Posted on 05. Feb, 2003 by Brian Reid in General
Shockingly, Rebel Dad readers didn’t buy the line that the American workforce is getting more father-friendly. Forget about telecommuting or flexible schedules, says one letter, a truly family-friendly workplace “would measure an employees worth based on his production and not the amount of time he spends at work. Unfortunately, the mind set in corporate Amercia is still such that a man who puts in a 50+ hour work week will get more recognition than a man who puts in a 40 hour work week even though both men produce the same amount of work.”
That harkens to a book review I read today for a book I may put on my ever-lengthening “To Read” list: The Power of Full Engagement. It sounds like your average excutive time-management book, expect without the time part. It looks at “energy” as being different than “time.” You want workers to spend lots of energy — a renewable resource — rather than just log hours. It’s a way of thinking that probably makes fatherdom an asset: get a fully-charged father who gets ample family time and doesn’t feel perpetually shortchanged, and you get an employee who makes every working moment count.
Heck, I’d rather have a company full of happy dads than a bunch of 70-hour-a-week suckup automatons counting the decades to retirement. But that’s probably just me …