Providing services on demand is connected to the “sharing economy,” which started from the idea that people who have a car they don’t use all day or an extra bedroom in their apartment could make money by sharing that extra capacity with those who want it. Instead of everyone owning one of everything, we can generate income by sharing things that we already have. Other labels for the same phenomenon are “project economy” and “gig economy,” in the sense that you can earn income project by project rather than at fixed times for fixed sums.
The on-demand economy has already come in for plenty of criticism. An Uber driver who is a housewife or student driving to earn extra income whenever he or she has time is one thing. But drivers who are actually trying to make a living often receive below-minimum-wage pay and no benefits—no health or disability insurance, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, or retirement plans. That’s what it means to be a contractor rather than an employee. Some job is better than no job, but the inequities are stark. As New York magazine reports, a platform start-up that connects housecleaners to customers ends up employing homeless people to clean the homes of the prosperous. Even as the entrepreneurs succeed in attracting hundreds of millions in investments from Silicon Valley investors, they do not provide the pay and benefits necessary to allow the service providers they profit from to rent a home of their own.
That said, the on-demand economy is bound to continue growing, and it has enormous promise—even now, it at least allows low-income workers to stay home when a child is sick or school is closed and not lose their jobs. To make it work for everyone, however, we’ll have to find ways to make the sharing economy a caring economy, just as workers in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution turned to unions and strikes to claim their fair share of the wealth they were creating. We have to attend to the needs of all platform workers to ensure that they can earn a living wage, have access to good healthcare and education, and provide for their futures.
New forms will emerge, or rather new adaptations of old forms. MIT professor Thomas Malone, who wrote a prescient book called The Future of Work in 2004, predicted that freelancers with a craft or a specific profession would be likely to organize as guilds to exert the power necessary to even the playing field with employers. He used the example of the Screen Actors Guild, now known as SAG-AFTRA, which brings together a wide range of media artists—actors, singers, dancers, broadcast journalists, voiceover artists—who work as independent contractors. SAG members come together on specific creative projects—a play, a movie, a sound recording, a broadcast—and disband again, much as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, and other small businesses or individuals come together to build a house. The guild itself negotiates and provides health and pension benefits, allowing members to work flexibly on different projects as much as they want or need to.
If we can provide for contractors or freelancers in ways that ensure they can earn a living and provide for their families and their futures, the on-demand economy offers the prospect of far more flexible, self-scheduled work hours. It points to the end of the office as we know it, the place you must go to earn a living. That is exactly what many workers who are trying to fit their work and their caregiving responsibilities together need.
Moving up the income scale, the on-demand economy is likely to be a godsend for professionals who are also caregivers. Lawyers, business executives, bankers, doctors, and many other professional women could continue to advance in their careers or at least stay in the game while being the kind of parents they want to be. Consider Axiom Law and Bliss Lawyers, both of which have a bench of high-quality law firm alumni whom they rent out on a project basis to large companies—doing the same work that law firms do but at a fraction of the cost and a multiple of the flexibility. Topcoder matches freelance computer coders to projects; Eden McCallum provides project-based consulting services; Medicast allows patients to request a doctor through an app, charging a flat fee for a basic visit and paying malpractice insurance for the doctors on their roster. The Business Talent Group, based in Los Angeles, even rents out bosses who use their executive skills to get a specific project done.
If we can provide the right kind of portable social safety net, this deep flexibility will make it far easier for a wide range of platform workers to navigate the phases of life when they need to be caring for family members. But in the meantime, of course, millions of Americans still have day jobs with fixed hours, fixed locations, and bosses who expect fixed amounts of work. How can we change that economy to make room for care?
OpenWork
THOUGH MANY OFFICES ARE STILL stuck in a framework that was established over a century ago, some imaginative and innovative workplaces are making dramatic changes today. These workplaces allow employees to shape their own working environment together with their supervisors. They have opened up spaces for conversations that previously took place in secret or not at all and opened the door to an entire array of possibilities that can improve productivity, community, loyalty, and contentment. All of these changes make room for care. All of them are part of something called OpenWork, a platform and movement that I am proud to be a part of.
OpenWork is both a noun and a verb. It means a kind of work, a way of working, a spirit and set of values that animates a particular workplace. Openworkers are employees who have been able to make change from the bottom up, either collaboratively at their employer’s invitation or more insistently, helping their superiors see and understand the enormous benefits of trust, mutual respect, flexibility, and mutual accountability. Kathleen Christensen, board chair of OpenWork.org, describes it as a place where “we share stories of organizations shattering the poverty of imagination that limits business productivity and societal well-being.”
OpenWork works, for management and workers alike. Ninety-seven percent of openworking companies see increased productivity; 88 percent of employees report greater job satisfaction; and 45 percent have reduced rates of stress and burnout. To see how the elements of OpenWork have been put into practice, the website offers a wide range of examples. These are real places that have made real changes.
At the financial arm of General Motors, for instance, the company wanted to increase engagement and decrease stress at their call centers:
[GM Financial] handed over the scheduling to employees to figure out the best way to work. They ended up allowing employees to make their own assignments and schedules. They came together and came up with a plan [under which] they could show up within 3 hours of their start time—or compress their hours during the summer—as long as they were working the equivalent of an 8-hour shift every day. It’s resulted in significant reported decrease in stress and a 90 percent reduction of tardiness. People can have their home lives, and get stuck in traffic without panicking. It’s really reduced attrition rates. They’re now below industry average at just 6.2 percent.
Another company that exemplifies OpenWork principles is a multiservice tax firm from Dallas, Texas, called Ryan, LLC. They lost a number of star employees to burnout in 2008 and, in response, created a program called myRyan, which “enables employees to work wherever they want and whenever they want, as long as their work responsibilities are met.” They can monitor their own progress through an online dashboard, but they monitor performance, measured with a score, instead of hours worked. The goal is to maintain a high score, not to work a certain number of billable hours.
Accounting firms, both big and small, have been particularly innovative—perhaps because women have often been the bookkeepers in family businesses and accounting has long featured more women than law or finance. It’s a particular plus that at least some of the partners in the Big Four global accounting firms—KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EY, and Deloitte—were promoted from part-time positions. In 2013, for instance, Ernst & Young (as it was then named) promoted more than two hundred employees “to executive levels while on formal flexible work arrangements.” Deloitte has a program of “mass career cus
tomization” for all employees, based on a book of that name coauthored by Deloitte vice chairman Cathleen Benko and Anne Cicero Weisberg. It allows each business unit to come up with a set of options for its employees that would allow them to either ramp up or dial down their careers as necessary. Sharon Allen, who was chairman of Deloitte from 2003 to 2011, said of the system, “Over the course of a long career, almost everybody has a need to adjust what they’re doing—the pace, the location, whatever that might be.”
Beyond accounting, consider 1-800 CONTACTS, a direct-to-consumer retail business with more than nine hundred employees in Utah. It has an ingenious attendance system that is modeled on airline frequent-flier programs. Employees can earn points for “positive attendance behaviors” (like coming to work on time) and then redeem those points for up to one hundred unpaid days off a year and more than thirty paid days. Like an airline system, employees can use fewer points on each redemption if they provide more advance notice. They can also trade, release, or pick up shifts from home or even from their smartphones.
In still other sectors, Delta Air Lines has created a host of flexible options to allow employees to manage their time better and fit together their professional responsibilities with their family lives. Southern California Gas Company has a program called the SmartWork initiative, which offers flexible work hours, telecommuting, and extended-leave options. Other options include collaborative software to help employees work from home. According to Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas, American Express employees who work virtually “produce 43 percent more business than their office counterparts. IBM saves $700 million in real estate costs by allowing 25 percent of its employees worldwide to work from home.”
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.
TAKING CHARGE
YOU 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.
Train Your Boss
ONE 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 t
oll 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!
Have the Conversation with Your Boss
ONE 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.
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