Rant #2 - the 3-day workweek

[chang]

This week I reached out to another department in the company for some data that I need to perform an analysis. The lady in charge told me that they were very busy with other projects and wouldn't be able to get to what I needed for another two months. Complete B.S. and I will outsource the requirement to someone who actually does something useful.

I left the workplace in early 2020, just as Covid hit, so I missed the evolution of the workplace. In a nutshell, my company's official working policy is that employees must come into the office three days a week. (And the same for every other company.) Most people come in Tue-Wed-Thu, but others choose different patterns.

This means that my entire team is never actually in the office at any one time. Meetings are usually conducted with half the people in the room and half the people on video.

What I suspect it really means that people are just working three days a week now. When you're working from home (or "WFH", in corporate lingo), can you really be as effective as when you're at your desk in the office, or meeting face to face with colleagues and clients?

No wonder I have to wait two months for the data I requested.

It seems to me as if, overnight, the world simply stopped working 40% of the time it used to.

[steelpony10]

        I just ran across someone who received I believe about 5 days+ of bereavement leave for a grandparent. Hitting a lick for a living or holding multiple jobs is so old school.

[Chahta]

chang , I agree 100%. Work ethic means nothing anymore. My working life was pretty much "assholes and elbows". My hours were to get the job done. If that was explained to Millennials, Gen Zs and Ys (whatever they are now called) it would be met with disgust.

No kidding on this, I have a 30 YO friend that works from home, I think responsibly. At times she takes care of her 3 YO child while working. She got a friend of hers hired with her company. These are inside sales positions. The new hire has learned she works from home so she has taken it to mean mobile. Driving to kids games, taking her adult son out of state to a bowling tournament etc. My friend has to cover for her at times for not getting it done.

[Fearchar]

I'm sure there are many sandbaggers in the work force; especially in the remote world.
That is really a management issue though.

Our real problem seems be retention.
We pay well, so we can easily hire good Engineers.
However, good Engineers tend to be on the move and it takes about 16 months to qualify.

We have a younger Senior Engineer that recently announced an ultimatum.
It's because his Fiancé works 3 hours away.
So, he wants to move away and remote.
His deadline is February, which coincides with the annual bonus.

Great guy and I sympathize with his situation, but as a Manager, I don't see how that would work and it would just invite others to make similar demands. So, my recommendation is to hire 2 Engineers into "pipeline" positions.

Believe it or not, we have people commuting weekly from over 5 hours away.

[retiredat48]

It seems companies have continued to respond by placing more and more of the burden of this situation, back onto the customers or clients.

There is an old mantra that Russians spend 20% of their life waiting in line. Seems to be happening in USA also.

Biggest change is USA moving to an economic model more like Europe...making do with fewer workers. That is: USA old model...seek 100% use rate (occupancy in a motel) to maximize profits. New model...Double prices, cut usage in half...same profits yet need much fewer workers. Think a hotel. Need only half a staff to clean rooms etc with 50% occupancy. Ditto restaurants...double price, usage falls, but profits survive...need less workers. Winners are employees...work less hard. Loser here is the USA customer.

Fido forum had an interesting thread whereby most posters stated they now wish to get a foreign national to handle their customer calls. Courteous, generally well spoken, patient. Philippines and India dominating. I find myself doing same.

Lastly, pushes forward the usage of robots/AI to do the work. I was in a restaurant yesterday with a moving robot serving food. It was heading straight towards me. I didn't move. The robot stopped. We stared at each other for about 30 seconds, then I backed away...the robot then continued forward! No cuss words; no paying medical insurance; no gratuity to the robot; no overtime pay; no vacation!

R48

[yogibearbull]

I have relatives and friends working from home. They seem more busy. Of course, there is flexibility in hours. Some have been told to keep enough hours logged in daily.

Employers have tools to monitor online activity. Some require video on and a blank screen would draw attention. They can monitor web activity too - actual, so people cannot just use a mouse-shaker device.

Hybrid office-home model is here to stay.

[Chahta]

We had a young engineer in the office that wanted to work remote, since there was one already very remote at 3 hours away. He was less than an hour away. Well Covid caused him to work remotely. He was happy to get back to the office since he had a new-born at home.

[anitya]

Some jobs are more productive at home, especially when you cut down on commute time. But some jobs are more productive in the office. The second category are more B.S. jobs and many of them are a new category of work. I know which ones they are and can not mention in a public forum. I think employees that game the system (in either category) will always find ways to game. In fact, these gamers being away (WFH) improves morale and productivity of the group because gamers do not thumb their nose on the hard working employees and make the hard working employees feel constantly like they are the losers. I have noticed 15-20% of the employees are gamers. Gamers are enabled by their managers.

So, I would say, eliminate / reassign the B.S. jobs because the hybrid work situation is here to say, as yogibearbull said. If you want to reduce the number of gamers, retrain / fire some of their managers. For all the new category of HR initiatives over the years, not sure why the issue of gamers and their impact on work and company culture has never been addressed. Some companies annually require to lay off bottom 5% (by performance) of their work force, which takes care of some of these gamers, but bosses' nepotism ensures the problem still persists.

I think the issue chang  may be thinking is how when you have WFH, work tends to get organized around personal chores vs. when you have in office work, personal chores get organized around office hours.  Because of work getting organized around personal chores, even if the employees are more productive at home, it is very difficult to get group work flow dependencies right, resulting in projects taking longer.  So, yes, there is loss of productivity in the system overall, but presumably employees are happier because now their weekends are really relaxing time; whereas, previously, they were running around doing their personal chores over the weekend.  You can say that they have bigger blocks of free time.  Same with small service providers, who previously used to be very busy over the weekend, now have a more evenly spaced business flow throughout the week and some have stopped opening over the weekend, and presumably these guys are happy too because they get to spend time with their families over the weekend. 

chang , Man, you completely checked out for three years if you are noticing these things now.  Good for you.  I would temper my expectations from Europeans.

[bizman]

My nephew is doing his postdoc at a university out west and moved out there with the idea that interacting with all the smart people in person would be cool and worthwhile, plus face time with bosses would be good for advancement and picking up the culture and whatnot. Fewer and fewer of his colleagues came into the office to the point where he didn't see the point in staying out there. He recently moved back to the midwest and saves a bunch on rent and enjoys the quality of life more. Obviously this is academic research, so somewhat different than regular business, but it seems Zoom is the way an awful lot of collaboration happens these days.

[chang]

Aug 19, 2023 20:13:07 GMT anitya said:

chang , Man, you completely checked out for three years if you are noticing these things now.  Good for you.  I would temper my expectations from Europeans.

I left the business workforce three years ago, but the three-day work week does not exist in Thailand or in Asia, where we lived up until a year ago. I don't see it as much in continental Europe as I do in London. My bank manager in Europe, for example, seems to be in the office five days a week.

[anitya]

Aug 20, 2023 6:59:08 GMT chang said:

Aug 19, 2023 20:13:07 GMT anitya said:

chang , Man, you completely checked out for three years if you are noticing these things now.  Good for you.  I would temper my expectations from Europeans.

I left the business workforce three years ago, but the three-day work week does not exist in Thailand or in Asia, where we lived up until a year ago. I don't see it as much in continental Europe as I do in London. My bank manager in Europe, for example, seems to be in the office five days a week.

Bank Branch Managers in the US are also present in the office 5 days a week.  That would be true for all customer facing jobs.  

I would expect Europeans to generally work less than their counterparts in the US.  I saw this even from Continental Europeans (Dutch, Germans, and Swiss) that came to our US offices on secondment.  25 years ago, when I was in London on a secondment, I went from 70-80 hours a week in office work in the US to some 45 hours a week work in our London office and I was the hardest working person there because that was nearly 30% more than their 35 hour work week.  Those guys hardly worked 40 hours a week.  It was like being on vacation for me.  Many days, in the evenings, I was the only person in our five+ story office building in London. 

Asians also work longer hours than the English. 

I can accept that the English are probably less hard working and entitled than some of the Continental Europeans.  The English were definitely not my favorite during the decades of my cross-border work.

[chang]

anitya : You are probably right about customer-facing versus back office jobs. I haven't really been exposed to the back office environment since I left business in 2020. Except indirectly, of course, from the standpoint of a customer experiencing longer wait times and declining customer service.

[anitya]

chang,

There is no doubt work attitudes have changed across the world. We can see erosion of productivity (and acceleration of inflation) across the world, even after Covid related issues are solved. We worked our rears off and retired to find the new crop want to just coast. Even before Covid, work culture in the US had changed in the 2010s and Covid accelerated that change. May be you were not impacted by the changes in advanced economies' work culture while you were working in Asia. I had time to adjust to the new reality and not expect from the juniors what we delivered. They hallucinate way more than any prior generation. It does not matter to me, it is their world I am just renting.

I am assuming these things go in cycles.

[Mustang]

I've read articles about the next generation wanting to work from home. They want to wear pajamas, walk the dog, go to the store, take the kids to school, etc. on company time. Perhaps I'm just old but I read those article and just think about the loss of productivity. If they can do all of that from home while still getting the job done then why are all of them needed? They are paid for an 8 hour workday. Working half a day for full pay just just isn't right. I would think a competent manager would consolidate jobs and layoff half of the workforce in order to restore productivity and the company's competitive edge.

Inflation is an imbalance between supply and demand. Our government tries to control inflation by only influencing the demand side. But it can be also controlled on the supply side.

Just a thought, maybe this is why they could cut so many jobs from Twitter (now called X) without affecting performance. They had too many people drawing pay for doing too little.

[archer]

Number of hours worked on average per person is crucial to the credibility of employment statistics. We are in a current trend of high employment..or are we? The current trends throw off the effects of unemployment figures. If GDP declines amidst a false high employment rate, it paints a very different picture than low GDP when people are actually not working so much.

Another area where measures can be deceptive is in putting a real quantity on service related product. When we had a predominantly manufacturing based economy producing real goods, measuring output and input was pretty straight forward. Now we have an economy more service based, (you scratch my back, I scratch yours, and we exchange some money in the process) How do you really measure that? I guess you measure the money exchange, but with nothing to show for it, it seems rather meaningless.

We grew a strong middle class on a manufacturing economy where people were paid well and goods were relatively affordable. I think the evolution to a service based economy has rendered many of the measures used in assessing economic health meaningless opening the way for unexpected developments. As time goes on, economic data becomes more and more of an exercise in quantifying the abstract. There's really nothing of substance to quantify.

[Chahta]

Part of the problem with younger workers is they are not good at face to face relationships. They would rather text than speak to someone. I heard an article on the radio about larger companies holding classes on office behavior for younger employees. Un-freakin’-believable!

[yogibearbull]

I have watched kids sitting in a room and txting each other on phone. The weirdest craze is that they txt words (1 or few) in a sentence in a sequence of txts, so the other person has to wait or guess what may be coming. They don't like to just holler.

[steadyeddy]

Aug 20, 2023 18:53:26 GMT yogibearbull said:

I have watched kids sitting in a room and txting each other on phone. The weirdest craze is that they txt words (1 or few) in a sentence in a sequence of txts, so the other person has to wait or guess what may be coming. They don't like to just holler.

I remember the days when wireless carriers used to allow something like 100 text messages per month in the monthly plan.. now-a-days everything is all-you-can-eat.. Or all-you-can-text

[archer]

Aug 20, 2023 18:30:11 GMT Chahta said:

Part of the problem with younger workers is they are not good at face to face relationships. They would rather text than speak to someone. I heard an article on the radio about larger companies holding classes on office behavior for younger employees. Un-freakin’-believable!

I can understand this given the ease of accidentally violating PC with an unintended micro aggression.

[gman57]

Once again.. oh my, what's wrong with the younger generation. The never ending complaint. My Grandparents said my parents were a bunch of drinkers and drunks dancing the night away doing the Jitterbug and the Charleston, what's wrong with them? My parents complained my generation was a bunch of pot smoking hippies that were too stoned and lazy to work like they did, what's wrong with them? Now we complain the next generation are a bunch of lazy kids just hanging out on their phones and playing video games all day, what's wrong with them? If ONLY they could be like us!! Sheezzzz...

Actually, I'm glad they are maybe going to enjoy life more and work less. It's about time we took some lessons from Europe in that regard. IMHO. Hmmmm.... maybe they're smarter?

[Mustang]

Aug 20, 2023 20:17:40 GMT gman57 said:

Actually, I'm glad they are maybe going to enjoy life more and work less. It's about time we took some lessons from Europe in that regard. IMHO. Hmmmm.... maybe they're smarter?

I'm OK with that.  Let them smell the roses -- on their own time.  But, products and services will still be needed so cut their pay accordingly and hire an additional person.  One can work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  The other Thursday, Friday and Saturday.   Since we are becoming a service economy I think it is important to have service available when it is needed and that is not just three days per week.  Think about what would happen without a reduction in pay.  Companies would need to double the price of their goods and services.

P.S.  Not everyone in the next generation is lazy.  I was talking to a waitress after church on Sunday.  It is the busiest day of the week.  The staff was really hustling to try to keep up.  I mentioned that they were really busy.  She said yes and that everyone wanted the after church shift.  (That was when the job was the hardest.) When I asked why, she said that is where the money is.  Since a lot of their pay is tips if they do the work of two people then they have earned the pay of two people.

Rewards should go to those who earn them.

Edit:  Here is an example of a politician who really doesn't understand the consequences of his policies.  "A Pennsylvania lawmaker is moving forward with plans for a four-day workweek that would see businesses with more than 500 employees reduce their hours from 40 per week to 32 per week without reducing employee pay."  www.foxnews.com/media/democratic-lawmaker-plans-move-forward-four-day-workweek-legislation-more-time-rest   The politician has a narrow minded view of the workplace.  Technology might allow productivity increases for some jobs.  But not others.  If an assembly line works four days instead of five then only 80% of the products are produced for the same labor cost.