Unfettered Blather

I often talk about concepts and ideas with a wide-eyed wonder that would make most people mistake me for a starry-eyed optimist. I can then start talking about human nature that exposes me for the misanthrope I truly am. In truth, at my core I am a pragmatist who would prefer to judge the situation and make decisions based on the facts instead of a sense of idealism or fatalism.

I’m a big fan of the 40 hour work week. I’ve worked in offices where most employees worked 32 hours and I’ve been in environments where people routinely worked 60. For some reason, and I know there are studies about why, 40 hours broken into 8 hour segments seems to be a magic number. Less than 40, not enough work gets done and it’s too difficult to collaborate between team members or other teams. Over 40 and people become so tired that productivity drops and work quality quickly deteriorates. There are exceptions, of course, but planning around the exceptions is foolhardy. My primary reason for being a big fan of the 40 hour work week is because it is an ideal balance between productivity and morale. Companies want high volume but employees want to have a life. You cannot get high volume if employees do not commit to a certain amount of work but morale will drop, as will productivity, if employees feel like they are not allowed to have a life outside the office.

A concept that continues to escape many corporate suits, much to my befuddlement, is that happy workers are productive workers. The answer to happy workers seems to be a stricter enforcement of the rules, which leads to unhappy workers, which leads to a drop in productivity, which leads to questions of how to make workers more productive. Instead of giving workers more incentives, better pay, more flexible schedules, etc. the answer seems to be introducing processes and procedures. More rules to follow and more paperwork to file while still doing the same amount of work just leads to further dissatisfaction. Your best people will flee to other companies, leading to a further drop in morale as the best workers were often the only reason that made everyone else think the job was managable.

I’ve continued to struggle with the concept that happy workers are a problem. I’ve seen senior management at many companies, particularly when I was a consultant, take away minor benefits that were costing the company thousands of dollars a year and then lose tens of thousands of dollars as morale dropped. That is possibly a best case scenario. What a company stands to lose by tanking morale could easily soar into the millions. I know when a large corporation bought out a smaller company that a family member worked for they killed a nightly after hours videogame session played over the company LAN. This was an extremely stupid move as this was done outside of company time, had minimal cost to the company, and furthermore acted as an excellent team building and social bonding tool. These minor benefits have major payoffs and yet are often the first thing to go since they have no direct relation to the bottom line. Unfortunately, some gains just cannot be directly attributable on an accountant’s spreadsheet.

As companies look for more efficient ways to be productive and increase profits, they need to avoid the death spiral of ever increasing workloads, rules, and hours in an attempt to solve their problems. What I avoid are companies who believe that successful managers are measured by how many hours their people work. That is not a measure of success, that is a sign of impending disaster. Start-ups can get away with long hours because those hours are voluntary and employees often have a personal stake in the company. Give someone the prospect of potentially making millions and their attitude towards long hours will change dramatically. Most companies do not want to potentially pay out millions of dollars to employees that are in the trenches, so why expect them to have the same dedication as their start-up counterparts?

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