Why do people bring work home on the weekend but never go to the movies on Monday afternoon? Why do you get interviewed by your boss but you never get to interview the person who wants to be your boss?

These are just some of the provocative—and good--questions CEO Ricardo Semler asked and they resulted in the unorthodox running of Semco, with 3,000 employees in three countries that has made money, grown and had nearly non-existent employee turnover.

His thinking, translated into his business operations that some call revolutionary, includes the belief that people should come to work when they want, set their own salaries and hire their bosses.

Why the dramatic way of doing business? He says—and he’s so right—“we have to find a better way for work to work. The seven-day workweek is shaping up a personal, societal and business disaster. It robs people of passion, a pleasure, destroys family and community stability and sets up business organizations to ultimately fail once they’ve burned out their employees...".

But let people set their own salaries and hours? His approach is messy, inefficient and hugely rewarding, he warns in his new book, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works (Portfolio).

Why should a company demand employees come to work at times when they may be unproductive or have personal commitments? he asks. On the salary issue, he points out, you probably assume that people will set their salaries much higher than feasible and come in as late or little as possible. But that hasn’t been his experience.

They distribute copies of the market surveys so that employees “can know what people make at competitors, show them what everyone (from me all the way to the janitors) in the company makes, and openly present and discuss what the company’s profits and prospects are,” he explains.

His philosophy is based on treating workers like intelligent adults who can manage themselves. He attacks conventional wisdom that managers need to manage and that growth should be the ultimate goal of every company.

His ideas include doing away with headquarters. With satellite offices and telecommuting, people can choose the most convenient locations for work, he rationalizes. What about managers’ concern that they can’t see what they’re doing? Judge them on performance.

One of my favorites: people are encouraged to walk out of boring meetings. You don’t even have to come in the first place since all meetings are voluntary.

“If someone isn’t interested in this particular project or meeting, we’d much rather have him conserve his energy for something else. We don’t see a conflict if a Semco employee needs to spend an hour and a half talking on the phone to her teenage daughter instead of attending the powwow. If she doesn’t feel a sense of balance between her personal and professional life, she’s not going to do well at either one.”

And--you’ll love this--he says such an employee may stay in the job because she needs the money, but she’ll become disillusioned, doing only what she must to earn her paycheck. “And that’s not the kind of employees we want at Semco.”

When they started doing business this way, everyone said they wouldn’t last. Twenty years later, his manufacturing and professional services firm has $212 million in revenues and has obliterated the drudgery of the work week, replacing repetition and aggravation with joy, inspiration and freedom. It may seem revolutionary, but as Semler says, it’s just common sense that people will be more satisfied and productive if they can control their work environment.

© by Andrea Kay