Maybe If You Were a Better Manager

It wouldn't take you so long to move the building one foot to the right.

The delightful and multi-talented Sara Robinson has a long column about the way the world should be.

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity

If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it. If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.

Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years, probably at the expense of your family life, your exercise routine, your diet, your stress levels, and your sanity. You’re burned out, tired, achy, and utterly forgotten by your spouse, kids and dog. But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?
...

First of all, I completely agree, both with this snip and with most of the rest of the article.

Second, I cannot remember the last boss I had who asked me to "work 50 hours".

That question simply never comes up anymore.

Instead, a new project or seven is suddenly dumped on one's desk -- either six pounds of yellowing paper festooned with ancient Post-It notes crammed with incomprehensible scribbles, or a single sheet of cryptic gibberish written by some very senior person who thinks spelling is for losers and has never bothered to learn how to construct a sentence in English that humans can decipher.

Either way, the project will come with a deadline that usually translates into "Now!Now!Right Now!"

(For your own amusement you consider calling out to your boss as he sprints away from the scene of the crime and asking him which of 19 other "Now!Now!Right Now!" drop-dead hurry-up projects you are working on should you stop working on to fit this one into you schedule. Then you remember that you like little amenities like being able to visit a doctor and keeping a roof over your family's head, so you only whisper such thoughts to yourself.)

After a few months or years of this treadmill you begin to figure out that the organization doesn't really give a shit about things like "productivity". That whether or not you competently complete some or all of your "Now!Now!Right Now!" projects is entirely secondary to:

1. Proving you are a "team player" by working yourself to near-fatal exhaustion. And, 
2. Giving your boss a warm body to throw on the hand grenades that his boss keep lobbing at him.

And, third, unfortunately, this same column has been written and re-written thousands of times in hundreds of forms by dozens of people over the last 30 years.

This was one of the the core message of "The Dilbert Principle" which, in addition to being achingly funny, was also one of the best books on management I have ever read (and I have read dozens).   The idea, as I recall, was pretty basic:   Six hour meetings, employee recognition key chain award ceremony piffle, and mandatory weekend "Who Moved My Cheese?" encounter groups are mostly indulgent nonsense invented by halfwits who Peter Principled themselves into upper management apparently by dint of their ability to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide with minimal supervision, so for the love of all that's holy, if you want your people to work better, please quit screwing with their personal lives and let them go home at 5:00.

Very simple.

"The Dilbert Principle" was published in 1997, sold tens of millions of copies (I still have mine) and did not change anything at all because the internal reward system of American business culture is set up to attack, destroy and reject any attempt to transplant the idea of treating workers as human beings back into the system.

(With millions of pinched and put-upon citizens aching to take their frustrations out on someone lower in the social pecking order, you might have noticed that this "shut up and work harder you fucking ingrate"  mentality has also being common vocabulary for discussing government, education, not-for-profits, etc.  From yours truly in 2009:

People who flip on the news and hear Da Mare -- in full-blown, cult-like fetishization of All Things Private Sector mode -- expressing his undisguised contempt for the little people who work for him (from local NBC affiliate, with a little emphasis added by me):

…
On Wednesday, Daley had said, “'They’re not customer-related. They’re gonna leave at 5 o’clock. They’re gonna leave at 4:30 or 4:00. I’m sorry. We’re on a time clock. They walk out. But, in the private sector, when you have a customer, you’re gonna stay there making sure they’re happy and satisfied."

Daley's logic, as always, is hard to follow. The mayor is defending leasing or selling city assets such as Midway Airport and its parking meters to private interests because he apparently believes private interests can get more out of those assets by getting more out of their employees. Good for them, if true. But how does that help the city?
…

It's also clear that Daley doesn't understand a private sector in which he's never worked. No clock-watchers there? Take a look around your office right now. Think the mayor is right?

Also, city workers leave their jobs when their shifts are over because . . . their shifts are over. Same with the private sector - at least the unionized part of it. Maybe Daley prefers Wal-Mart's old style of management, which forced employees to work for free off-the-clock.
…

Whaddya mean "maybe"? 
...)

From the enshrining of Silicon Valley Asberger's worker syndrome (no life outside of work at all as the pure, Kantian ideal to which every single person must aspire or risk being cast out from the Temple of Prosperity) to the rise of an ethos that keeps every worker on a leash and indentured to every passing 2:00 AM whim of the boss, Sara gets her history exactly right.

However...

However, you can wave as much common sense and as many studies in the faces of management as you want; what you will get back either a blank, cow-like stare of incomprehension (But hiring more people...would...cost more) ... a threat-sheathed passive-aggressive rebuke (Maybe if you quit complaining and managed your time/people better you would not be having these problems) ... threat-sheathed passive-aggressive arithmetic (If you don't want the job, quit.  There are 10 people waiting who would take it tomorrow and be grateful for it instead of wasting my time with a lot of whining) ... or a look of sheer terror (Do you have any idea what would happen to me -- to my family -- if I told the boss, "We just don't have the people to do this?")

This is why measures of success and failure -- of what is possible, what is not and how long a particular piece of work should take --  are kept deliberately subjective and subject to the whimsical, moment-by-moment reinterpretation of those in power.   And as long as the vocabulary of the discussion is kept under economic lock and key by those in power,  you might as well be Winston Smith from the novel "1984" trying to convince O'Brien that his system cannot work because it is cruel and insane:

"...This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said weakly.

'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'

'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'

'Why?'

'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'

'Why not?'

'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'

'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.'

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.  

'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'  

'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside -- irrelevant.'  

Sara Robinson concludes:

But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy, and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth.

Again, I agree completely, but again, this misses a couple of important points.

First, in the corrodors of business (and all too often in government...and education...and not-for-profits...and so on) any talk of "common wealth" is taken as arrant Commie treason.  Period.  Full stop.

Second, while profit is indeed part of the equation, other, fearfully potent forces are also at play in the workplace.  Things that come from way down deep inside our ape brains.  Things like power.  Prestige.  One's place in the social order.  The sadist's thrill of dominating another human being; of making other people damage themselves for no damn good reason other than you can.  The terror of the incompetent management alpha male who knows that if he does not keep you under his boot, you will rise up and take away all he has.

Hell, slavery was a stupid, inefficient and immoral system too, but after every moral and economic argument was exhausted, it still took the entire Union Army and four years of brutal civil war to put an end to it.  And even after all that blood and treasure had been spilled, the South still absolutely refused to give up on the loathsome ideology that undergirded slavery, and rushed back into its clammy, white arms the minute the Union took its foot of their neck.

Of course someone should do something.   Of course this should change.

Unfortunately the people with the actual power to affect real change are busy squeezing every last nickel out of their work force like so:




Now quit fucking around on the internet and get back to work.

Don't you realize your project needs to be finished, bagged and shipped by tomorrow!