Search results for: “overwork”

Stop obsessing about working hours
I’ve written a lot about the obsession companies have with tracking and increasing employees’ working hours – based on the myth that working more hours leads to better results.

But the clearest and most concise commentary on this comes from Zach Holman of American software company GitHub, who puts it like this:

Hours are bullshit!

I could not agree more. Stop focusing on hours worked and start focusing on results delivered. And realize that there is not a linear relationship between the two.

Read more about what makes GitHub an awesome workplace here.

Related posts
January 16, 2014
Top 10 Things Companies Should Stop Doing Right Now
Companies waste huge amounts of time, money and energy on practices that pretty much everyone hates, not because these practices deliver any value but out of habit and because “everyone else does it.”

Here’s my list of the top 10 things companies should stop doing right now.

10: Competitive team building events
Californian home security company Alarm One Inc. had a team building event where winners poked fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers and swatting their buttocks with rival companies’ yard signs.

The good news: Alarm One Inc. got swatted in court when an employee sued them and had to cough up USD 1.7 million.

The bad news: A lot of team building events borrow elements from this approach, setting up artificial (and often meaningless) contests pitting coworkers against each other. Let’s stop that kind of thing once and for all.

More: The top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time.

9: Performance reviews
Performance reviews are fundamentally broken. Managers hate them and fear them and resent the drain on their time. Employees often leave reviews demotivated, cynical and with no clear idea of how well they’re doing and how to improve.

In the words of Sammy Culbert, professor of management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles

To my way of thinking, a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It’s a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork.

More: Top 9 Reasons why Performance Reviews Don’t Work.

8: Job titles

When you ask people what they do for a living, most people will give you their job title. As in “I’m an engineer” or “I’m a project manager” or “I’m a developer”.

But that’s not what you do – that’s just your title. It really says nothing about you or your job, so I always find myself asking follow-up questions. “So what kind of projects do you manage?”

And make no mistake: A lot of energy is spent in organizations on trying to give people the right titles and fighting over who gets be X and who gets to be senior X. I think we’ll be fine without’em.

More: Death to Job Titles

7: Org charts
Seriously – when was the last time you needed your workplace’s org chart for anything?

6: Staff satisfaction surveys
I am thoroughly skeptical about job satisfaction surveys. Here is one reason why:

I’ve been with my current company for 9 years, and our “engagement score” just hit an all time high in a year when I have heard more employee concerns about the company than ever before.

Over the last five years, I have personally seen a combination of rewriting survey questions and “teaching to the test” that I believe solely explains the reason for the current score that clearly doesn’t match reality.

For those who might think I’m just cynical, a member of our executive team responsible for the largest part of the company told the HR team to check their math when they showed him this year’s score.

More: Do Staff Satisfaction Surveys do Anything?

5: Job descriptions

Job descriptions are almost always incomplete and/or obsolete. When was the last time you even read yours?

Also, if your job can be adequately described in one page, it will soon be outsourced to India.

More: 5 reasons why job descriptions are useless.

4: Corporate values
Having a conversation about your workplace’s identity and mission can be very inspiring. But typical values programs aiming to define and instil corporate values like respect, openness, excellence, team-work etc. rarely work.

More: Why corporate values often have no value.

3: Employee handbooks
Employee handbooks are usually long, boring and useless. They gather dust on the shelf or linger unread on the company intranet.

Let’s abolish them. Or alternatively, do as computer game company Valve did and let the employees write it. The result is the coolest and most useful employee handbook ever.

More: The Top 10 Most Awesome Things from Valve’s Employee Handbook.

2: Rules and red tape
Alabama A&M University has this policy in case of a death in an employee’s family:

Staff members shall, upon request, be granted up to three (3) days annually of bereavement leave for the death of a parent, spouse, child, brother or sister, grand parents [sic], grand parents-in-law, grandchild, son or daughter-in-law, mother-in law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, step children, children-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and first and second cousins. Other relationships are excluded unless there is a guardian relationship. Such leave is non-accumulative, and the total amount of bereavement leave will not exceed three days within any fiscal year. If additional days of absences are necessary, employees may request sick or annual leave, after providing an explanation of extenuating circumstances.
(source)

Got that? Contrast that with Nordstrom’s rule book:

Rule #1: In all situations, use your good judgement. There are no further rules.

Let people do their jobs – don’t put endless rules, regulations and bureaucracy in their way.

1: Pointless meetings

Meetings are one of the most hated workplace activities. Studies show that the more meetings people attend, the less happy they are at work and that meetings are the biggest time waster keeping people from actually, you know, doing their jobs.

I’m not saying we can abolish meetings entirely, but we should abolish all meetings that don’t lead to tangible results. Fortunately, you can fix all problems your workplace has with meetings with one decision: Make all meetings voluntary. You’re welcome.

That’s impossible!!!

Most of the time we advice our clients on what they can do to become better and happier workplaces. But an equally important question to ask is this: “What can we stop doing that is making employees unhappy?”

If you look at the list above and think “That’s impossible! There’s no way we could abolish X,” I want you to ask yourself this: When was the last time, you could only do your job, because you had X?

For instance, when was the last time the org chart was incredibly useful to you? When was the last time you could only complete a project on time because everybody working on it had just the right job title? When was the last time you could only make an important decision by referring to the corporate values?

Your take

Are any of these indispensable to you? Or conversely, did we miss any on the list? Has your workplace abolished some of these already? What was the results?

Related articles
October 1, 2013
Free Time – A Forgotten Dream
Yesterday some of my most fundamental assumptions about work and life were challenged.

I had the pleasure of skyping with Benjamin Hunnicutt, professor at the University of Iowa and author of a new book called “Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream.”

Hunnicutt showed me that about 100 years ago, most people fully expected work to play an increasingly diminished role in our lives. Work hours had been steadily dropping (mostly through the efforts of organized labor) and even John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d end up with 2,5-hour work days.

This would create a huge amount of free time in workers’ lives which could be spent in communities, education, sports and leisure. As we all know, that is not exactly what ended up happening in most of the world, especially the US.

Instead, working hours in America have increased and increased more. Where the ideal used to be having a job that allowed you to make enough money to enjoy the rest of your life, work itself became the ideal and full employment for everyone became a societal goal.

Also, the ideal has become not just having a full-time job, but having a fulfilling job. One where you can realize your full potential and build a positive identity. However, many people work in workplaces where this is not currently possible. They would be able to seek fulfilment in their leisure time.

We also talked about good and bad free time. Good free time connects you to other people, let’s you do something meaningful and gives you a positive identity. Think amateur theatre, volunteer work, community service, sports and similar. Hunnicutt and has wife have recently taken up ballroom dancing.

Bad free time is basically TV. A passive activity that results in no meaningful improvement or enjoyment.

My work, of course, is to help create happier workplaces. I honestly believe that most jobs can be enjoyable and fulfilling and I believe that this is an advantage to both workers and workplaces.

But Hunnicutt helped me see that our current notions of what ideally constitutes employment are just that – current notions. We might easily be able to find better ways to divide our time between work and leisure.

Like IT company 37signals who introduced a 4-day work week, or like Kellogg’s who until the 1980s had 6-hour work days.

Denmark (my country) is getting this somewhat right. Danish workers have both shorter working days, more annual vacation time (typically 5-6 weeks) and long maternity/paternity leaves than almost any other OECD country. And (not coincidentally in my opinion) Danish workers are some of the most productive and Denmark is routinely ranked as the happiest nation in the world.

I would personally like to see people enjoy both their work time and their free time but right now the needle is pointing towards more and more work time. I think this is a mistake for both workplaces and workers.

Ask someone to describe their perfect day and few people would say “Well, I’d go work for 9 or 10 hours than come home too tired to play with my kids.”

Your take

What do you think? How many hours do you work in a typical week? How many hours would you like to work? How many hours would your boss like you to work? How many hours would your children like you to work?

Related posts
September 12, 2013
Top 5 reasons we should play more at work
Jane works in HR in a large Danish organization where I was giving a speech about happiness at work. I talked to her in preparation for the speech to learn about their situation and challenges, and she told me the she and some co-workers wanted to do something fun for Halloween a few years back, so they carved pumpkins and put up decorations in hallways, meeting rooms, and offices.

The reaction from some co-workers was immediately dismissive and they were told in no uncertain terms that “this is a workplace, not a kindergarten.” They have not since attempted anything like that.

Pretty surprising considering Denmark was named the happiest country in the world in 2011 by a UN backed survey, right?

To most people, work and play are mutually exclusive. Work is serious, play is frivolous. Work is something you have to do, play is something you want to do. Work is hard, play is fun.

But does it really have to be that way? What would happen if we played more at work?

A while back, I asked the readers of this blog how they play at work and here are just a few examples.

Three great ways to play at work

How about introducing play into brainstorming:

When brainstorming for new ideas we wanted to exclude critical thinking and encourage divergent thinking. Rather than having a facilitator policing the workshops we introduced water pistols. Any mistimed critical thinking led to a soaking.

The pistols did not however become a distraction, they raised the energy levels massively and resulted in great, off the wall, ideas being proposed.

Even the house “Mr Negative” could not resist and started to come up with great ideas….after shooting himself several times as he realised that he was being negative before ideas had properly emerged.

Why not simply play a game on break time:

On Fridays, it’s not unusual for a game of darts to break out. We have a dart board in our office and it serves as a great way to take a break (a game usually lasts less than half an hour), build a little camaraderie, and get our minds off of work a bit. I have found that it’s a great team building activity and it actually makes work time more effective and productive.

Oh, and it’s fun, too.

One company even uses play in hiring:

Where I work, we do our best to weed out the unhappy and cynical employees before they even get hired.

After each candidate goes through his/her well-rehearsed and pre-meditated interviews with HR and management, the entire engineering team (it’s a small company) comes into the room, closes the door, and starts a game of Jenga like it’s no big deal. Meanwhile, we strike up a casual conversation with the candidate and insist he or she play with us.

Without fail, the candidates true colors are almost immediately revealed. Candidate scoffs at the idea of playing a game in an interview? Obviously too uptight for our group and not capable of handling rapidly changing situations. Focusing on Jenga also takes the candidate’s mind off of all of the pre-meditated answers and pages of ‘interview tips’ articles that we’ve all read at one point or another.

Works every time. We end up with engineers who are laid back and easygoing, but who know their stuff, and can think on their feet.

I have heard countless other great examples of workplaces making themselves more like playgrounds – and this is also good for business. Here are the top 5 reasons why it’s a good idea to mix work and play.

1: You relax and de-stress

A play-break is a great way to laugh and focus on something besides work, emails, meetings, deadlines and clients. That break gives us a chance to relax during an otherwise busy work day and makes us less stressed.

2: We build relationships

In play you can be yourself and so can your co-workers – as in the Jenga-hiring-game above that brought out an applicant’s true self. Playing, especially together is a great way to build better relationships with your co-workers.

3: It broadens your mind

Play stretches the mind and makes us more creative. More and better ideas come to you when you’re in a playful state of mind than when you’re being serious and professional.

4: We take work less seriously

To many people, work is life and death, forever locked in a bloodthirsty, winner-take-all battle to end. No surprise that this attitude tends to make people cramp up mentally. Introducing play in the workplace gives us a break from this mentality and a chance to take ourselves less seriously.

5: We become happier at work

But most of all, playing at work would serve to make a workplace happier – and we know from many studies, that a happy workplace is a profitable one!

The upshot

There is a great case to be made for playing way more at work. And what’s more, introducing play can be fun and easy. It’s not without its challenges, and as we saw from the example above, some workplaces have an anti-play brigade that insists on keeping any and all aspects of fun and playfulness far away from the workplace.

Well nuts to them, I say – let’s do it anyway! I suggest we make the new battle cry in the workplace ”Wanna play?”

Your take

How do you play at work? Does your workplace even allow that kind of thing? What would happen if you made work a little more like play? Write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.

Related posts
February 28, 2013
Memo from one boss: Don’t work too much!

I found an excellent blog post about Wisetech Global, an Australian IT company with a somewhat… different attitude to overwork:

If employees work more than 40 hours a week regularly, they have to talk to their manager to redress the situation.
…
WiseTech Global chief executive Richard White said the company’s approach was consistent with its core values, which state that although staff should strive for the best outcomes, “we do not ask people to impale themselves on their work commitments”.
…
“Its not the amount of work, it’s the quality of the work,” he said.

There you go. This is what every single workplace in the world should do.

Hat tip to Luciano Moretti for telling me about this awesome company.

And we can all contribute to a better and healthier attitude to working hours. Check out this comment from Dee:

I work in retail, and it’s true, some enjoy spending all their time at work, and that’s fine. If you want to spend 60 hours at work, that’s your prerogative. What I don’t like is the judgmental attitudes surrounding work hours– the unsaid expectation that if you don’t work 9-9, you’re a failure, or letting your team down.

No, working 12 hours, five days in a row makes me miserable AND a failure– a failure at my job. I work to live, I don’t live to work, as the old saying goes and, when I first started and was eager to fit in, I bent over backwards keeping a similar schedule. I felt ashamed that my ‘meager’ 12 hour day contribution wasn’t enough, and I felt in ‘awe’ of the woman that habitually came in at 6am and leaving at 9pm. Then one day, about a year into the job, I remember wondering why I had gotten the flu yet AGAIN, (the fourth time in two months!) when it hit me. I was working way too much and almost killing myself. Life is going to get me in the end. I don’t need my job to speed up that process.

Now I work less, work better, and win more accolades, get more sales, and get sick less, all because I don’t conform to the cult of overwork. I’m in the minority, but I’m happy. And that lady? Well, she still works her heart out, and complains the whole way.

YES – shorter working hours can make you enjoy work more, enjoy life more AND help you do better work.

What’s the attitude to overwork at your workplace? Are people who constantly work overtime celebrated as heroes or is there a real effort to keep working hours down?

Related posts
Bring back the 40-hour work week
Don’t let The Cult of Overwork ruin your work life.
The top 5 new rules of productivity.

November 9, 2012

Much of what you know about business is wrong. You will continue to believe it even now that you know it’s wrong.

“Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions”
– Daniel Kahneman (Source)

This quote explains why many workplaces are still unhappy even though we all should know by now, that happy workplaces are not only more fun but also make more money.

In the image above, every horizontal line is perfectly straight. Don’t believe me? Hold up a ruler to your screen and check.

OK, now you know the horizontal lines are straight. What does your mind see? Bendy lines.

And in the same way, managers and employees alike are clinging to cognitive illusions like:

Work is unpleasant but that’s normal and there are no happy jobs.
The more hours we work, the better.
If you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not getting enough done.
Managers can never be friends with their employees.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world and everyone is just out to screw everyone else over.

The list goes on… you can add your own in the comments.

Kahneman also notes how hard it is to change your beliefs, even when you know better:

When my colleagues and I learned that our leadership assessment tests had low validity, we accepted that fact intellectually, but it had no impact on either our feelings or our subsequent actions.

So how do we overcome our cognitive biases in the workplace (and in general)? It can be done, but it takes work. Here are 5 steps that help.

1: Be aware of your biases
This is where it all starts. We all have cognitive biases (Wikipedia has an exhaustive list) but as long as we are not aware of them, we are slaves to them. The first step to overcome a cognitive bias is to know that you have it. And you do :o)

2: Follow the facts
What conclusions do the facts actually support? For instance, if you look at productivity studies, permanent overwork leads to lower productivity, not higher. This is what the research shows. This is fact.

3: Be willing to acknowledge that you have been wrong
If you believe A but the facts support B then change your beliefs. Everything else is stupid.

4: Don’t be afraid to stand out
But this means going against the flow, since everyone else still believes A. Tough! Truth is not decided by majority rule, and it’s absolutely possible for 90% of any group to be dead wrong.

5: Use stories
Possibly the best tool for changing peoples’ minds is stories because stories speak to our emotions not just our intellect.

The upshot

Much of what you know about business is wrong. If you don’t do something about it, you will continue to believe it even now that you know it’s wrong. This is bad.

Your take

In your opinion, what are some of the most stubborn and pernicious beliefs in the business world? What beliefs have you changed personally? What helper you change? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your take.

October 31, 2012

My top 10 most popular articles ever

I started this blog on October 14 2002, almost exactly 10 years ago, and it may have been one of my smartest decisions ever. Not only has blogging taught me to enjoy writing (and led to me writing 3 books) but it’s also been a great way to spread the message of happiness at work to the world.

Since 2002 the blog has had more than 10,000,000 page views from about 7,000,000 unique visitors. My most popular blog post alone, has over 1,000,000 page views. Not bad :o)

It’s been quite a ride and it’s still going strong, but here’s a short stroll down memory lane with my top 10 most popular articles from the last 10 years.

10: Top 5 reasons why “The Customer is Always Right” is wrong
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909. Ironically it often leads to unhappy employees and bad customer service. Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

9: Ten seeeeeeriously cool workplaces
Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one. Take a tour of 10 really cool, beautiful workplaces.

8: How NOT to lead geeks
The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions. See the top 10 mistakes IT managers make.

7: Secret salaries are a baaaaaad idea
It’s a golden rule in most businesses that salaries must be kept secret. Except for a few heretics, it is almost universally accepted that mayhem would ensue in the workplace if people knew what their co-workers, their managers or – gasp – the CEO was making. Making salaries open inside a company instead seems like a wild idea sure, but it makes a lot of sense and brings advantages for both the workplace and for its people.

6: Top five business maxims that need to go
Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update – with a replacement for each.

5: Rewards don’t motivate. No, really, they don’t.
Many people don’t feel motivated at work, and there’s a very simple explanation for this: The motivational techniques used by most managers don’t work.

4: Top ten bad excuses for staying in a job you hate
If you’re unhappy at work, I’m sure that the thought “Man, I really should quit!” crosses your mind occasionally. So why don’t you? Here are 10 of the most common bad excuses for staying in a crappy job.

3: 12 ways to pimp your office
I’m not going to claim that a fancy desk or a weird chair is going to magically improve your creativity and productivity – but I am damn sure, that all that sameness and eternal corporate grayness, does nothing good for your ability to come up with great new ideas. Here are some ways to spruce up a workplace that may actually inject some color and fun into your work environment.

2: Top ten signs you’re unhappy at work
How do you know that you’re unhappy at work? In my work, I talk to a lot of people who are not happy with their jobs. Here are the top ten symptoms of unhappiness at work that I’ve observed. How many apply to you?

1: Don’t let The Cult of Overwork ruin your life
I know it’s normal to view people working constant overtime as heroes of the organization. But still I think they would be more efficient and enjoy life more if they cut down their time at work. They may find that they become more open, less stressed, have more fun AND are better role models for their employees. This cult of overwork has got to stop.

You can find more popular posts from the blog here.

October 22, 2012

The 10 most awesome things from Valve’s employee handbook

I recently had a chance to read the employee handbook from video game company Valve and it’s the single most inspiring such document I have ever seen.

I play some video games myself (the Bioshock and Dead Space franchises are my favorites), but if you don’t partake you may never have heard of Valve so here’s the skinny from Wikipedia:

Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States. Founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, Valve became famous from its critically acclaimed Half-Life series. It is also well known for its social-distribution network Steam; and for developing the Source engine.

Valve is privately owned so few financial figures are known but they have 300 employees and Forbes estimates the company’s worth at $3 billion.

Their employee handbook was recently released on the web and it explains how they’ve become so successful. Here are the top 10 most awesome things from the document.

1: Valve has no hierarchy

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.

But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.

That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager.

How cool is that?

2: Pick your projects

We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100.

Heh :o) Screw Google and their “20% time to work on your own projects.” Valve turned that dial to 11!

3: Don’t forget the long term

Because we all are responsible for prioritizing our own work, and because we are conscientious and anxious to be valuable, as individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company.
…
This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind. Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive.

So our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be.

In many, many workplaces where employees are unhappy and frustrated because their workdays are entirely taken up with putting out one fire and then the next, leaving no time for long-term planning of any kind. Valve try not to fall into that trap.

4: Don’t stress over the things you don’t do

It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.

At most workplaces there is a huge and unrelenting focus on the things employees haven’t done. Almost every meeting, email and phone call are intended to remind people of the next deadline and how far away they are from reaching it. Valve try to take the pressure of employees so they don’t stress over the things they don’t do.

5: We test ourselves

…rather than simply trusting each other to just be smart, we also constantly test our own decisions

Yes. Don’t believe your own hype. Test your decisions and adjust as needed.

6: Overwork is bad

While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication.

This is a brilliant slap in the face to all members of The Cult of Overwork, ie. everyone who believes that the key to succes is simply to work more hours.

7: Enjoy yourself

Sometimes things around the office can seem a little too good to be true. If you find yourself walking down the hall one morning with a bowl of fresh fruit and Stumptown-roasted espresso, dropping off your laundry to be washed, and heading into one of the massage rooms, don’t freak out. All these things are here for you to actually use.

And don’t worry that somebody’s going to judge you for taking advantage of it—relax! And if you stop on the way back from your massage to play darts or work out in the Valve gym or whatever, it’s not a sign that this place is going to come crumbling down like some 1999-era dot-com startup.

If we ever institute caviar-catered lunches, though, then maybe something’s wrong. Definitely panic if there’s caviar.

In short, you should feel good during your work day.

8: You’re free to screw up

Nobody has ever been fired at Valve for making a mistake.
…
Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the company — we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized people for errors.

Yes! I cannot stress enough, how important it is to let employees make mistakes.

In fact, we should celebrate mistakes at work.

9: It’s not about growth

We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue hiring the best people as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing staff. Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures — only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the hiring bar very high.

Yes! Way too many businesses are slaves to growth goals that are arbitrary, unrealistic and ultimately meaningless.

As Ricardo Semler put it:
There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?

10: Hiring

Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing.

So when you’re working on hiring … everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!

Again, this is brilliant. Nothing undermines a strong positive company culture faster than hiring people who don’t fit in.

In short, this is a fantastic document and one of the coolest things about it is that it’s maintained by the Valve employees themselves, who are free to edit it on their intranet.

You can find the whole Valve Employee Handbook here – read it, read it, read it :)

Your take

What do you think of these 10 points? How does this document compare to your workplace’s employee handbook? Is there anything in your employee handbook that inspires you?

June 11, 2012

Working time through the ages

Wikipedia delivers again, this time with a great overview of working time – from the stone age to today.

A few nuggets from the article:

…early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by capitalist and agrarian societies;^[5]^[6] For instance, one camp of !Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day.^[7] Aggregated comparisons show that on average the working day was less than five hours.^[5]
…
The automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, was an ardent proponent of shorter work hours, which he introduced unilaterally in his own factories.
…
Recent studies[9][10] supporting a four-day week have shown that reduced work hours not only increase consumption and invigorate the economy
…
Because of the pressure of working, time is increasingly viewed as a commodity.[26] This trend, as well as the amount of working time being found to affect gender roles, has been notably researched by Sociology professor Dr. Stephen C. Smith.[27] In 2006, the average man employed full-time worked 8.4 hours per work day, and the average woman employed full-time worked 7.7 hours per work day.[28]

Good stuff. There’s loads more – go read the whole thing.

April 30, 2012

Bring back the 40-hour work week

Companies are more productive when they stick to a 40-hour week. This article explains why.

From the article:

Unions started fighting for the short week in both the UK and US in the early 19th century. By the latter part of the century, it was becoming the norm in an increasing number of industries. And a weird thing happened: over and over — across many business sectors in many countries — business owners discovered that when they gave into the union and cut the hours, their businesses became significantly more productive and profitable.

Even Henry Ford, who was definitely some kind of socialist, profited from this knowledge:

By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe, and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

Basically, it seems that this was accepted knowledge for decades – until some time around the 80s when constant overwork became seen as a sign of passion and a desirable tendency in employees.

Go read the whole thing – it is excellent.

Your take

What about your workplace? Are people allowed to work 40 hour weeks or is overtime more or less mandatory? What is your optimal number of working hours per week? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

March 19, 2012

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