Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Don't confuse hours with productivity - the 8 hour day campaign laid that one
> to rest in the late eighteen hundreds.
> And more recently, the Japanese salarymen who didn't dare leave work early
> for fear of being thought lazy or uncommitted.
>
One of my frustrations toiling in the corporate vineyards for decades
was the idea of some direct relationship between hours worked and
quality/quantity of output.
Although I did a number of things over that period, most were "brain
work" of some sort or other. For much of that work, the simple truth was
that I couldn't do anything productive for more than about maybe 25-30
hours/wk for eny extended period. So the rest of the required at-work
time was mostly wasted. Not uncommonly, an effort to work beyond my
limits simply wasted time and resources. dumb from tiredness sin't good
for brain work.
In at least some of this work, I was well ahead of anybody else in the
Q&Q of what I got done. A fair amount of it couldn't be evaluated that
way, as it was simply unique in the company. It's been over nine years
now since I retired, and the reporting application I conceived of and
created is still running on the laptops of all upper level management at
headquarters and in the operating divisions.
In the last few years, I was able to work pretty much my own hours and
mostly from home or travel. I think those were my most productive years,
when I could work 10-12 hours when I was on a roll and simply ignore
work when I wasn't up for it. But oh how many thousands of hours I
wasted chatting with co-workers, reading, pretending to be busy, simply
hiding out, etc., that could have bee usfully used for other pursuits.
Better rested and recreated, I would likely have been more productive
when working.
This foolishness extended to many aspects of the workplace. When I was
first made a manager, a good part of my employees were knowledge workers
who spent a lot of time on their own out in the field. My predecessor,
who didn't work out, wsa putting the screws to everybody about hours and
expenses. I soon discovered that his insistence on low motel costs was
causing some of these people to waste hours of our most expensive time
looking for a cheap place to stay and commuting from locations far from
the actual work.
He also had a hard and fast meal cost limitation. Nuts! Inman, who was
6'5", maybe 250# and worked out extensively, was expected to eat on the
same budget as Patty, who was maybe 5'4", slim and a light eater. All
this foolishness had the expected result, poor morale, resentment of
restrictions and resulting (semi) intentional inefficiencies in the
field, and so on. I immediately loosened those and other silly rules.
The section manager for those folks and I simply looked at expense
reports and asked about amounts that seemed out of the ordinary.
My field work costs went down. I also put them on flexible hours and
evaluated them on the number and quality of studies done. With this
particular work, it's hard to evaluate quality objectively. Certainly
simple quantity production went up a little. Based on overall
statistical analysis, our quality as a whole went up.
The whole idea of valuing many kinds of work on hours spent is just
ludicrous. I've had ideas in the shower that were worth many, mnay hours
of pounding sand.
> Can we assume that the American 'minimum wage' workers are motivated and
> productive, given that it's almost a new version of the old Chinese 'iron
> rice bowl' technique or what we'd call a 'work for the dole' scheme.
>
No.
Some are, of course. Many aren't.
Moose
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