The Way to Enough

Changing Work Style -- and Work

Work redesign brings flexibility. Flexibility furthers diversity. Diversity, in turn, enhances competitiveness. Therefore, improving competitiveness begins with changing how people work.

Unni Foss, 47, lives on a peninsula across the fjord from Oslo. She commutes by ferry to her job as a graphic artist at the Hydro Media group, which publishes Hydro's in-house communications and offers design services to other divisions throughout the company.

In early 1998, after two years of planning, Hydro Media's 35 employees inaugurated their Hydroflex project. Every employee was set up with a home office (including appropriate computer equipment and an ISDN line) and given up to $2,000 for furniture. Staffers were urged to work at home up to two days a week.

"I saw the possibilities immediately," Foss says. "You work when it fits you and your work. When I need to be in the office, I'm in the office." ISDN communications lines allow workers like Foss, who use data-intensive graphics, to work from home. Foss makes corrections from her home office and then sends her work to the Hydro print shop for delivery to the appropriate in-house division.

As the Hydroflex experiment unfolds, the deeper challenge lies in changing people's attitudes -- about their work and about one another. The arrangement, after all, has recast relationships between peers as well as between staff and management. "I used to wonder, Do they really mean that we can do this?" Foss says. " Do they trust us?"

Management not only trusts -- it cares. Last winter, in the months before her father's death, Foss worked at home full-time. Foss was able to be with her father and to support her mother. She kept her salary, and Hydro got good work from a talented staffer. Where she worked didn't matter. When she worked didn't matter, as long as tasks could be coordinated with her job partner.

"We used to focus on how many hours people were in the office," says Ole Johan Sagafos, 43, head of Hydro Media. "Now we focus on the results. It doesn't really matter to me what my colleagues are doing, as long as they deliver the results on time."

Roald Forseth, 42, also works for Hydro, but his world of work couldn't be more different from Foss's. He labors at the furnaces in the magnesium plant at Porsgrunn, 60 miles from Oslo. There he melts raw ore to produce magnesium ingots. The job is demanding and dangerous, requiring him to work with blistering-hot liquid metal for long periods of time.

For the past three years, Forseth has participated in another experiment in work redesign. The plan emphasizes teamwork -- turning foremen into "coaches" and allowing workers more autonomy, more control. It's just the sort of strategy-of-the-month that makes factory workers roll their eyes. At Porsgrunn, however, teamwork has gradually taken hold.

"When the project first started," says Forseth, "I knew only about my own job. We hadn't been using all of the information that was available, all the competence in the organization. What we discovered is that we can learn from one another freely. We've taken responsibility for collecting knowledge for the team. And running the casting house is easier when everyone knows everything."

For Forseth, diversity is about something supremely practical: Teamwork requires accepting diversity of opinion. "Before, if you criticized someone, you were as likely to get a black eye as not," Forseth says. "Now we have a common language. We're more open-minded. We've all taken responsibility for everyone else."

All of which proves that muscle workers can also be knowledge workers. Forseth and his coworkers have gained new skills, and productivity has increased by 25%. It's not hard to imagine the team eventually managing not only its work but also its schedules and its training. Flexibility is not for white-collar workers only.

Competing on Balance

"Hydro," Sohlberg says, "is not an idyllic place where employees can come and go as they please, and work whenever and wherever they desire." Flexibility, diversity, and balance, she says, all serve a business purpose. Ultimately, they are strategies to make workplaces more effective.

Yet Hydro, like all of Norway, remains distinct from much of the rest of the world. Balance is not a core business value elsewhere. As it grows and globalizes, Hydro is starting to absorb that reality.

"We are finding out that our little company, here in our little country, is part of the big world," chuckles Hans Jørn Rønningen. Rønningen, 53, Hydro's senior vice president in charge of global human resources, is a good-humored but blunt-spoken man. He is not one to put a positive spin on negative circumstances.