This morning, a particularly difficult Tuesday morning (since yesterday was a holiday, so it felt even more like a Monday), I sat at my computer at work staring blankly at the screen.

My to-do list had grown again since last Friday, and all I could think about was how much I’d rather still be in bed.  Suddenly, I seemed to hear a voice saying “Someone’s got a case of the Mondays!”

Let’s start with a clip from one of the most genius movies, or should I say documentaries, I’ve ever seen.

Seeing this movie as a student in high school, I enjoyed it for it’s comedic value, it’s seeming exaggeration of the workplace environment that I was striving to be a part of, and the movie’s ability to bring lightness to what I realistically thought might simply be monotonous days at work.

As someone who now works in an office environment, I can appreciate this movie so much more.  And while I don’t advocate bringing the fax machine outside and smashing it to bits, I think we can all relate to the frustration, the monotony and the repetitiveness that sometimes comes with working in an office.

Another genius creation is the TV sitcom The Office.  While I think the forced situations and uncomfortable colleague encounters are utterly hilarious, my parents have a very different view of the show.  They simply cannot believe that this show is an exaggeration of real life situations.

Whether these two examples are completely fictional or actually real-life exaggerations, they do highlight some issues that are of significant concern to many employers; mainly productivity.

I tend to think that productivity is simply a nice word created by employers to mean, Get 100% out of our employees, 100% of the time that they are on our watch.  Perhaps this is a little cynical or jaded.  But when it comes down to it, employers generally seem to fear the fact that their employees are not completely focused on work-related items for the entire workday.

Lucas McDonnell describes two unintended consequences that may result when companies try to restrict the freedom that employees have to “waste time while on the clock”;.  While restricting employees from certain websites may provide a short-term solution to preventing employees from wasting time, employees will ultimately find other ways to avoid, ignore, walk away, etc. from work for at least a few minutes of the day.

However, at the end of the day, the main message that is being sent to employees is that the employer doesn’t trust their employees enough to treat them as adults and allow them to manage their own time appropriately.  I highly doubt that this is the intended message of today’s employers.

It would do companies good to realise that they are in mutual relationships with their employees.  Just like any interpersonal relationship, both parties need to give a little in order to get a little.

Best Buy took an incredibly innovative approach to creating an open work environment and providing employees with the trust and respect that many workers crave. What is key in this example is that emphasis is placed on what employees are able to produce as opposed to how long they are able to sit in front of their work computers during the day.  The distinction between being present and being productive may seem ambiguous at first, but is an important distinction to make when managing people.

As far as I know, the Best Buy experiment has worked wonders at improving “productivity”.  I would be curious to know how the Best Buy experiment has evolved in the two years since this article was published.  If anyone has any info, or knows of any other companies who have addressed the issues of productivity differently, I’d love to hear from you.

Employers essentially need to realise that life happens.  Give employees the respect and trust to allow them to live their lives and I think companies will be pleasantly surprised at how much employees are willing to give back.