Most CEOs are morons stuck in a manufacturing paradigm where they imagine that employees are doing 10 units per hour, so with more hours they must get more done!
... except most work these days is thinking work, and the more tired people get the less they get done.
As one programmer friend of mine put it, "My best programming solutions come to me on my day off."
More days off? More programming solutions. Less days off? Less programming solutions.
what's amazing is that they 100% get it when it comes to workers they actually see as people... fellow execs.... they get that flexibility and time off and remote work and all the rest can have a huge boost on productivity ....
but they just can't get around to thinking of the line workers as real people and professionals, they need to have the whip cracked....
No, they do get it, but majority of jobs are still not "thinking jobs", but shit that cant really be done any faster. You wont do 5 days of work in 4 as a McDonalds workers or supermarket clerk or manual labourer, or a driver, etc.
And while people can live with the 0,1%, the exec class, living by different rules, society would probably explode if you also elevated the ~10-20% making up "specialist class" to that. The amount of anger and jealousy from lower class workers, would probably legit result in instant revolution.
The quality, value, and consistency of your output at a job that is not a 'thinking job' matters to the bottom line of a company. You waste less, the product is worth more, more sales are made, turnover drops, etc. Never let anyone convince you of the lie they tell us about unskilled labor. People on the whole are not stupid, they'll get good at anything if the incentives are right. Capitalism does not provide any incentive for people to grow and learn and perform well. Capitalism crushes the effort that makes people better themselves, to be good at their work and to take pride in it. Everyone laboring deserves equality, and everyone who can not deserves to be cared for as well.
You wont do 5 days of work in 4 as a McDonalds workers or supermarket clerk or manual labourer, or a driver, etc.
There are actually loads of days that for whatever reason my Pulls to stock the floor in retail are like 3-4x higher than normal.
Does doing more work in a day mean nothing to you if that work was manual labor? Does that not count as more work? What do you consider work in a manual labor job then? The hours themselves? What do the hours do, if not tick by on a clock? Do the hours stock the shelves? Do the hours pull everything forward so it's pretty and accessible? Do the hours move the bulky shit from the back? Do the hours pick the Online Pick Up Order carts for guests? Do the hours pack those carts, stow them?
I was actually just thinking about this as I left work today, my department cut a position and now I have inherited their workload on top of my own, and literally have no time to just think about how to optimize my tasks and make things more efficient, so I'm perpetually maintaining/reacting instead of proactively improving. My boss justified the cut position by saying our team is a "well-oiled machine", but basically took away the workload buffer that allowed us to oil the damn machine in the first place. This will be an interesting year.
I worked with Toyota a bit and even for heavy machinery they have scheduled downtime - if I recall correctly it's about 20% of the machine's operating time is "preventative maintenance", and they found that this prevents machines actually breaking which saves a ton of money.
In human resource management textbooks they recommend humans run at no more than 60% to 70% of "capacity" for entirely the same reason. When someone has had enough and quits mid-project it costs a lot more than just giving people a reasonable workload in the first place.
The thing here is most ceos will Tell you they work 16-18h a day.
But also those same ceos Go to 5 Meetings a day where they Talk about stuff and thats it.
They count their transportation time. They count their meals. They could their smoke breaks if they’re in the vicinity of their office. They count any thing if they’re think about work for even one second. They are not working that many hours any day.
biblically manipulative sociopaths that feign emotions just enough to come off like an everyman so that you, incorrectly, perceive it as stupidity, and who are
stuck in a manufacturing paradigm where they imagine that employees are doing 10 units per hour, so with more hours they must get more done!
As a programmer, I agree. In a meeting, I recently uttered the line, "Can we revisit that problem we identified yesterday? I was running last night and I came up with a really clever solution"
Now try being at a place where your manager pings you when you're "inactive" for more than 5 minutes. Like bro, I'm literally thinking and every time you ping me, I have to restart my thinking.
Acting like the bottleneck to output on code is how fast and long people type is just bugfuck insane.
I had one of these just this week, where I just spent a few minutes talking through a problem with someone, and it occurred to me that we had a pretty easy way to do it. The implementation was maybe an hour of work, and the vast majority of that was testing. The actual code took like 5 minutes to type.
exactly. i do most of the work in day driving in the car, going to the store or for a walk in the nature - all during working hours - where i can think away from messages and screens.
I don’t currently code, but when I did I used to regularly come up with the solution to things that I had been struggling with in my sleep. I would literally wake up and know how to do the thing that I had been trying to figure out.
Any time there's a linear correlation between 'hours worked' and 'productive output' you've a job you should have automated already.
(And most jobs where humans 'add value' are not like that, although I'll grant increasing numbers of employers are hiring 'meat robots' because they're cheaper than the metal kind)
The most reliable way for me to come up to solutions for tough problems as a software dev was to get up from my desk then go outside and take a walk. These days for a lot of jobs you'd need a mouse jiggler to get away with that.
Exactly. I'm an aerospace engineer. My best ideas usually come on days off or vacation. My brain is too busy trying to multitask through a million things on work days to be creative or innovative.
I'm a chef and I think of most of my best menu ideas when I'm off. It sucks because I'm working for free for bosses I hate but I can't stop myself because i like making good food u_u
this even translates to like IT projects and stuff. Utilization hours are tracked by logged work hours on each project, etc. So when you do your timecard the number of tracked hours related directly to projects etc gets classified as 'utilized' whereas internal meetings etc don't. So guess what you stop logging? Internal anything gets attributed to a customer or something. I'm training, but i'm training this skill so i can work on X client, so i am being 'utilized'. It's moronic but they literally cannot behave in a non metric based performance view so this is what you get.
I agree so much with your friend, my best ideas come on Sunday when I start to think about the work to do for the coming week. And on Fridays NO ONE has the energy to work as much as we do the rest of the work week, having that day off wouldn't change a thing for the company.
And yet the CEO's will take the breaks they want, for as long as they want, whenever in the day they suit.
But to employees, you get a set break, often at the worst times and for many if it's busy you have to work through your break.
They are in a bubble.
In my admin/CS role due to short staff if I don't take a breather between calls even for a minute or two my work quality dips so I would still do 50+ calls even 60+ (and 10-25 emails) but I would make far more mistakes and they would make the company look bad.
If I did 35-40 calls they would all be higher quality, less issues, less frustrated customers.
I mean, I work in manufacturing and even if it’s not a thinking task output decreases as the day and week wear on. Operators get sore, bored, stiff, distracted, exhausted, you name it. But outside all of this, when none or multiple of these factors are present the least productive time of the day is the first and final hour. In the beginning you have warmup and periodic maintenance for machines, planning meetings and handoffs for the people…the end of the shift has timekeeping and paperwork, machine shutdown, cleaning and washing up. With 4 days you have 2 fewer of those hours and all the same workload. Yet still we come to the factory when the bell rings…
As a person that works in the manufacturing world this is also annoying. I’m not a robot, my 40hrs this week isn’t the same effort as my 40hrs last week. I could get 15 units to their calculated 10 done in the same time if I have an extra day off bc I work harder. It’s like them assuming the work I do at 6am is the same as the work done at 11am. It’s not. Humans fluctuate and their work will too, the smart thing would be to have it fluctuate in ur workers favor instead of just pushing them non stop
Not to mention the mental anguish of “oh fuck… its only wednesday and im already fucking tired… 2 more days of this shit” can severely impact your productivity.
At the same time, having 3 day weekends can become a “well, ive done all i need to do… ive cleaned the house properly, theres a plan for the week, i got some errands done… ive watched a couple films and shows and now im just kinda bored…” so you might look a little forwards to working.
Mondays feel less exhausting when you know its a short week ans a long weekend. Even when that becomes the norm
Same, me being in the office for five days and eight hours. I can get everything done in one day and just update any changes through out the week before the Friday wrap up meeting.
It's a satire account, it's not real. It also says nothing about 8's vs 10's etc.
Most of the time this is brought up, it's 4 x 10's with the benefits being less commuting, longer uninterrupted weekend etc. There's will be no actual factual data showing a 20% efficiency improvement from going from 5 days to 4 days.
Schools in our area started going to 4 day weeks, so the biggest benefit for us would be no needing child care to cover that 5th day.
The point of experiments like this is showing less overall hours worked is actually more productive. This can be shown in both shorter work weeks and shorter work days.
The people (usually employees) that talk about stuff like four 10 hour days are not discussing this, they're trying to get an alternative that stays in the same old mentality of "40 hours is a magical number that equals a real work week".
lol I had a boss decree rto 1 day a month peak covid and I told him if he made it my job to show up that's all I would do. so I sat in my chair with a mask on and scrolled reddit for 8 hours that day
Reminds me of that movie when the nazi asks the old man to make a hinge at one of the work camps while timing him, then says "and you've been here 6 hours why have you only made "X" number".
It’s why I intentionally work more slowly. I have absolutely no problem getting my daily tasks done in 2.5 hours, but this will just get me more work assigned so I don’t do it.
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u/StockCasinoMember 21d ago
The staff showed how much they could get done in 4 days. Now they have no excuse to get more done in 5.