Reader Duri writes in with a compelling (and detailed) comment to an earlier posting about productivity during March Madness. Duri, you’re right: I did find your description of your working conditions “utopic.” But toward the end you make a few key points (bolds mine)–that not only did you value your workers for the quality of the work they put in, not the minutes, you made sure your bosses comprehended and appreciated that value, too.
Managers, send me more fresh ideas like these; employees, tell me what you think. Here’s Duri’s comment:
I’ve been a software industry manager for most of the last 12 years. The software industry (as you note) is notorious for grinding work schedules and exhausted employees with a high burnout rate. But not in my labs.
My policy, wherever I could get away with it, was (paraphrased) “Get your work done on time, tell me when you’re overloaded or light loaded, and if you get done with everything early get out of my sight (but make sure I can reach you if I need you).” I didn’t tolerate “presenteeism”, didn’t expect them to consistently work OT, and didn’t monitor their email, web browser or game use. Basically I didn’t care what they did with every minute of their day, or even (*gasp!*) if they didn’t put in -quite- 40 hours that week. What I cared about was that they got the job done. That was after all why I employed them.
I never gave busy-work, so when I had significant downtime (which happens anywhere unless you’re so understaffed you can’t really function anyway) I would put them through training exercises, cross-training, and various admin and prep work for the next project(s). But if there wasn’t anything useful for them to do, I didn’t chain them to their desks.
Sounds utopic, but there was a very real benefit to me and my employers. I made sure that my staff knew two things; 1) They must get their assigned work done to the highest quality, and 2) There would be a time when I would need them to throw themselves into their work and push until they dropped. I -would- lean on them. Just not arbitrarily, and not every week.
The benefit to my employers was that my staff was very loyal, very dedicated, and very good. They were self-confident and felt good about what they did, they didn’t begrudge the OT when I did ask for it, and they were fresh when an emergency came down.
In one example my department was tasked with setting up a near-shore lab that was essentially a bootstrap operation. I asked for volunteers to go with me to this location (a 13 hour trip on average) for an indefinite period of at least two weeks and work to get this thing off the ground. I told them that this was that time when we had to come back with our shields or on them. I had to turn down most of the volunteers.
And we all died gloriously in battle. The people who came averaged 115 hours a week for the first week and about 100 hours a week for most of the next month. I had to threaten to put them physically on a plane and send them home to get them to take a day off (because they had gotten so tired they were useless). And they did a fantastic job. The project would have failed outright without that effort.
They didn’t do it for pay, as they weren’t paid that well (an artifact of that particular branch of the industry). They did it because I treated them well and only asked them to work like that when it really, legitimately needed to be done, and did everything I could to avoid creating those conditions unnecessarily.
To do this successfully required me to be a smart enough and strong-willed enough manager to know what my team was capable of, and to make sure I took on a level of work we could actually do (otherwise that message would have translated into “Work until your done or die”). I also had to be politically savvy enough to convince upper management that just because they didn’t see my people there at midnight didn’t mean they weren’t working. This wasn’t too hard, since the quality of work they output was top-notch and when I –did- need them there at midnight, they would show.
I believe that most managers who over-focus on hours (minutes, seconds, picoseconds) worked and absolute ‘efficiency’ are basically lazy or incompetent. It’s easy to measure hours and work units as ‘success’, but those are meaningless values by themselves. It takes a much better understanding of the work in question and the people doing it to really judge effort and impact. Companies don’t hire people to “Do Something” for 40 (50, 90) hours a week. They hire them to do something specific that will contribute to the company. As long as they get that job done, why should I care if they play solitaire or surf the web when they need a break?