When I was in the navy my command did this. We were out by 2pm, 4 day work weeks and had the best productivity of the whole navy.
Productivity isn’t a straight line, which is where most businesses fail in their thinking. Yeah I can do five days of work in four days, with the right incentives. I can also do it in five with no incentives.
I can do three days of work in five days with the wrong incentives :)
I kinda see it lol, at work I see people dragging themselves to Friday. And on Friday, they’d do so much work and wrap up things that would otherwise take time. The excitement of “there’s no office tomorrow” and the motivation to clock out on time on a Friday evening is like the adrenalin rush!
Just think about WFH, exactly the same logic.
Three days in office was a perfect balance for me and my team. Everyone came in Wednesday so anytime we needed in person stuff, it was scheduled for that day. Folks were happy, saving on the commute, desk space and parking was plentiful. Then higher said folks like me were to be in five days a week while everyone else was four. Cue nosedive in productivity.
This is genuinely how MBAs think
MBAs have systematically been drilled to view the world as numbers, rather than social or psychological dynamics. Empathy is an obstacle when your focus is on generating higher numbers.
If you estimate a project in hours of work, a shorter work-week looks like projects will take longer. Imagine you’ve planned 60h and are billing for 60h, but instead of devoting 20h per week and delivering in three weeks, your developer now only spends 16h and you’ll be delivering in four weeks instead! That’s wasting a week they could’ve spent on other projects, slow down turnaround times and essentially cut your revenue per week by 33%.
Worse, you’re also supposed to pay them 20% more per hour, so you have less revenue for more pay. You can see how that’ll cut into profits.
Never mind that the increased productivity messes with your estimate, so the same work might now get done in, say, 48h instead, keeping the same turnaround time, at the same price you were paying before. Even if you consider that, you’d also have to charge the customer more per hour of work, which seems like a tougher sell than just keeping things as they were, which everyone is already used to.
It’s an idiotic and soulless way to think about labour instead of people, and it’s neither sustainable nor really reasonable, but if the only tool you have is a calculator, everything becomes numbers.
I used to work at a university whose education department sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into a study to find ideal lecture length to maximize retention.
Memory’s a little fuzzy… it was short. Like a half hour?
Anyway the punchline I definitely do remember is that they got the results of the study then changed absolutely nothing
I can believe it, last two places I’ve worked the primary voice in teaching decisions seems to have been timetabling. Got to maximise your room usage.
“We funded this study hoping it would conform to our existing world view, Alas it didnt, there for we’re not changing a fucking thing”
Thats pretty much the status quo of science under wealth inequality. I invent AI studies to confirm my biases too. The current study is “can an AI legislate better than mitch mcconnell”
Let’s start with Lindsey Graham and go from there.
All of them, and we should use the AI to spy on them and use the PATRIOT ACT data to see everything they’ve done in said in the last 100 years and summerize it for us. I’m totally ready to adopt this technology and use it against the people who would use it to control me.
This is why cruelty is the point, because they prioritize it even above profit.
If you’re not miserable, you’re not working hard enough/s
Lol yeah it’s the exact same [facetious] logic as expecting increasing the working day from 10 ~> 20 hours to lead to increased productivity.
It’s almost like ample and adequate rest need to be baked into scheduling?
Like thinking 2 women can birth 1 child in 4.5 months…
Holy crap are you telling me that if I impregnate 17 women at once I can have a kid in an hour? What’s all this hubub about population decline hop to it people!
Pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks, so to get it done in an hour, you’d have to impregnate more like 6,720 women. It’s hard to impregnate that many in an hour, so it’s no wonder guys are too intimidated to try it.
while we know this post is fake, this is the logic capitalists use. it is the logic they hide, the lede they bury, when they report on how efficient ai will make us.
I can’t tell you whether the post is fake, but I can tell you this exact situation was researched in my country and found to be correct and then was never heard from again
It’s Taco Bell logic. You love our chicken nuggets and caramel empanadas? We sold out in 3 days? Well they’re discontinued so fuck you. Ok guys, sales are down and we can’t figure out why, we need ideas.
they got rid of the quesarito just so they can bring it back for a week. and there is NOTHING in the quesarito that isnt already on the menu, so you can still get it if you customize a beefy 5 layer
What’s the “logic” here?
I’d laugh, but this just seems like it would actually happen.
This happened to me.
I requested four days and laid out a plan on what “success” looked like. We tried it. After six months my boss and I agreed all my metrics had improved, so he put me back in five days because “imagine how productive you’ll be now”, so I quit a couple of months after.
When I accepted my current job, I did so on the conditions that I’d work 4x10 and fully from home (after training). When I started, they said there had been a misunderstanding about full WFH and that I was allowed to WFH one day a week. (That eventually changed during COVID but no one ever apologized to me for lying to me.)
Seven years later - last year - they told me that it was “unfair” that I’m the only person who had a special schedule (apparently I was the last person to have it, but I certainly was not the only) and took that away, too.
I live in a rural area and will not be able to find a comparable job nearby. I’ve been contemplating what to do.
Wanna share the plan? I’m still trying to come up with something for my boss.
Yes! I had an engineering management role in a smallish company, which means that I still had a lot of hands on responsibilities, so not sure how things apply to your role. But a lot looked like this:
- we set out what we expected would be achieved in six months (major projects or milestones) <- we ran a roadmap that got fuzzy with time so this was more a vibe check than commitments
- we defined what would be signs that it wasn’t working. Eg. Projects stalling, teams confused about direction, feedback from the team, lowering of certain metrics.
- we set up checks every two months that included feedback from direct reports and one over.
- I picked Wednesday. we set out how the calendar was going to change, how handover was going to work for those days and what mechanisms existed to avoid blocking.
It went great! Especially as a manager knowing you’re not always there helps drive decision making delegation, self directedness, etc.
In this team I wasn’t the only one that tried it, and we didn’t synchronize days. It had no issue
Also depending on where you are, it might be moot. Eg. In Germany they can’t say no unless they have business reason.
I would have prepared my two weeks notice letter in advance and handed it to him right after he said those words.
Honestly this caught me off guard because they interim check-ins were good. I wasn’t expecting this conclusion. Otherwise i would!
Three months notice over here lol
They would never give you notice if they were firing you. They don’t deserve that courtesy from you.
I’m less than 50% confident the OP is a joke.
It’s a joke based on a true story.
On my first job the boss was telling a story about one of his previous jobs, where at one point they had to redo a whole week’s worth of work in one night. They tried hard and managed to do it. So I just added: “it’s in those times one see how slow they usually work”
Burnout is a thing too. There’s a reason marathon runners don’t sprint.
ya it’s cuz they aren’t side hustling enough
Marathons don’t move at the speed of business though. Progress moves business faster. Commerce IS business. Fast businesses use speed to move faster than their clients speed.
Business, business business. Speed. Solutions.
Edit: how am I being downvoted lol - obviously what I wrote is nonsense straight from every Amazon, UPS, IBM commercial every made. Maybe I’m just moving at the speed of business. Keep up!
Very few business are sprints, they go for longevity like marathoners.
Even most know not to treat their employees that way too.
how am I being downvoted lol
Poe’s Law
Most in the c-suite truly think that way.
redo
Or rather we see just how much labor original work is compared to replication.
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I have worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. Before Covid happened my monthly schedule was set up so that we were given seven days off every month. At the end of 2021 management decided to change it so that we worked 5 days and 4 off with them saying that this was a “safer”and more beneficial to employees, since the schedule change there have been more people quitting and more people getting hurt on the job I myself along with others have voiced our opinion to go back to the original schedule and management looks down upon us as if we said a dirty word.
7 days off a month, as in, accruing 7 days each month that you can take off later (in a bigger chunk, for example)? Or like, 3 weeks on, ~1.3 weeks off, repeat…?
The 7 days off was built into the normal schedule monthly. The schedule was, 4 days on the 3 off, then 3 days on and 2 off, then 3 on 3 off then 4 on then a week off. The schedule was also divided into half a month day shift and half night shift.
Yeah, I’d go with the option that has the least incidences. Mining is already environment prone so we don’t need to add any more human error than we need.
“So we went back to five days, and now productivity is down to effectively three days, what went wrong?”
Executives, everywhere.
“so I started
blastingfiring people”Anyone else remember the scene in Schindler’s list where the Nazis make a work camp Jew show how quickly he can make a part (a hinge I think), and then look at his completed parts bin and decide to kill him because he clearly hasn’t been working that speed the entire time?
Maybe Pizza Friday is the answer
One slice each only, obviously.
The management quietly dropped/forgot it lol
The study stops when the executives get what they want.
Which is objectively stupid as fuck, btw
Capitalism in a nutshell. Treat your employees like expendable assets and squeeze every last drop out of them
The only silver lining to ending slavery for the owner class was that at least now the cogs were responsible for their own room and board and etc
*acknowledging that slavery hasn’t truly, universally ended
If people are happy, something is wrong. Misery is a virtue/s
