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According to a recent study by AOL and Salary.com, full-time employees work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. The new era of free-range workers and their managers and clients must embrace transparency, and there must be a fundamental trust shared between colleagues. Beyond deadlines, expense accounts, and privacy, every employee must trust that their colleagues want the best for the company, care about the product, and aspire to succeed in their role.

The pressure of being required to sit at your desk until a certain time creates a factory-like culture that ignores a few basic laws of idea generation and human nature: (1) When the brain is tired, it doesn’t work well, (2) Idea generation happens on its own terms, (3) When you feel forced to execute beyond your capacity, you begin to hate what you are doing.

Managers must start to reconsider the conventional assumption that butts in chairs = productivity. In some particularly impressive companies such as Kluster, managers have abandoned the normal societal expectation of work time in favor of “doing work whenever there is work to be done.”  Another company, 37 Signals has went as far as implementing a standard four-day work week.  Even major corporations such as Best Buy have implemented programs such as ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) which favors performance based on output instead of hours.