Then you grew up and got a job and found out that people still got to tell you what to do. They told you when to be at work, when to go home, when you could take time off, how much you could be sick. It was called the HR policy. So much for freedom.

In the 21st century, some companies are actually experimenting with not having any (or many) HR policies. Netflix has a freedom and responsibility culture, and they don’t have a vacation policy at all. Red Hat maintains a similar balance between freedom and accountability. Best Buy invented the results-only work environment: no meetings, no required time in the office, just accountability for results.

The experiences of these companies have been similar: The more freedom the company gave to its employees, the more accountability it received in return. In other words, the more the company treated its employees like adults, the more they acted like adults.

And when companies restrict freedom, should it come as any surprise when their employees start to act like children?

Does your organization need a “no policy” policy? (Opensource.com)
The Story of How We Uncovered the Red Hat Values (Dark Matter Matters)
Reference Guide on Our Freedom & Responsibility Culture (Slideshare)
Smashing the Clock (BusinessWeek)

First, it is useful to know what a nonprofit is exactly and how they work.

The next question is whether to start a nonprofit at all. Is there something more productive you could be doing instead?

If you decide to go ahead, here are some steps to get started. Here are some instructions for getting on the web at very little cost. And the most important thing, what you need to know about raising money.

The Resources:

About.Com: Nonprofit Charitable Organizations
Don Griesmann’s Nonprofit Blog
Foundation Center
Free Management Library
Non-profit Tech Blog

Such a move would take some time, and I don’t think it will be an easy transition for our culture, which is based in so many ways on cheap and easy access to oil. I think the immediate impact would be on driving and other forms of transportation that rely on cheap gas, as well as shipping of products. Where I live right now, you have to have a car to get anywhere, and alternative fuels are likely to be more expensive then gas is now. So I see a fundamental shift in how we think about getting to places and getting the things that we need shipped to us.

A longer term impact will be on products that require petroleum, such as plastics and fertilizers, but I feel we have time to develop alternatives (or learn to live without). Some industries may go away entirely, but I wouldn’t mourn the bottled-water industry if it failed, for instance.
I can’t help but think that peak oil may actually be a positive event in the long run, as it may help reshape the way we live in positive ways and address many of the problems of modern life. For example, the obesity epidemic is caused in part by how need and opportunity to move our bodies has decreased with the advent of the car, and in part by access to cheap, high-caloric, highly processed food made possible by cheap gasoline for shipping and processing. Isolation from the community has become a problem that we may solve ourselves once we become less mobile by necessity. Also, if we aren’t spewing fossil fuels into the air anymore, it can only positively impact the problem of climate change.

Not that it will be all rainbows and unicorns. But here are some other changes I think might be brought about as a result of peak oil.

Small-scale changes in the way we live:

• The way we work would change as rush hour becomes cost-prohibitive, accelerating moves to nontraditional work schedules and telecommuting. You may no longer have to live near your job.
• In the suburbs, neighborhood networks might arise for exchanging goods and services, such as childcare, home repair, tailoring, restaurants and small stores, perhaps ignoring zoning or other laws. Some suburban neighborhoods could effectively transform themselves into small towns.
• If suburbs are not able to provide local access to necessities and public transportation, they may be abandoned, and people may move back into city and town centers.
• There will be more people gardening and owning small livestock such as chickens and goats, as well as more community gardens, even in urban and suburban settings. Already here a roving goat service is available for yard cleanup. But it is naive to think that each family can supply its own food, so we may have to dedicate more land to farming and grow more food locally.
• Pastimes such as recreational shopping and travel will likely decrease as transportation and product costs rise. We will turn more to entertainment that can be delivered digitally.

Larger-scale changes we may see in our culture:

• Inflation will rise. We will probably have to pay more for everything except digital goods. Our days of cheap food will probably be over. As a result, we will buy less, which will impact the foundations of our consumerist economy. I don’t know what the economic or political ramifications might be, but I think this shift would be good for our species in the long run.
• Some industries will be negatively impacted and may go away altogether. I think we would see a steep decline in air travel, tourism and some consumer goods (particularly unnecessary items) causing economic problems as some businesses fail.
• An increased investment in public transportation will be required. Personal transportation may become a luxury item.
• Trains may become important again, especially if they can be designed to run efficiently on alternative fuels.
• Manufacturing, especially of necessary goods like clothing and electronics, may be re-localized if overseas shipping costs become prohibitive. Goods may cost more, but on the flip side, we should see some outsourced jobs return.
• Manufacturing may also be scaled down to serve local markets. New technology may make it possible to run a factory out of your garage.

In the end, it comes down to how we react and where we place our priorities. Do we take a short-term or long-term view? Do we approach the problem with optimism or pessimism? It’s up to us to decide whether and how we adapt.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Peak oil could hit soon – report (guardian.co.uk)
• Squeezing the last bit of oil from Mother Earth (thestar.com)
• Happy 150th, Oil! So Long, and Thanks for Modern Civilization (wired.com)

Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. — “Interviewing the Man Behind The Wire,” Slate

When I was a full-time writer, I heard a certain question a lot. It was posed different ways, but it always amounted to the same thing: “Do you make any money doing that?” And the implicit question behind it was: “Why don’t you get a real job?”

Real job meant, of course, a job that paid a salary. A job that took place somewhere other than my home. Where I had a boss telling me what to do.

The idea was certainly attractive. As a writer, money and my next project were constant worries. I had to provide my own benefits and pay my own Social Security. But it was only after I took a couple of gigs that didn’t feel were right for me — but still, I needed the money — that I decided to chuck it in and get that real job.

Here were some things I learned while I was working my real job. Nothing can be done without holding a meeting — or preferably, a whole series of them — first. “Collaboration” means spending countless hours consulting everyone without anyone helping you do the actual work.  Having to be in a certain place at certain hours even if it wasn’t the most productive use of my time feels unpleasantly like being back in middle school.

I don’t have a real job anymore. I don’t have any job right now, unless you count mothering as a job, which most people don’t. And it feels great. I know that I don’t want to go back.

Reflecting on this brings to mind the eye-opening book Your Money or Your Life. We must each ask ourselves: “How much value does my life have? How many hours should I have to work to buy this pair of designer jeans or this new television or this DVD I don’t need? Is it worth it?” No one else — certainly not your boss or the company that gives you that real job — will be asking these questions for you.

It saddens me when I hear people say things like: “I’m lucky just to have a job.” Yes, even in these tough economic times, we must remember that our time and labor still have value. We have to establish our own value. We can’t let our employers determine how much our lives are worth.

Everyone acknowledges that there are no more jobs for life. I would argue that there are no more real jobs, even. Companies showed no hesitation at shedding workers when hard economic times hit. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Health insurance and other benefits are being cut back, and more of the cost is being passed on to workers. Companies show no loyalty to their workers, so why should workers be expected to be unquestionably loyal to their employers?

We all work for ourselves, even if we have real jobs. We can’t expect our employers or the government to look out for our best interests anymore. Each of us is a corporation of one, and we are our own CEOs. And it’s time we start deciding for ourselves what our time, what our labor — what our lives — are worth.

For further reading:

• The Disposable Worker (BusinessWeek)
• Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression (AlterNet)
• Study: Bush Tax Cuts Cost More than Twice as Much as Dems’ Health-care Bill (Crooks and Liars)
• America Without a Middle Class (Huffington Post)
• White Faces in the Day Labour Queue (Futurismic)

When I talk about ROWE with other people at my company, I come up against a lot of confusion about what it is exactly. ROWE is not telecommuting or flex time. It is tying work directly to results. So there is no need to work the 8-hour day if you can get the desired results in less. There is no need to come in to the office if you can get the desired results from some other location. The employee is treated as an adult and trusted to determine what is the best way for them to achieve the results they are being asked for. ROWE is all about turning the factory worker mentality that has dominated corporate life for so long on its head.

The best analogy I have seen is in this article on Brazen Careerist, which compared ROWE to college. In most college experiences, the student is given clearly defined expectations. You have to take a certain number of credits, usually in a prescribed selection of subject areas, and achieve a certain level of performance in each. However, it is up to the student to determine how to meet those expectations: which classes to take, what their schedule will be like, when and how much to study, even whether to attend class on a given day. I had one class in college that I stopped going to altogether, but I was still able to achieve the desired result — an A grade — and nobody, including the professor, cared that I wasn’t physically in class as long as I was doing the work to make that A.

In the workplace, ROWE hinges on giving employees very clear expectations and then leaving it up to them to figure out how to achieve those results. If your job is to be on the helpdesk and one of your expectations is that you will be available to support users and fix their computers during certain peak hours, then you probably have to come in during those hours. Otherwise, you won’t be meeting your job expectations. In the ROWE paradigm, those of us who are supervisors have to be more willing to give clear feedback to employees on their performance, listen to them if they say that the expected results are unreasonable, and even fire employees who are not able to meet the results we expect. If there are slackers in the system, the system won’t work — but do we really want slackers on our teams, anyway?

The problem with my industry is that our work is tied to hours — hours that we can bill to various projects. The whole idea behind ROWE is that you don’t work a set number of hours; you work as long and when you need to in order to get the work done.

That being said, I doubt I’ll go completely anarchist and slash my working time down to 20 hours per week without letting my company know. Rather, I’d like to stop keeping track of how much time I work per day. I’ve noticed that when I work according to my natural rhythms, on some days I’ll work 9 or 10 hours, some days I’ll work 6 or 7. It’s rare that I work exactly 8 hours on the dot, but I think I’m giving the organization a decent amount of time for their money, and I’m certainly achieving the results they need, according to the feedback I’m getting. And that’s not even counting the time I’m not precisely working, but I am thinking about work and formulating ideas, such as in the shower or on a walk with the dog, or the times I quickly read email or dash off a note to someone “off the clock.”

So for purposes of billing, I’ve decided to call time worked during a day a “workday,” equivalent to 8 hours, so I can stop tracking exactly how many hours I work. Each day that I work, I’ll charge 8 hours on my timesheet. Of course, if I work very little in a day, I’ll go ahead and charge leave time to keep things fair. I figure that with this loose system, it will all come out relatively even. I’m salaried, so I don’t get overtime. The only thing we’ll lose is a record of how long it takes me to do something, but my years in project management have taught me that this kind of data is generally useless. You usually have a sense of about how long something will take anyway, and since no project is like any other, you can’t say that because it took you X hours to design the website last time, it will take the same amount this time.

I obviously can’t tell my team that it’s okay for them not to work 40 hours in a week (although that group has more of a problem with working too much than too little). But I can tell them that it’s okay for them to schedule their weeks in order to be most productive and achieve the best results. Development often requires high-focus work that is not conducive to the interruptions of the office environment. While collaboration is a requirement, we don’t need to collaborate 8 hours a day, and a lot of it can be done remotely. So what I plan to tell them is that, depending on the needs of their projects, they can choose to stay home or come in whenever they like, as long as they remain available to the rest of the team even when working remotely. And I plan to give them very clear job responsibilities so they know exactly what is expected of them.

The only way this will work is with clear expectations and frequent feedback. People working in a ROWE environment have to be willing to take responsibility for achieving the results and they have to be accountable to the entire team. This is not about going off to do your own thing without regard for the needs of the team or the organization. It is about enabling people to manage their own work lives so they can produce their best results.