Here is a report on a survey of 25,000 IBMers. (By the way – I have no connection at all with IBM)

Flexible arrangements and the chance to work from your living room increases productivity so much that workers can carry on for 19 hours more than other employees before feeling any interference with family life.

The findings are based on a study of 24,436 employees of IBM, the technology company, across 75 different countries.

For office-based workers the tipping point at which staff felt that their working life started to interfere with their home life came after 38 hours of work a week.
However, for those offered a flexible working, including from home, the length of time that employees could worked without feeling the pressure was much longer.
On average they could put in 57 hours a week without feeling such a conflict.

The study “Finding an Extra Day or Two” is published in the Journal of Family Psychology. The research team, from Brigham Young University, in Salt Lake City, Utah, identified the point at which a quarter of employees the reported a conflict between work and family life.

Many of the home workers did spend some time working in an office, the study reports. But it was flexibility, including the option to do their job from other places, which allowed them to work for longer than other staff.

Prof E Jeffrey Hill, who led the study, said: “Telecommuting is really only beneficial for reducing work-life conflict when it is accompanied by flexitime.” Prof Hill, who once worked for IBM himself, said: “Managers were initially sceptical about the wisdom of working at home and said things like, ‘If we can’t see them, how can we know they are working?’” But now they are convinced of the benefits, he said.

His study also reports that eight in 10 IBM managers believe that flexible working increases productivity. “A down economy may actually give impetus to flexibility because most options save money or are cost-neutral,” he added. “Flexible work options are associated with higher job satisfaction, boosting morale when it may be suffering.”

More here:

‘Managers were initially sceptical about the wisdom of working at home and said things like ‘If we can’t see them, how can we know they are working?” Hill said.

Nowadays more than 80 percent of IBM managers agree that productivity increases in a flexible environment.

In the current economy, the scenario is being repeated with other businesses feeling the pinch.

‘A down economy may actually give impetus to flexibility because most options save money or are cost-neutral,’ Hill said. ‘Flexible work options are associated with higher job satisfaction, boosting morale when it may be suffering in a down economy.’

The study, titled ‘Finding an Extra Day or Two,’ will appear in the June issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Study coauthors include BYU School of Family Life professors Jenet J. Erickson and Erin K. Holmes, and Maria Ferris, a retired IBM researcher.

The more you raise the stakes, the worse people do - the more you focus on THE plan - the worse you do - the more you use play and prototyping and allow for small fails - the better.

Big lesson for me recently.

Consider this:

The average American sleeps less than 6 ½ hours a night — and the costs include not just much higher rates of illness, but also significantly worse performance.

A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.

Working more than 50 hours a week has been correlated in a raft of studies with less sleep, less physical activity, higher job dissatisfaction and ultimately worse performance.

In our own work in companies, we've consistently observed that the longer and more continuously people work, the less marginal return they get from each additional hour — and the more alienated and disengaged they become.

Getting more tasks accomplished — say writing and responding to scores of emails in between other activities — may technically represent higher productivity, but it doesn't necessarily mean adding greater value.

Instead, the ethic of more, bigger, faster ultimately generates value that is narrow, shallow and short-term.

Working frantically all the time leads to collapse. "How are you?' we ask each other. "Busy!!!!" is the standard reply. But busy doing what?

What happens when we are exhausted and frightened? We miss stuff. We narrow our focus so we cannot see the connections. We become "blind". We also become ill and dysfunctional.

How do we get off this treadmill? I think the key is to look for what the key outcomes should be and not the tasks. Most leaders don't even know what the key outcomes should be.

Do you know yours?

Many think that social media is all about technology - but here Euan reminds us that underneath all of this is a need to return to a more Human place.

We are not responsible for others. Messy is normal and human and shiny and neat is not. No spark in the eyes, not life. Listening in detached judgement is a killer. Saying what you really think is what you have to do. Asking the dumb questions are the best questions.

Be really interested - ask real questions - know that you can't and don't know it all - questions start conversations and so engagement - be part of the network - you can only have a conversation with a peer.

If you do this, you do get real creativity.

Start by measuring the size and health of your network.

If you need creativity, then the classic rewards = #fail.

Most of our challenges today are complex. The right brain has to be activated to cope. But money forces us to be analytical opening up the left brain that can only find what is known.

Here Paul Solman and Daniel Pink make the case that the traditional reward of carrot and stick has no effectiveness in this new context.

Before you laugh - watch!

Meet newly minted university graduate, Karen. She’s an honours student from a fine business school whose second major was sociology. She wants a career path in marketing and she volunteers at the local women’s shelter. All in all, a fine job candidate. Let’s sit in on the interview.

“How many hours do you expect me to work a week?” she asks, as soon as the pleasantries are exchanged and before the interviewer can get a question in.

“The standard work week here is 35 hours a week, although we expect our employees to work the hours necessary to get their deliverables completed,” the interviewer stammers, a little put off.

“Hmm, doesn’t sound like a great work/life balance. And what’s your environmental policy? Has that effluent spill in South Asia been cleaned up to the satisfaction of the UN monitoring agency? And closer to home, do you offset your company’s carbon footprint created by your shipping and packaging policies, corporate travel and the lack of transit accessibility here at your headquarters, where I see pretty well everyone drives?”

“Well, it’s free parking…”

“Hmm. And does the company sponsor any social programs either locally or internationally?”

“We have a United Way drive every year. Casual Friday, you get to wear jeans and donate a $1…”

“You mean there’s a dress code?”

“Well, not a strict one, just no jeans, no sandals, no piercings except for earrings…”

It’s not going well. Karen doesn’t look like she’s interested.

Wait: she isn’t interested? Isn’t it the employer who makes the decisions?

That was then, this is now. Get ready for the generation revolution. Half of Boomers now working are set to exit the workforce by 2015, leaving Gen Xers to move up the ranks as Gen Y enters the workforce.

The trouble is, there just aren’t enough of the best and brightest to go around, a Conference Board of Canada warned in a recently updated report: “By 2015, there will not be enough qualified people in Canada to fill the jobs available,” the original report stated. “Employers will become locked in a war for employees as they struggle to hire and retain qualified workers.” In a February update the board said the recession has delayed the inevitable but underlined its previous position: “If organizations fail to adequately plan for tightening labour markets, they could lose out on employees with the required skills, which could dampen their future growth prospects.”

It's going to be a whole new world out there - so what are you doing about it?

I am working with a team that are starting a conversation across Canada to find out your answers. Our focus will be the small and medium sized organization - we don't have much hope for the big ones

Watch this space - we start in Charlottetown!