The Freedom Solution: Working Without Borders

By Michael Willard

Last month marked an anniversary of sorts: Our company’s one-year experiment with what I call The Freedom Solution, a revolutionary way of working and of looking at work in Eastern Europe.

I’m pronouncing it a success, though perhaps a qualified one. Basically, we set out to determine if a freer and more open environment could actually work in a land where work structures are generally rigid and experimentation rare.

In other words, could one make a profit and serve clients to the hilt while having an atmosphere that is more similar to a clubhouse than a traditional office structure. The answer is ‘yes.’

The Freedom Solution: Working Without Borders consists of what I term the 24-hour workday, an open office and an all-mobile office. We went for the trifecta in September 2008, a whole-hog adaptation of all of them.

It wasn’t easy, but I, and a core of others, was determined to turn an experiment into a way of working, and therefore a way of life.

I felt adaptation to the 24-Hour Workday would be the most difficult to implement. I was wrong; The Open Office concept was the most difficult, for I had not counted on the nesting instincts of professional employees. The all-mobile office - only using mobile phones and Wi-Fi - went down as smooth as single-malt Scotch.

The most misunderstood concept in the beginning was the 24-Hour Workday, which, as branded, seems to imply that employees are on-call and working 24-hours-a-day. It merely means getting work done within a 24-hour span, regardless of when and where.
This takes a little explaining.

We live and work today in 24-hour time segments, and it really makes no difference if you are behind a desk, driving your car, taking a shower or washing the dishes.
Time is not a thing, but a state of mind. Intellectual work -- that creative and strategic thought that you bring to your job - cannot be lassoed and contained within a glass cubicle any more than it can be sustained in a Petri dish for study. 

In my view, no self-respecting professional looks at the clock on his desk and automatically shuts his or her brain off when the sun goes down. It is, in fact, a misnomer to label work by that traditional name, sort of like calling a car a horseless carriage or a refrigerator an icebox.  My suggestion would be to simply call it paid time.

Paid time can and does occur anywhere, and it is a 24-hour phenomenon. To my knowledge, there is nothing written down, in the Bible or elsewhere, that prescribes a workday as consecutive hours, usually eight and usually during the day.

We as professionals have become too sophisticated, too mobile, and too global to think in the narrow confines of traditional paid time. Business time is all the time and it has been for at least the last decade or so. Many companies have yet to realize this. Once they do, they will also realize that the paid time of the individual worker can be adjusted to fit global circumstances, and not just the mere convenience of fellow workers, even bosses.
 
For those who prefer the 9-to-5 tradition, fine, but all should realize that it is simply another option, and probably not the best one.

The Freedom Solution paradigm recognizes that a professional who takes a long lunch to shop for disposable diapers is not inciting mutiny but rather, living a life.
Life is complicated, more so, I believe, for female colleagues where tradition has bestowed on them many more ‘real life’ responsibilities, like grocery shopping and making sure the kids are ready for school.  There has been some societal change in this, but it is far from a sea change, particularly in more conservative and non-secular countries.

It all goes back to simply this: Getting the job done, and done well.  This should be thought of as a 24-hour assignment, and not the rigidity of the eight-hour workday or the 40-hour week. It took a while, but a good many of our people found it convenient to work from home or even from a café that offers Wi-Fi.
The mobile office was a concept that we presented to Astelit, a mobile operator, about three years ago.  I recall a meeting in my office with the president, Tansu Yegen, when I abruptly tossed a desk telephone against the wall to demonstrate that the future of such sets was limited.

Perhaps my histrionics were a bit overdone. After a brief flirtation, Astelit decided the time had not arrived for an all-mobile office. It took us two years, but we went ahead with the concept anyway. I have been happy with the result:  lower telephone bills; more direct responsiveness to clients; and, of course that wonderful mobility.

Even the open office, though having limited success, has been beneficial to about 50 percent of our employees.  Instead of desks, everyone has work stations and they are  encouraged to move from work station to work station – wherever is most convenient at the moment – even to patio tables with umbrellas that we set up in the office courtyard.

Would we recommend the Freedom Solution for most professional offices? Yes, without a doubt. We believe it is the future of the modern office. However, it takes a very responsible employee to make use of it effectively.

That which does not have walls, does have fences of papier-mâché.  Self-rule at work is a philosophy based in the writings of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.  I believe that if Benjamin Franklin were around today - in the Internet age - he would have proposed it, and reveled in it.

Old Ben was never a 9 to 5er. He liked to sleep until noon.