The Way to Enough

"In Norway, the standard of living is the highest that it's ever been. But now we're seeing some paradoxes. People have very nice homes. But no one is at home during the day. Offices and homes are being underutilized. But we also have traffic and pollution. We have money and material goods, but no time for ourselves." -- Ragnhild Sohlberg, Norsk Hydro executive

On the surface, Norway seems to be a moderate place. The climate can be intemperate, but the people and the lifestyle are just the opposite -- the picture of restraint and judiciousness. Oh, there are some unassuming little oddities: Norwegians eat fish for breakfast, and often for lunch and for dinner. Caviar is so common that it comes in tubes, just like toothpaste. Very few people are overweight.

All of which seems charmingly unusual -- but hardly alien.

The workplace, too, seems familiar: computers, cubicles, bullet-point slides. Familiar, that is, until you look more closely.

Every weekday at 6:10 a.m., Morten Lingelem boards a train at Sandefjord for the 90-minute ride to his job in Oslo. Lingelem, 42, a process-technology manager, has a standing reservation in the train's "office car," where he can power up his laptop and work in quiet comfort. That office car serves a purpose that's exactly the opposite of what it would be in the United States: It enables Lingelem to hold down a demanding engineering-management job, to spend more than three hours a day commuting, and still to be home by 6 p.m.

Atle Tærum, a colleague of Lingelem's, lives on a farm 90 minutes west of Oslo. And, two days a week, that's where he is, taking care of his 10-month-old daughter. Tærum is never without his cell-phone. On those days, customers -- perhaps calling from Africa or from the Middle East -- often reach him while he's plowing his fields, or chaperoning his son's kindergarten class.

Norway is, in fact, a sort of alternative universe of work. The inhabitants, the setting, the language, and the profit imperative all seem familiar. But Norwegians have a very different attitude about work -- and a singular view of what work can become.

That vision is rooted in the notion that balance is healthy. The argument: Work can be redesigned to promote balance. More than that, balance can become a source of corporate and national competitive advantage. Working less can, in fact, mean working better.

Norsk Hydro, the company that employs both Lingelem and Tærum, is one of Norway's dominant institutions. It's the world's second-largest producer of oil from the Norwegian North Sea, and the single-largest salmon farmer. Hydro fertilizer feeds Florida tomatoes and Arizona golf courses. Hydro metals toughen Cadillac Seville bumpers and Nokia cell-phones.

Hydro operates in 70 countries and employs 39,000 people, many of whom live and work outside of Norway. But it remains emphatically Norwegian -- an organization not easily understood in American terms. As excess defines American culture, so balance shapes life for Norwegians, who long ago discovered sane responses to the tension between work and family. Norway is a place, after all, where people typically leave work between 4 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Working women get at least 38 weeks of paid maternity leave; men get as many as 4 weeks of paid leave. Norway's answer to "How much is enough?" is found in the way the nation operates. Balance is the place where conversations about work and life begin.

In its 94 years of operation, "Hydro has created and nurtured industry in Norway," says Roald Nomme, a consultant and former manager at Hydro. "What is deep in the culture of Hydro is to think in the long term, to think more holistically -- to think about the connections between employees, the company, and society."

Now Hydro is reexamining these connections. In a series of experiments across the company, it is testing a much more ambitious vision of balance. The two-year-old project, known as Hydroflex, has given hundreds of employees varying combinations of flexible hours, home offices, new technology, and redesigned office space.

What has Hydro learned?

Hydro believes that it can help employees find a better balance by redesigning physical work spaces -- and by redesigning work itself. It can free people from old restrictions on where and when they work. That flexibility makes workers more productive and jobs more appealing, and more appealing jobs attract more talented people.

Linked to the push for flexibility are new notions of diversity. Hydro believes that diversity goes beyond race or gender. Diversity has to do with perspective -- and it exists within individuals: Each of us is many different people at different times in our lives. Cultivate that diversity, and greater creativity will follow.