Business Efficiency, lagging behind the real world
Tim on April 28th, 2009
Whoa, haven’t posted in here in aaages.
Been having a lot of thoughts about the future recently and where the world is going.
One of the most interesting areas to me is that of automation and efficiency, the entire world is getting faster, more effective and better at what they do, yet at the same time people are doing more. Why is this? I believe it’s mostly to do with us as Humans being able to easily adapt, but the systems we have built our society on can’t.
A Notable one is that of every business in the world believing it’s best to work 9 to 5 and you get paid on the amount of time you are in the office.
When you think about it, it just doesn’t make much sense. It makes sense from a managers point of view because it’s easy to mark a role and judge someones productivity based on what time they logged in and out.
However it’s incredibly inneficient.
Just like on office space what it boils down to is employees giving the job their best shot in the early days, realizing they get 0 reward for putting in extra effort and slowly falling back to do the minimum required work not to get fired.
If you go to work 4 hours a day and get twice as much done as the guy next to you who worked a full 8 hours you’re still more likely to get fired.
The company will simply say:
“Work 8 hours a day and get 4 times as much done…
But we’re still going to pay you just as much…”
So where’s this motivation coming from again?
It’s all well and good wanting to help grow the company, but if your reward for doing work… is more work, then why would you give a shit about working hard?
What it comes down to is a system that was designed in the past primarily for simplicity.
It’s kind of hard for managers to look over every detail of every person in a 10,000 person company and judge them based on results achieved.
It’s sooo much easier to just look at the times they logged in and out.
But with computers and technology so advanced these days you can monitor pretty much anything, just set up systems with checklists and more that staff can all work with and managers can easily see.
The problem is: companies aren’t keeping up.
and the government especially isn’t keeping up.
Out of every friend I have who’s working / worked in government none of them would say they worked especially hard, it’s just too easy to do sfa and get away with it.
Now the problem isn’t that people are just lazy and don’t want to do work. Because anyone that’s ever played World of Warcraft can understand just how friggin hard people work for that new shiny piece of loot. I’ve known some to spend 1000 hours+ doing the same repetitive task over and over to get one new mount.
and it isn’t even real…
The problem is games and web applications (web 2.0 stuff) are keeping up with the times, they are setting the pace. They are entertaining, addictive, fun and everything people want.
Jobs are not.
Some jobs are quite fun I must admit, the games company I worked for previously is a good example of that, so is working in a bar. Google is doing a superb job at making a fun workplace happen.
But they are still missing a few critical elements to being places people WANT to go.
Rewards are a big element, nobody wants to do extra work for no reason (even raiding in WoW you get loot sometimes 
).
Cutting the beurocracy and unneccessary tasks would be another great step (I’ve seen companies throw money down the drain because half the staff are doing jobs that don’t even need to be done).
If you think an 8 hour day is needed for your employees to get their stuff done, here’s a test:
Tell your employees if they get their work done by lunch time they can go home.
Now watch how fast that 8 hours of work magically turns into 4.
Tasks expand to fill the time alloted to them.
What I’d love to do is create an ideal work place, discover everything people want and provide it, provided they are being as efficient and hard working as possible I see no reason not to.
Have any ideas on what you’d love in your workplace? List em below.
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