I believe that we are beginning to experience a fundamental change in the workplace. Historical management strategies suggest that management treat every employee as an equal, keep running business hours between 8am and 5pm and work a 5 days a week. Some of the most successful companies today are throwing those management ideas out the window and formulating management upon a foundation of autonomy.
Autonomy is the idea that every person is self governing and should be free to make their own decisions. In basic entry level positions, autonomy has not been a highly integrated management strategy until recently. In the past, management would assign menial tasks and the workers would do them within normal business hours and leave it at that. This can pose as a problem because every worker is not the same. Some people work better at different hours and others work better with various incentives. Wouldn't it be more productive to allow people to work in their ideal environment?
If I were a manager or a consultant I would advocate a system where autonomy is a very integrated part of the workplace. I would begin with a "new employee probation" period in which new employees for the first six months would work within normal business hours on various projects that give them empowerment. After the six month probation period, I would then allow the workers to work on their projects at their on schedule so long as they were available within the hours of 9AM and 1PM if any meetings or other needs were to arise. The workers would then be able to keep this system running so long as their performance was at the expected level. I believe the key benefit of this system would be the employee happiness and employee empowerment. With happy employees you are more likely to have greater production and better results. In addition, I feel that this company would have a very high employee retention rate. This would be very cost effective for the company because staffing and training is a very expensive task.
The major risk of the system above is that the employees can abuse the system and the business could suffer. If this were the case and if a specific employee was not performing to their optimal level, there would obviously be repercussions. I feel that many people would enjoy working for a company like this, and if an employee would need to be replaced it would be somewhat easy to do so; however, I do not advocate the idea of "interchangeable employees." The employees, especially the entry level employees, are the foundation of the company and without a sturdy foundation disaster is imminent.
