The final step toward complete autonomy was not simple. In an outcome-centric workplace, you can no longer casually and ambiguously drop an obligation on someone else’s plate—the forwarded e-mail thread with an appended “Thoughts?” or the quick request, delivered by a boss passing in the hallway, to “get into” an issue. The pilot participants had to rewire their office interactions to expand these casual handoffs into a structured negotiation: what exactly is being asked, when exactly is it needed, and what other communication will be required between now and then to get it done? Both parties had to agree on a plan that balanced the urgency of the task and the reality of its executor’s workload. Ressler and Thompson ran training sessions in which mock negotiations like these were acted out. These sessions were eventually accompanied by a set of thirteen directives called guideposts, designed to be extreme in an attempt to shock people into a new mind-set: “Every day feels like Saturday,” one read. “It’s okay to grocery shop on a Wednesday morning,” another read.
The biggest challenges to overcome were interpersonal. Passive-aggressive comments about peoples’ work behavior—“Are you leaving early again today?”—had a chilling effect on autonomy. Ressler and Thompson introduced a term for this commentary: “sludge.” Their first attempts to rein it in were simple: a jar in the break room where you’d add a quarter every time you “flung sludge,” and thirty-minute sessions in which employees were encouraged to spew out every type of subtle negative comment of this type that they could remember ever hearing. (One group managed to come up with more than a hundred different comments in only twenty minutes.) Soon, Ressler and Thompson defined a complex ontology surrounding this behavior, including “Sludge Anticipation,” “Back Sludge,” and “Sludge Conspiracy.” They developed a detailed training program that they called the Environmental Sludge Eradication Strategy.
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The biggest challenges to overcome were interpersonal. Passive-aggressive comments about peoples’ work behavior—“Are you leaving early again today?”—had a chilling effect on autonomy. Ressler and Thompson introduced a term for this commentary: “sludge.” Their first attempts to rein it in were simple: a jar in the break room where you’d add a quarter every time you “flung sludge,” and thirty-minute sessions in which employees were encouraged to spew out every type of subtle negative comment of this type that they could remember ever hearing. (One group managed to come up with more than a hundred different comments in only twenty minutes.) Soon, Ressler and Thompson defined a complex ontology surrounding this behavior, including “Sludge Anticipation,” “Back Sludge,” and “Sludge Conspiracy.” They developed a detailed training program that they called the Environmental Sludge Eradication Strategy.
How to Achieve Sustainable Remote Work
Companies must move away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust.