re machines, expected to be constantly productive, day in and day out, and the importance of their lives outside of work is rarely considered until something extreme happens (a death, the flu, childbirth). It’s all wrong.
Parallel to these slowly developing ideas about energy and productivity, traffic was bugging me.
Growing up in a small town in the middle of Australia, I found traffic congestion completely foreign and, well, shocking when I finally experienced it – every morning and every evening – as a professional working in one of Australia’s capital cities, Brisbane. It was surreal: a weird nightmare as I crawled forward in my car behind an infinite line of other crawling cars for a reason that would never reveal itself, while listening to someone on the radio talk about how bad the traffic was.
Day after day the traffic reporter listed streets and highways that were suffering from congestion. Every morning and afternoon it was the same list. It didn’t change. There was never any mention of how it could change or anything being done to improve it. A helicopter was burning copious amounts of fuel to tell us what we all knew. Its purpose, I guessed, was to remind people who were stuck in traffic that they were stuck in traffic. I also guessed that I was already in hell.
The engineer in me had to do something. I read about traffic congestion: Why does it exist? What are the different types? How do you reduce it or eliminate it? It was fascinating, and the answers were exactly the opposite of human nature.
To get rid of a traffic jam, you either need to get some cars off the road (more on that later) or you need to drive more slowly and leave a large gap between yourself and the car in front. That erases those sudden stops and starts that propagate a jam, and eventually it disappears.
Japanese jamologist (traffic researcher) Professor Katsuhiro Nishinari recommends a forty-meter gap or more to disperse traffic – a theory tested with great success on Tokyo’s Shuto Expressway:
At 4:00 pm there was always about a ten-kilometer traffic jam. We asked eight cars to keep headway; we asked them to move more slowly than other cars and it was amazing. With just eight cars the jam didn’t appear for forty minutes. If you continuously had all cars (keeping headway) maybe you can shift the onset again and have no traffic jam. It’s counter-intuitive but if we slow down it makes the flow faster. Slower is faster.6
There was one problem with this revolutionary find: people aren’t patient at the best of times, and behind the wheel they turn into monsters who need to get where they’re trying to get, now! I literally ended up on several kill lists (including my then-partner’s) by testing this slow, constant-speed driving with large gaps.
In trying to address the problem on a larger scale, and avoid being murdered, I came up with other solutions: a phone app that would help drivers regulate their speed well before they reached an area of congestion, or a leave-your-car-at-home day to encourage people to try public transport or find other ways to avoid driving. I learned about autonomous vehicles and what they could eventually do for congestion. But in my digging for information about traffic, an obvious question came to mind: Why are people driving at the same time in the same direction every day anyway? And this is when I discovered telecommuting – working away from the normal workplace by using technology.
This concept of not going to the office every day was something I must have heard of before, but I didn’t take it seriously, or maybe I didn’t see the point. The Protestant ethic, “work hard all week, at work, doing whatever is asked of you by your boss, and then relax and drink away your pain on the weekend,” was seared into my psyche at an early age. But here was this thing – working from a different location, even home of all places – that suddenly and loudly answered the question, How do we get cars off the road?
And while I was digging for information, I fell down a rabbit hole. I realized that telecommuting was just one form of flexible work, and that these different forms could not only help with traffic congestion but also ticked the boxes for the energy and productivity theories I had been playing with: they answered the questions of how to help people feel happier and more engaged and productive at work, consistently. Eureka! These two parallel roads that I had been putting so much of myself into converged into one superhighway of goodness.
Flexibility also turned out to be a boon for sustainability as well as other challenges the world is facing, such as gender inequality, poor physical and mental health, aging workforces and disability, wealth inequality, skills shortages, job loss due to automation, and more. Double and triple eureka!
From connections I’ve made in the world of diversity and inclusion and sustainability, from research I’ve done for consulting and writing on the subject, and from learning about health as I go through my own journeys with depression and chronic pain, I’ve discovered that there exists such an intricate web between life and work and the world around us that it’s impossible for any of these elements to exist separate from the others. Pull one strand and the whole web moves, for good or for bad.
For example, work-induced stress produces adverse physical responses (such as inflammation) that can lead to depression, the leading cause of disability in the world.7 Governments can reduce traffic congestion and pollution by incentivizing flexible work practices much faster and more cheaply than by building new roads or expanding public transport. Rates of domestic violence can be reduced by allowing for more job control and autonomy for both men and women.
For me, over the course of the last several years, the concept of work flexibility has grown from “telecommuting would be a cool way to reduce congestion” to the premise and driver behind the book you hold:
We, as humans, expect more. We need more. We deserve more. To be treated like a human and to be free to be human is a basic right, and one that cannot and should not be taken away by fear, arbitrary rules of the workplace, and outdated and controlling management styles. Flexibility is a human right.
Being human is a major theme of this book, so I aim to bring my real, authentic self into the words – anger and happiness and imperfections and all. So there will be a bad word here and there; there will be references to topics we balk at in the workplace, such as sex, and mental health, and boredom, and love, and lying, and joy, and, heaven forbid, other passions besides our jobs; there will be (at least an attempt of) vulnerability and humor, mostly in the form of personal stories and dry, rhetorical sarcasm; and there will be hand-drawn stick figures and graphs. This is not by chance. With this book I want to step away from the needlessly sterile, inhuman places many of us call work, and encourage a dirty, truthful, productive, real space where we can be our true selves, and be human all the time, not just after five. And that’s who the hell I am.
Guiding Principles
Flexibility Is for All People
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 flexibility 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.
Another major 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 and possible for all people to have flexible work, and I will show you why and how.
Humans Don’t Want to Escape Work
The driving assumption of The 4-Hour Workweek 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.
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.
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 (Figure 1.1). 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 all our needs, including those provided by work, can be fulfilled in a sustainable way (Figure 1.2).
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.
The Productivity of a Human Is Non-Linear
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.
Figure 1.1. For most people work is currently a belligerent being that demands all our time and effort and energy and forces all other parts of the human experience into the tired margins of the day, starving them (and us) in the process.
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 energy buckets (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.
Humans Can Look After Themselves
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.
Figure 1.2. What work could be: part of the team! With flex, work becomes one of the parts of our humanity and helps the others flourish rather than hindering them (and flourishes itself too, with greater energy, motivation, and creativity).
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.
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.8 They need to question why their current work practices are sucking up their employees’ time and energy to the point where it becomes a Herculean task to choose exercise over collapsing in front of the TV.
I’m very much against a business inflicting itself onto an employee’s life with patronizing “we’re going to help 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.
The Biggest Barrier to Flexibility Is Polite Skepticism
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.” This argument is known as polite skepticism.9
And although seemingly supportive and harmless, it is 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.]”
Facebook, a company whose mission is “to build community and bring the world closer together,”10 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.
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?”
Both were politely skeptical.
Sandberg, a proclaimed feminist and author of the book Lean In, 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.”
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.”11
Maybe later.
Not right now.
Not for us.
It’s just not feasible at the moment.
Sorry.
[Big smile.]
The urgency for flexibility is not clear to everyone. It’s a nice-to-have instead of a house on fire, or a burning platform in corporate lingo. (Also notice both Sandberg’s and Zuckerberg’s assumption that flexibility is only needed by parents.)
But it is 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 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.12
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.
Small Changes Can Make Big Differences
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 just get back to damn work!
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.
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.
Even just taking the time to listen 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.
The Fundamentals Are Universal …
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.
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,13 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.
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,14 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.15 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.
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).
The fundamentals in this book can be applied worldwide.
… But Their Application Can Always Be Improved
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.
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, and make money?
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.
Structure
Humans Are Not Robots combines theory and practical methods. Some of the ideas are discussed in great depth to illustrate their power and to challenge conventional thought, which is essential when questioning management and control methods that have been normal for hundreds or thousands of years. But it’s also designed to be read and used by any business leader, current or future, to make a real and practical difference to any workplace. This is achieved by dividing the book into four parts:
Part One: For Humans and the World looks at how the traditional workplace starves us of our fundamental human needs and causes signifficant harm with its long and rigid structures and how flexibility enables a more sustainable way of living that helps employees feel whole and more human. It also challenges the assumption that people want to escape work, by arguing that work fulfills many of our human needs – it just needs to be tamed.
Part One also looks at the broader connection between today’s management practices and critical problems the world faces, and how, with some simple changes, organizations can directly impact our crowded roads, the fragile environment, gender inequality, domestic violence, mental and physical health problems, and the negative effects of aging populations.
Part Two: Definitely Not Robots introduces the concepts of energy buckets and non-linear productivity to explain why flexibility is important from a business perspective, and that to maximize results and profits we should consider employees as whole humans rather than automatons with infinite energy (robots).
It considers how flexibility reduces the wasted effort and energy found in normal work structures, and how it multiplies productivity. Instead of being a cost, flexibility is an investment with significant and measurable returns.
Part Two deep-dives into real cases of a special type of flexibility – reduced hours with full pay (the four-day workweek and the five-hour workday) – as well as remote work, to demonstrate how having the freedom to look after human needs is great for business.
Part Three: How to Flex is a practical guide for rolling flexibility out to an entire organization. It lays out the 3Ts of Flexibility: The Talk, Training, and Trial. These are the critical elements needed to get it right. Although a step-by-step guide for implementation is provided, every business is unique, so this part is really about creating an understanding of why these different elements are important and what needs to be covered when a flexibility strategy is being created and rolled out.
Part Three also deals with the forgotten industries: those that many would consider impossible to implement flexibility because of the need for workers to be present at certain times and the apparent difficulty in automating tasks. They include the healthcare, manufacturing, retail, construction, airline, and legal industries. They require slightly different and more innovative pathways to flexibility, and because of the intensity and rigidity of jobs in these industries, flexibility is arguably more essential than in other knowledge-based industries.
Part Four: Work Revolution looks at a world where flexibility is normal and rigidity is the exception. It considers various changes and adaptions in the workplace, recruitment, management, holidays, language around flexibility, how people connect and collaborate, and, ultimately, what the future might look like when work adds to a full life rather than subtracts from it.
* Flexism, defined as “prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s working status,” also applies to people who have access to flexibility but are discriminated against for using it (mostly women).
* May or may not be a made-up discipline.
