There was a time when evening meetings adjourned and Board or committee members asked if I would join them in an outing to a local pizzeria or tavern. I usually declined. I had young children at home and needed to help them with homework or put them to bed.

Years later, those very same association members had children of their own. Not only did they skip post-meeting food and drink outings, they often skipped the meetings, too. They had to help their kids with homework or put them to bed.

One member left work every day at 4:00 p.m. to pick up his kid from day care and help prepare dinner. Another could no longer run with her husband every morning. They ran on alternate days, so one could always be home to care for the kids.

Our society promotes family values, and people holding family values usually have family responsibilities, too. They attend school meetings and events, share carpooling duties, take their kids to the doctor, and deal with family emergencies.

Travel, commuting, and work tasks are all impacted by family needs. That should be expected, and associations should accommodate employees' family needs.

Workers today are told they must be creative, flexible, and innovative. They should always think "out of the box." However, when it comes to employment policies, they are usually stuffed inside a rigid, nonsensical box.

Scott Briscoe revisited his nonsensical work customs in a recent ASAE posting. My favorite is "Uncommon Sensical HR Practice 2" that states:

"In most cases, don't be so rigid with workday hours. Allow staff to come and go and work and balance their personal lives in ways that makes sense to them - as long as they're doing the job, who cares if they leave for two hours in the middle of the day?"

Associations should let their employees out of the box and focus on their results, not where or when they try to achieve those results.

Will you really perform better if you are offered a bonus? Will you become smarter or more inventive? Will you achieve better results?

If you can do all of that, why wouldn't you just do it all the time? Is a bonus really necessary to coax those skills out of you?

Here's a great video (and it's fun to watch, too) that debunks the theory that more money equals better work.

Thanks to Russell King, of Wisconsin Homecare Organization, for pointing to it.

Imagine how it must feel to read a memo and not see any capital letters, punctuation, or spaces between words or paragraphs. Although you're pretty sure the memo doesn't really look like that, that's how your brain transmits the image to you.

So before you can react to the content of the memo, you have to decode it and arrange the letters, words, and paragraphs into their proper form.

You may be smarter than everybody else in the room, but you won't be able to use your intelligence until your brain reformats the memo.

Employees who respond slowly to written words, make frequent and repetitive spelling errors, appear disorganized, and sometimes reverse letters and numbers, may be dyslexic. They aren't dumb (Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia), but their learning disability may interfere with their processing of information.

Don't punish them for having a health problem. Recognize that they may process and organize information differently than you. Proofread copy they write for dissemination (you should do that anyway) and offer helpful criticism.

People who were fortunate enough to receive assistance at an early age are likely to have devised strategies to overcome the effects of dyslexia. Others, who may have been dismissed in the past as slow, dumb, or inattentive, may have more difficulty with some tasks. So help them be effective at their jobs. Don't ridicule or punish them.

The International Dyslexic Association can provide information that will improve your ability to work with Board members, employees, vendors, and other association personnel who grapple with the effects of dyslexia every day.

P.S. I've employed dyslexic staff and it was never a problem for the association.

Here are two phrases that some people think are challenging and motivating. I think they are negative and insulting.

"Step up to the plate" suggests you haven't done what really needs to be done, so now you'd better do it.

"Take it to another level" implies you've settled for less and now you need to demand more of yourself and your association.

Most people are not motivated by put-downs or accusations of shortcomings. They are motivated by encouragement and opportunities.

You should not want to improve your performance, or that of your association, because it has been insufficient in the past. You should want to improve because doing so may yield better results.

Do better because you always want to do better (even if you are doing fine right now) not because you think you weren't doing well enough before.

Ellen Behrens thinks people work too much. And she's right.

Working longer hours doesn't always yield better results. It often leads to nothing more than working longer hours.

If you never slept, ate, or shopped, and worked 24 hours every day, you would still not accomplish everything you thought was necessary.

Decide what tasks are most important and how best to succeed at those tasks. Maximize your time and energy and preserve some of both for non-work activities (including family).

If you work all of the time, you may burn out. Burn out pretty much guarantees failure.

Bosses don't always realize - or, maybe, don't care - that they often unfairly take advantage of employees' time.

Bosses should respect employees' time, work needs, and personal responsibilities, just as they (bosses) expect theirs to be respected.

Here are just a few things that bosses should NOT do:

1. Do not bring your children to the office if employees are not allowed to do the same. Being the boss may give you the power to do that but doing so is a really big morale killer.

2. Do not eat lunch at your desk unless employees are also allowed to do that.

3. Do not expect employees to eat lunch at their desks just because you do.

4. Do not assign someone an "emergency" task five minutes before the end of their day. Just because you work later, doesn't mean they should (and they may not be able to).

5. Do not give employees last-minute notice of evening or weekend work, or a travel assignment, if those conditions are not a normal part of their jobs. They'll need time to make alternative personal arrangements (if possible).

6. Do not schedule a staff meeting during off-hours and still expect everybody to work a full day - unless they were told of that requirement when hired.

7. Do not expect all employees to attend meetings during off-hours. They may have child care or other personal responsibilities that must be met.

8. Do not send e-mails to employees that will need to be acted upon on the last day before a holiday vacation. You've merely freed up your time for vacationing by passing your work burdens on to them, and that's a crappy thing to do.

An attorney told me he doesn't waste money hiring computer consultants. He is tech savvy, so he repairs his own computer hardware and software instead of spending $100 an hour for technical support.

However, he charges $350 an hour for legal services, so for every hour he spends doing computer work instead of legal work, he is losing money.

Bottom line? Do your job and hire other people to do things for you that are not your job.

I don't work in my PJs. I get dressed every morning, even when I'm laboring at a home office. Being able to keyboard in sleepwear is not enticing. Avoiding a commute and bad weather is.

Telecommuting offers some plusses - you don't have to worry about traffic or weather, nobody is standing over you telling you what to do, and you can work any time (although, some people may consider that a minus).

On the other hand, you don't have a mailbox in the lobby or a receptionist to handle FedEx, UPS, and messenger services or to pick up your calls when you're on another line. People usually cannot visit your office (that's what Starbucks and Panera are for).

Shannon Otto has some suggestions for managing a telecommuting staff. Trust and self-discipline are key ingredients.

Kevin Holland and Dan Kowitz both announced they were going "off the grid" (and they used the same words) - one for a vacation, the other for the ASAE conference.

That shouldn't be such a rare occurrence. Very few people need to be in contact with their worlds all of the time.

I took off three days for a short vacation last weekend. I didn't read or write blogs (I didn't have access to a computer), read a newspaper, watch or listen to the news, or check my voicemail. That's what a vacation is - no work.

You can always catch up (if necessary) when you return home.