How the crap did we adopt the 40 hour work week as a working standard?
It is so arbitrary. Ask the average worker how much of those 40 hours are actually spent doing work, and you will get widely volatile answers. Where did it come from? Did someone sit down and think, hey – ‘if we get people working a butt-load of hours, maybe they will get something done for some of them?’ Is it an intentional attempt to break people’s spirits? (Although that hardly makes sense, because if you break someone’s spirit – they do crappy work) How does time correlate to productivity?
I am becoming much more aware of output / product. What do my clients/bosses walk away with? In my field (art/animation), there is something tangible to see. But the idea is the same regardless of field – how do you help the company succeed? If your company makes more money because of your contributions, you will have inherent value no matter how many hours you are there or how hard you work. Think about it: if you were your boss, would you rather have an employee who was always at the office but got very little done, or one that comes less frequently but accomplishes a tremendous amount?
Hmmm… How would it be different if everyone worked from home?
Many of us would go crazy from social isolation. I guess a bunch of us would be even less productive without someone directly standing over us and harassing us. Or maybe we would be more productive without the crazy boss breathing down our necks. Hard to say how it would play out.
But why 40? What if everyone worked 25 hours a week? I wonder. Would we be more efficient? Probably not. I think people tend to goof off the same percentage of their day no matter how many hours they work. What if people were only paid on the output of their work? Not necessarily commission, but paid on the results of what they accomplished. That would be weird. I think that many people would be too scared. We would live with a bit less security. We would have to face up to the actual reality of how much value we are putting out into the world. On the flip side, we would have a more direct control over how much we earn monetarily. If you were genuinely working all 40 hours of the week, you could make a very generous income. If not, you could avoid those hours killing time at work until the clock strikes 5 – in favor of spending time with your family or loved ones.
Only one thing seems certain to me: in most cases the 40 hours that we are paid for does not directly correlate to the output of the efforts.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
40 Hours
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I was just thinking that this sort of shorthand is somewhat outdated for much of today's modern workforce. It used to be that businesses basically owned you, and anything outside of your assigned duties was called moonlighting.
Yes, "40 hours a week" is a shorthand for a certain level of productivity, as conceived by those who have no other way to measure how someone's output should relate to how they are paid.
If you were working in an assembly plant, it might make more sense. And perhaps it makes some sense in some other manufacturing jobs. In these jobs you can measure productivity by time. The line keeps rolling.
You can find the opposite in many sales jobs. In these jobs you are paid for your success.
These are two ends of the spectrum. In many jobs it's hard to measure someone's actual productivity though. Therefore, here's this shorthand, "40 hours a week". There are loopholes to this kind of set up, of course (people surfing the web during work hours, etc.). The only way around the loopholes are bonuses -- for those that are productive -- or firings -- for those that can't avoid exploiting the loopholes (or more correctly, can't avoid getting caught).
I think as people become more entrepreneurial in the conduct of their job, there will be less and less need for the 40-hour work week paradigm. And companies that fail to recognize this will suffer, as will the people who work for them.
There was a thread bouncing around our forums at work today. A company called 37signal has started experimenting with alternate working conditions. One of the things they tried was to switch to a 4-day work week in the summer and give everybody friday off. That way everybody would come back refreshed on monday because every weekend is a long weekend. Apparently it's worked so successfully for them that they've now adopted the 4-day work week as their regular schedule.
I'd love to see this shift in thinking about the modern workplace become more dominant.
Wow. That's really amazing. Kudos to 37signal for their courage. It probably took a lot of trust and vision to attempt such a major change.
Post a Comment