Search results for: “productivity”

CNN has a great story of a small company who tried an innovative solution when four key employees became pregnant at around the same time:

We had fewer than 25 employees at the time, and the soon-to-be moms were our head of publicity, a media buyer, the manager of print production, and a senior account executive. Each had client and supplier relationships that were vital to our business. Plus, conducting four executive searches at the same time would be costly.

So I decided to try something radical. A few months before they left for maternity leave, I invited the women to bring their babies to work when they returned.
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The moms were so thrilled to be close to their babies that none ever dropped the ball when it came to work. When one had to run to a meeting, another babysat. We made sure employees who couldn’t stand the sound of crying babies didn’t sit near the “romper room.”

As we grew to become the $60-million-a-year company that we are today–we now have 150 employees who fill six historic homes in Austin and an office in New York City–additional moms and even dads brought their babies to work.
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So far, 33 babies and a small army of dogs have “grown up” at our company. I can’t measure in hard numbers the impact of the goodwill that our family-friendly policies have had on productivity, but our local newspaper routinely names T3 as one of the best places to work in Austin.

They do have one rule, though: No goats!

I like this approach (to the babies, not the goats) and I think it has massive potential. It reframes the situation from “Oh no, one of my employees is pregnant, that’ll create huge problems” to “yes, pregnant employee, what fun!”

Kirsten Stendevad, a friend of mine, has written two books on the subject. One is about motherhood and how it can be a career boost, rather than a hindrance. The other she co-wrote with her husband Esben Kjaer, and it takes a similar approach to being a father. Both books are only available in danish so far.

All of this is yet another case of self-fullfilling prophecy. When you approach something as a problem, you make it a problem. Regard the same situation as an opportunity and, well… this story speaks for itself.

May I add: “Yes! Crisitunity!”

The cult of overwork is the prevailing belief that the more hours people work, the better for the company. That notion is not only harmful, it is dead wrong, as this story from Arlie Hochschild’s book The Time Bind demonstrates.

One executive, Doug Strain, the vice chairman of ESI, a computer company in Portland Oregon, saw the link between reduced hours for some and more jobs for others. At a 1990 focus group for CEOs and managers, he volunteered the following story:

When demand for a product is down, normally a company fires some people and makes the rest work twice as hard. So we put it to a vote of everyone in the plant. We asked them what they wanted to do: layoffs for some workers or thirty-two-hour workweeks for everyone. They thought about it and decided they’d rather hold the team together. So we went down to a thirty-two-hour-a-week schedule for everyone furing a down time. We took everybody’s hours and salary down – executives too.

But Strain discovered two surprises.

First, productivity did not decline. I swear to God we get as much out of them at thirty-two hours as we did at forty. So it’s not a bad business decision. But second, when economic conditions improved, we offered them one hundred percent time again. No one wanted to go back!

Never in our wildest dreams would our managers have designed a four-day week. But it’s endured at the insistence of our employees.

Interesting, huh? They cut back work-hours but production remains the same.