World of work enters the third dimension

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

IT'S talked about as working from the third place. Not the office or home but the railway platform or the cafe or the bus or the airport lounge or pub where you click on your iPad to email or return the business phone call. It's the space many of us increasingly take for granted in the blurred world of work and non-work.

"If I am standing on the station platform and make a call, it is filling up dead time," Michael Bittman, a professorial fellow from the University of New England, says. "It doesn't add to the pressure because I can choose to do it. In fact it is one less task that I will have to do later."

It's a version of time shifting.

"You are in perpetual contact with people," Bittman says, "but the compensation is that you can soften your schedule."

MORE than 15 years since the Netscape web browser began to truly transform communications in offices and homes, the blur between work and non-work is all but complete for many managers, professionals and those employed in communications industries. Complain about having to check emails at the weekend and you risk looking out of date or, worse still, not a player. To be constantly on is to be indispensable. There is no excuse for not being connected 24/7 now that hand-held devices such as smartphones and tablets are taken for granted and when wireless technology means you can go to bed with the internet and wake up with your email.

Yet for many workers in services, manufacturing and retail jobs, for example, it's a different story. Indeed, when Bittman and others in 2007 researched the use of mobile phones, they found plenty of after-hours calls and texts, but were surprised by how few were work-related.

"It was mostly socialising, the predominant traffic was family and friends," Bittman says.

As for the assumption that the mobile phone adds to stress, Bittman believes technology can lead to less rather than more anxiety: the determining factor is the degree of autonomy involved. Choose to check you email at 10am on a Sunday and you will feel in control. Get a call from the boss at that hour and you may well feel put upon.

Along with ubiquity, technology is speedy and has led to far faster turnaround times than we could ever have dreamed. As science writer James Gleick says: "A sentence that once might have required a day of library work now might require no more than a few minutes on the internet."

Bittman believes people can still control the pace: "People often send texts when they know someone has their phone off, so they don't want you to reply immediately and so you can decide when you retext."

Not true, says Monash University's Greg Bamber. "Students are using it [email or text] now to communicate with lecturers and they don't worry if it's the weekend," he says. "They expect a response."

Timelines have collapsed. People send out long documents by email on the evening before a 9am meeting and expect you will be across them by the morning. The speed of data retrieval and the way digitialisation has made researching documents child's play, mean managers now demand a quick turnaround on projects, taking for granted information can be compiled in hours, not weeks. The result can be volume, not quality, which is why Monash's professor of management James Sarros says you have to "manage the flow".

There are pluses and minuses in this 24/7 world. Sarros finds the technology works for him. He can work at home and flex his hours on campus around his teaching and thinking. He's not so sure about his wife, Anne Sarros, principal of big Melbourne girls boarding school Firbank Grammar. Time was when principals could close the door and walk away, if not at 3.30pm, at least by 6pm. But running a multimillion-dollar business that includes the care of young people means Anne is on the job 24/7.

"As academics we are privileged," her husband says. "She is on the phone all the time, in the car, on her iPad in the garden."

THEY were the boosters, the commentators who argued a brand-new world of work was upon us. It was the middle of the dotcom boom. Alan Webber had been an editor at the Harvard Business Review, but he had cooler fish to fry. In November 1995, he and Bill Taylor, also from HBR, launched Fast Company, a magazine driven by the belief that you could work hard, get rich, be fulfilled, do good and, most of all, be happy. On the cover of the first issue, they penned their manifesto: work is personal, knowledge is power, computing is social; break the rules. Webber, now an author on the business speakers circuit, with his latest book Rules of Thumb, is on the move at New York's airport when he answers his mobile phone.

"When we started Fast Company we wrote a bunch of articles early on about how exciting it was to have people so turned on in the workplace, so excited they were sleeping under the desks and setting up bunk rooms," he says. "Then we started to get a lot of emails saying we were crazy, with people saying, you think it's cool, we think it's terrible."

The magazine calmed down a little but throughout the 1990s it stayed relentlessly upbeat on the notion of work so meaningful that employees would willingly dedicate time and effort at nights and weekends to their jobs and careers. The net was just starting to have an influence, a new application called email was transforming business practice and mobile phones were revolutionising communications.

One of the most prolific contributors to Fast Company was Washington-based Daniel Pink, who had justleft the Clinton administration and written a book called Free Agent Nation. The title would come to define the move to portfolio jobs where you were expected to be the boss of your own career, not necessarily working from home or self-employed but working for oneself, independence possible only because of the net and email.

Still writing and consulting about work, Pink says the drivers of the portfolio approach have only intensified.

"Technology has become far more powerful than even 10 years ago and has put into people's hands the sort of communication and computing power once reserved for large institutions," he says. "That makes it easier to go out on one's own. And it's not as if jobs are getting any more secure. What was true 10 years ago -- that it might be a safer bet having multiple clients and customers than a single employer -- is even more true today.

"More and more risk is shifting to individuals, even individuals who have 'jobs'. In the States, they've got defined contribution pensions rather than traditional ones. They're paying a much larger share of their health insurance and medical costs. They don't expect to be with employers forever. They're in charge of their own professional development."

The trend to seeing employees as free agents is seen most vividly in Australia in the swing to outsourcing and contract work in the past 20 years.

The enthusiasm Fast Company and other management literature demonstrated in the 2000s for a seamless connection between work and play imagined workers using technology getting maximum meaning from jobs that were flexible, portable and, well, fast.

The screens on desks, however, led to other issues for employers, some of whom have attempted to block the non-work part of the deal by enforcing rules over access to various sites.

But it's not easy to control behaviour when workers have smartphones and tablets and feel empowered when they exercise small acts of autonomy such as checking private email during working hours.

American management writer and commentator Daniel Rasmus believes we are getting closer to the idea of the "punctuated" workday, where people switch between public and private tasks at work or at home, as the "millennial generation" born between 1981 and 2000 enter the workforce.

"They don't really care when they work," Rasmus says. "It is irrelevant to them to some degree and they don't really question having to answer a text or take a call in the middle of dinner. The millennials have a more fluid sense of time [than baby boomers] so the demands of work don't create the same kind of stress."

Rasmus says that in a lot of communications-based work, there is more opportunity to choose when to work. "There is a sense of saying to the employer, tell me when you want it and I will deliver it."

Bittman agrees: "You have many jobs now that are not about the hours but about the outcome, so people work to those deadlines. They may start in a leisurely fashion, then put in the hours in a rush."

Much of the redesign of work is ad hoc, rather than engineered to exploit technology.

Executive Assistant Network director Jonathan McIlroy says technology means bosses do a lot of work previously done by secretaries. "They do their own typing, they send emails, they have their own laptops," he says. "We know bosses who can touch type at 60 or 70 words a minute." Once the chief executive could leave the office at 5.30pm guilt-free, knowing that with his nine-to-five secretary gone, there was nothing useful to be accomplished. Not now. The executive assistant may leave at a reasonable hour, but the boss can work on and on into the night.

WEBBER says technology supports one of the main shifts at work, the emergence of workers operating at a psychological distance from the old employment contract, so that "everyone is an entrepreneur". "I don't mean they run their own business, but you are an entrepreneur of your own career," he says. "The benefit of technology is that you can get the network and the information you want. The downside is that you are always on."

That can erode performance because "you don't produce when you are exhausted and anxious".

Pink sees more upside. "I've always believed there's a natural affinity between work and family, and that stark separation we had for much of the 20th century was an aberration," he says. "Think back to the family farm or mum and dad and kids living above the corner shop."

There is a caveat. "On the farm, the sun went down and it wasn't possible to work. In the store, the shop closed and customers stopped coming in. For many of us, the sun never sets and the store never closes. And that's not healthy. So I do think we need to reimpose some sort of softer separation between work and non-work. It's good for productivity and for marriages."

Even so, Pink says most of us would rather be working in today's environment than the workplace of 25 years ago.

"Would you want to work without the internet? Would you want essentially never to be able to work from home? Would you want a workplace where the bosses were almost uniformly white males? Would you want to be an entrepreneur starting a business without access to cloud computing or a mobile phone or the ability to find the right talent for the right task anywhere in the world? Things aren't perfect. Not by a long shot. But they're better."

Perhaps. Susan Maushart, a columnist with The Weekend Australian Magazine, is no Luddite but a couple of years ago she turned off the technology and forced her family to operate without computers for six months. She documented it in a book, The Winter of Our Disconnect. The experience convinced Maushart "we have a new job to do now, and that is to put borders in place".

"Humans thrive on boundaries, so compartmentalising is good," she says. "We function better when we keep things in their place. There is an illusion that you are being productive because you are online, but sometimes you get yourself into a space which is a work space but where you are simply wasting time."

Maushart says only a small number of people operate in this blurred world but they are having a powerful effect.

"It is aspirational to be seen as the kind of person who can't survive five minutes without checking email," Maushart says. "It puts you in a certain class and confirms your value. If the ruling class conducts itself in this way, then others aspire to ape the behaviour."