@thanksajdotcom said:
People should be judged by the results they deliver, not how they obtain said results. If I can do my job in 6 hours a day to a very high standard, and it takes someone else the full 8, why should I have to be "working" the other 2?
Absolutely.
I like to think of human resources in a similar way to IT resources. You would never want to run your servers at 100% capacity all the time. If you looked at your servers right now and they were running over 50% you would be worried, right? So why expect human resources to run at 100% capacity all the time. This is where companies end up with a situation where during quiet times they are running at 100%, and during busy times they can't cope and end up letting down customers.
This is an area of interest to me, because I'm putting in a new ERP system that will increase productivity and as company we need to know how we will handle that. I'm a fan of Lean Manufacturing and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, which generally apply to manufacturing, but can also be applied to backoffice administration. If you have a machine in your factory that can produce 10 grommets an hour but during a quite period you can only sell 5 grommets an hour, what do you do? Traditionally, the production manager will run the machine at full capacity and over-produce. Inventory will build up, and the company will lose money. This is because the production manager is judged on his efficiency, and will be punished if he only runs his machine at 50% efficiency, even if that is the best thing to do for the company. Over-production is the enemy of manufacturing.
Now apply those principles to the back office. A back office worker is generally involved in the production of spreadsheets. You can divide those spreadsheets into productive ones, ie ones that add value to the company, and non-productive ones, ie ones that add no-value to the company and are only produced so that the worker can appear busy.
The lazy Facebooker will generally only produce productive spreadsheets. He knows what is important, but once he has done that he'll slack off and go on Facebook. The conscientious worker will always find new spreadsheets to create.
In the same way that over-production in the factory actually costs money, in terms of the cost of storing and managing excess inventory, so over-production in the back-office will cost money, in terms of the cost of storing and managing excess spreadsheets. So if you're going to fire someone, fire the conscientious worker and keep the lazy Facebooker.
Google General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord for more info on how he divided his officers and why lazy workers can be better.
The counter argument to this is that a grommet machine can only make grommets, whereas a human can do an endless array of tasks. And this is a fair point. So for example, during quiet times, Acocunts staff can phone customers and chase debt, which is always productive. But the trick here is ensuring that any extra tasks you assign to your back-office staff are actually productive. They have to add to the company's bottom line, otherwise they are bullshit tasks that add no value. Setting in a place a structure to recognise the difference between productive and non-productive tasks is the key to maximising profit. But if you can't do that, you may as well let people go on Facebook for all the good it will do you.
