Flexible office setup just the job

By SELWYN PARKER

Profits and benevolence coincide naturally for Richard Burton, who owns two legal businesses - a resource management consultancy and a publishing company - in Takapuna.

"It's your health first, your family second, and the company third," he says. That is his philosophy of life and work and it works well.

The holistic management style of Mr Burton (he's heard all the Liz Taylor jokes) has kept him profitably in business for 20 years and he's planning a significant expansion.

Yet he makes sure he plays golf on Monday afternoons. If he's still in the office for some reason when he's meant to be teeing off, his staff chase him out. Bronwen Hughes, a long-serving employee who is now Mr Burton's partner in the publishing business, takes her cue from the boss. She rarely comes into the office at all on Wednesdays.

The staff of the two companies, Burton Consultants and DSL Legal Publishing, pursue the same order of priorities. After 3 pm on most afternoons there is hardly anybody in the office, just somebody answering the phones and one or two sales staff.

The rest are probably at home, looking after their health and the children and the company, in that order.

"When people come into the office sometimes, they must wonder if we're still in business," laughs Mr Burton.

So what have we got here? The gender-neutral, soul-centric, politically correct, feel-good workplace? Don't kid yourself.

This is a practical arrangement of mutual convenience that reflects a fast-developing trend in work practices. Also, appearances deceive. A lot of work is being done, though not necessarily in the office.

It's all about faith.

"We operate entirely on a system of trust," says Mr Burton. "We know when people are not working or keeping their end of the bargain. But if for some reason we don't, staff will come and tell us. If you break the trust, you won't stay here."

Having said that, it's rare for anybody to break trust. In 20 years, Mr Burton has had to see off just one employee for not keeping his end of this gentlemen's agreement.

It has been like that from the establishment of the consulting business in 1980 when Mr Burton, a town planner by training, began hiring experienced, mainly professional women with school-age children who did not want to be pinned down to fixed working hours because they needed to be available for their families.

What these women wanted was project-based work that could be accomplished at mutually agreed times.

This suited the young business because it avoided the burden of high fixed-wage costs. At one stage, Mr Burton was the only fulltime worker in the company.

These family friendly working arrangements are not the expression of a warm and fuzzy Utopian ideal. If they were, they probably wouldn't work. For proof, just look at Levi Strauss' disastrous experiment with politically correct work practices that cost the company billions and caused the exit of its chief executive.

"This all sounds very egalitarian and altruistic," says Mr Burton.

"It's not. There's a hard business reason for it. We have flexibility on both sides. This is critical to the business' success. By being flexible, we are able to employ very experienced, intelligent and capable people.

"Your average command-and-control manager would have apoplexy in this office. Some staff work Friday nights, others all day Saturday, others start at 6 am and are gone by 3.30 pm. As long as they return their phone calls and generally keep in touch and do the business, this is okay."

And although staff are on individual employment contracts that stipulate so much pay for so many hours, time sheets are banned. "We are only interested in the task being done," says Mr Burton.

And with adult, professional people, the job gets done 99.9 per cent of the time. No working arrangement is perfect though, and Mr Burton says there are two problems with flexibility. Sometimes, especially in the afternoon, there might not be enough staff, and occasionally there is an overload of accumulated leave.