4-Day Workweeks & Employee Screen Monitoring: “It 1000% DESTROYS Trust”
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In this episode, we look at big changes in how we work, like 4-day workweeks, unlimited PTO, and no meetings. We also talk about the rise of screen monitoring and employee tracking. How do these changes affect trust, productivity, and work-life balance? Are they making work better or creating new problems? Tune in to learn more.
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#4dayworkweek #unlimitedpto #employeemonitoring
Transcript
Welcome to the make work not suck podcast. Have you ever worked with a client that did a 4 day work week? No. Actually, no. So the idea behind it is basically you work 4 10 hour days, which gives you 40 hours instead of 5 8 hour days.
rosoft in Japan tried this in: [:You know what? It took me a second there, but, yes, I have. There's a couple of companies I've actually worked with over the years. And what's interesting is I had to go back to, like, 2012 2010, 2012 to remember back. So this is way before remote work was a a big deal or a big thing and way before this whole 4 day work week thing.
They did it during summer. They implemented summer hours, and they basically took Friday off. The interesting thing is is still half the people went into the office. Okay. But everybody left around lunchtime, and it was way more casual.
And half of it was, well, I have nothing better to do. So I'm I go to the office, I get a few things done, but I'm not expected to be in meetings. And so they use it more as, like, a catch up day more so than a a workday. In their case, they still they didn't really add extra time into their work week, but the expectations was the work was done. So if you could get it done in an 8 hour day, you know, 4 days a week as opposed to adding the extra 2.
Yeah. Yeah.
[:Like, what kind of industry are we talking about here? Because you're you're probably not talking about people that are clocking in and clocking out.
[:Well, this is why it took me a second to realize it because it was a Little Caesar's franchisee and how they ran their corporate office, And they had, you know, roughly 30, 40 restaurants. And so the restaurants were operating, you know, regular hours. I mean Right. You're not open, you're not selling pizza. So it was their corporate office.
That's why it took me a second. But it it was a good program for them. But it was only a small, you know, corporate office staff, you know, 8, 10 people.
[:I wonder how the corporate how the field people felt about corporate only working 4 days a week.
[:I don't think they knew. I think it's Really?
[:Okay. Yeah. Like like, if you've got a crisis on a Friday afternoon and you call corporate to help bail you out and nobody answers the phone, like, I'd be pissed.
[:Well, the the stores would call the the regional Oh, okay. I so there's cell phone and yeah.
[:He I so there was lots of
[:Yeah. Those people lived basically worked out of their car 5 days a week anyway. So
[:I think it's a nice perk and a nice idea. And I think for employees, it's compelling because being able to work from home every Friday or not work at all or have a very light day that's got no meetings in it, I love that from a cultural standpoint. I think the challenge becomes how does your organization intersect with your customers and with your suppliers if you're only working 4 out of 5 days. That, I think, becomes a problem in certain industries where it's just not okay for you to not answer the phone on Fridays.
[:Well and let's let's do a few more stats out there. So you just talked about Microsoft doing this in 2019, just Microsoft Japan. Right. So and now fast forward to now, and Japan has the initiative starting in April of 25. So literally in, what, 4 months and a couple of days Mhmm.
They're planning to implement it, you know, countrywide, and it's to combat the declining birth rate of their overworked culture. And so their whole theory is if people have, you know, less workdays, then maybe they'll make more babies.
[:They'll go home and make babies.
[:Right. So so they're, they're encouraging family growth, k, which is interesting.
[:Japan has a societal crisis. Their birth rate isn't high enough to replace themselves, and so Japan's total population is gonna decline over the next 50 years.
[:And their only option is to allow immigration. But if you allow immigration, that starts to morph your culture and who you are. Where here in America, we're the melting pot. So therefore, that's what we built our country off of. So, yeah, we might have a slightly declining birth rate, but our immigration keeps our, you know, population growing.
So this is a culture slash body of people, initiative to combat the, you know, basically, the slow distinction of their race. Germany did an experiment. They studied with 41 companies. It revealed that employees improved health and satisfaction. The transition faced challenges due to complex processes and low digitalization.
day work week of:The addition led to reduced stress, improved air quality to decrease vehicle admissions. So backing up what you talked about with the Microsoft one, by people not driving and commuting all those extra days, it reduced secondary problems. So there is a level of byproduct by doing this. In some cases, it's emissions. In the in Microsoft, when you said it was electricity drop, so resource utilization, Japan's case, it's increasing, you know, birth rate and growth of their people.
Hopefully.
[:They haven't proven that yet. Right.
[:Well and then we come down here and the, I'm gonna miss mispronounce this guy's name. Dale here, who's the CEO of the 4 day work week, Says reducing work hours can encourage productivity by enabling employees to rest and reset and return more engaged. So
[:the real
[:question is, are people actually resting and resetting, or are we taking that time to do fill it with more things that aren't rest.
[:I do think that in general, work is like water. It will fill the space whatever space you give it. And so if you say that people need to work 40 hours a week, they will take whatever tasks they are assigned, and it will take 40 hours a week. If you say they've got 50 hours, they will probably use 50 hours. There is a lot of productivity studies that show that if you give people less time to do work, they will find ways to do it better
[:and to do it more efficiently. Because the whole thing is to force sprints. Because if we if we don't have a time box, then what do we do? We just allow it to expand and expand and expand and expand versus the whole point is if we can time box everything and force that productivity. That makes sense.
[:I think there is a lot of opportunity, and I'm not surprised that the employees are more productive. They're happier. They're more rested. I think the question is really the the touch points to other industries, customers, vendors, etcetera.
[:Right. I I think it comes down to you can't if you're a retail establishment that's open 7 days a week you can't all of a sudden have a 4 day work work work week. I think in a knowledge worker universe, so if you're a developer, you're in a finance department, I think sales and marketing marketing side, maybe, because you can do a lot of automation.
[:On
[:the sales side, are you not gonna take sales calls on that that day? You would definitely get your work done ahead of time, but are you going to not schedule the call with the customer?
[:Let's be honest. The sales guys are already on the golf course on Friday. So so they're they're working, but they're not really working.
[:Well okay. So that's that's another example. Is that considered work, or Right. Is this gonna encourage more golf course time for the sales reps? So get you all your sales calls done and then book your Friday with so you're still, you know, getting things done.
But I think there's also another challenge here. Is this all sounds fine and dandy. Right? Yeah. Just let's have the 4 day work week.
No big deal. Just make it happen. But I think there's complexities with that, and I think it's it's an idea to vision, and I think the workforce expects a result. But the question is is the journey in culture adjustments to get there. It's like, how can companies address the initial challenges faced with the transition of the 4 day work week?
Because I think where it falls apart is in the change management of it, not in the idea of it, not in the expectation of it, but I think it's in the transition of it is where it falls apart.
[:Where would you see that transition falling apart?
[:Well, okay, if you're supposed to go from a an 8 hour workday to a 10 hour workday, but nobody wants to take on more work because everybody's already overwhelmed. So how are you reclassifying the work? What are the scenarios like you said? What happens in some situations? Now you gotta have an on call.
If if the expectation is the business runs 5 days a week, do you have to have an on call system now? Right. How do you manage on call rotation? I think there's a lot of unanswered questions where, again, it's fine in theory. Maybe like in Japan, it becomes you know, if if it's a government mandate and just everything shuts down, I think, again, you'll have restaurants and other things that have to be worked through.
But if the professional world, if all of it shuts down, I think you could implement a mass policy like that and force the change.
[:But there's second order effects here. Right? Like, you think about if you went from a 9 to 5 workday to an 8 to 6 workday, you now have problems on the front and back end of that. Right? Because if if your morning routine was to drop your kids off at school and then head to work, that's all screwed up now.
And can you drop your kids off at school that early? What are they gonna do for that extra hour that you're working? And now, you know, Friday's easier because you've got more flexibility, but now every morning and every evening starts to become a logistical problem if you've got kids in school.
[:Oh, well, yeah. I mean, you know, especially, like, I think you just said, you know, pick your drop off may stay the same, but your pick up may be later. I know I'm talking to a very, very narrow purview here. A lot of these child care center centers around my area, pickup is no later than 6, and you're billed every minute past 6. Well, if you're expected to work to 7 now, you're gonna have grandma pick up your kids or a neighbor pick up your kids just to watch them for an hour.
I mean, again, you're right. The second order effects on these things unless it's at mass scale. Right. Unless everybody is forced to change. Now think about this way.
If this is a wide scale thing, I think the childcare centers would change their hours and they would find a way to monetize it. Sure. The other thing too is if you're billing a daily rate, well, you just lost a day. Right. So the business the the the economy would
[:would adjust, but it would be bumpy. Right? Like, that first two weeks would be real messy because not every childcare place will have adjusted their hours. Yeah. There's just there's a lot of second and third order consequences to that transition that I would imagine most people have not thought through.
[:Well, now this compounds with the remote working. Right. Because one of the issues with remote working is we've we've kind of allowed ourselves to work over 10 to 12 hours a day. We may only do 8 hours of work, but we've allowed ourselves to go 10 to 12 hours. And then if you cut off an extra day, in I think that's a that's a system problem.
Right. Because now you're you're gonna tell your remote people, okay, you don't chuck clock in on Friday, but you're gonna have to have more meetings now, or we have to tighten things up. And then, of course, you're also taking a a you're taking time away from collaborative meetings to cram more work in. So are you creating more context switching by trying to put more in one day?
[:Right. I think it could work. I think it would need to be very closely analyzed, understood, and monitored to make sure that it doesn't create more problems than it solves. Because I think there are some great benefits to it, but there's, there could potentially be a lot of downsides if you're in a dense urban area. I think it could make a lot more sense if you're in a more suburban context where you've got a lot of commuters and a lot more people with kids and stuff like that.
Like that's gonna be harder. It just screws up with a lot of other things that are codependent on that traditional business hours schedule.
[:Is this one of those we want everybody back in the office, but we're gonna institute the 4 day work week? So is this a trade between getting rid of remote and going back into the office? Can you have both, or is is this one or the other? Because I do think if you're forced to go into an office, I think you could institute a 4 day work week because you're just you're pulling people into a work environment as opposed to letting it be this more fluid environment at home. Because I think the biggest issue is when you have the more fluid environment, there's no way you're gonna have a 4 day work week unless you're, like, super disciplined.
I think there's a level of just as society and as a, you know, large body of people, we're more disciplined when we're in a common space Right. And the rules are a little more defined. And so I do think the 4 day work week could work in a, like, again, a Microsoft setting, a consulting firm, accounting firm, stuff like that in a return to work environment. I struggle to see how it'd be successful in a remote you know, have both. I don't think it can't be done.
I just struggle to see it.
[:I think there's probably less value in it as well. Right? Because one of the main values of the 4 day work week is you're not having to commute. And if everyone's working from home or majority are working from home, you're not really saving a commute on Fridays. So some of the upside is negated if you've got a distributed workforce.
[:So let's roll into this one, unlimited vacation policies. Because let's be honest. If you have an unlimited vacation policy, you have a 40 work 4 day work week and you're allowed to work remote, what are you working? What what
[:are you actually getting signed on?
[:At that point, did you just I mean, I know I'm I'm gonna get some haters on the comments on this one, but at that point, you're just getting paid to do nothing. Right.
[:So I you know, I love good books. This one, the Netflix No Rules Rules by, Reed Hastings. Very good book. Really interesting how Netflix uses their culture. They have a unlimited vacation policy, but if you read through the book, they actually talk about the, kind of, the implementation process of this.
They do not implement an unlimited vacation policy until they have only a players, and he's very specific about that. So I would be curious to an organization that's got, you know, kind of an average workforce where there's some great people, some average people, and some not so good people, and you throw out an unlimited vacation policy, I don't think that's gonna go very well for them. But if you have been, you know, militant on your talent development and you've only got a players, let's be honest, most of the a players that I know, they don't take their vacation days. That's actually part of the problem.
[:That's part of the problem. So here you go. You've got here's a here's a Harris poll that says, they found that 50% of US workers would prefer an unlimited vacation policy over a higher salary. But despite the flexibility, 43.7% of employees with unlimited PTO feel they don't take enough vacation time due to unclear expectations or workplace culture Mhmm. I e work harder, expectations or workplace culture.
Mhmm. IE work harder or, you know, don't go home until this is done. We we know the the the, you know, eighties work culture that is still prevalent today. So I think, again, this is another means. I think the 4 day work week is just another means of an unlimited vacation policy.
Maybe because that would force you, what, 52 vacation days a year? But then about when what about taking vacations in general? So this is where I start going unlimited PTO, 4 day work week, remote work. Like, at what point are we not addressing the real problem?
[:Yeah. And this is not gonna work for a lot of people. If you've got the right people that are really bought into the vision, They have clear job descriptions. They're a culture fit. Sure.
Fine. They're gonna get their work done anyways. Right? Like, I have no problem with that. It's just what?
That's 15% of the workforce is highly engaged at least according to the most recent, Gallup poll that I saw. So sure it works for 15% of the of your employees, but 85% of them are going to find a way to take advantage of either the 4 day work week or the unlimited vacation policy, because they're not really invested in what you're trying to do. You know, it was interesting they talked about in that Netflix no rules rules book. They implemented the unlimited vacation policy, but the CEO never took vacation. And so nobody else took vacation either.
And then the CEO quickly, you know, to his credit, quickly realized, uh-oh. We did this because we wanted people to take good care of themselves, and now nobody's taking vacation. And he realized that that's that was on him for setting the example of what this culture does. Right? And he was not a guy who had taken a lot of vacation historically.
He was, you know, type a hard charger, and so he consciously started taking more vacation days and then posting everything on, like, Twitter and Facebook and all this kind of stuff so that all the employees saw him on vacation, and slowly the culture started to shift where they began to realize, okay, not it's not just that we have an unlimited vacation policy, but it is culturally okay to go have a vacation. Right? And maybe even to have an epic. Right? He would take 2 weeks and go skiing someplace awesome and, you know, share all of his pictures so that everybody knew he was gone for 2 whole weeks skiing in someplace awesome.
You should go plan an awesome vacation too.
[:Yeah. I mean, well, it goes back to leadership. Right? I mean, culture is defined by leadership, and and leaders have to set examples. You know, it'd be an interesting statistic.
Is the 4 day work week, is that coming from Fortune 500, or is that coming for the more s and b? Because, you know, Fortune 500 is a very small percentage of the companies, at least in America. You know, there's, like, 2,000,000 small businesses. Right? That there's, what, 3 or 400,000 employers that employ most of America.
There's only, you know, Fortune 500. There's only 500 companies in that upper group. So where is this coming from?
[:I don't have data, but I would bet you that it is coming from the larger companies that are struggling to keep their people engaged. And they're they're seeing the turnover. They're seeing the employee net promoter scores, the, you know, great places to work, and they're reacting to that by trying to create some policies to make employees happier. That would be my bet, but I don't have data to prove it.
[:I'll give you an example how I've run this at a couple of companies in the past. So I've always loved unlimited PTO because I hate the whole accrual system. Okay. You gotta accrue so much. Oh, well, you need this vacation.
I just I've always had this expectation. Clear culture guidelines, clear KPIs, measurables. If you hit your measurables, your metrics
[:Mhmm.
[:You could take all the time off you wanted. The other thing I would do is if you wanted to go, I don't know, go work for a week in Spain. This is true story. Had a guy approach me, ran QA at one of our software companies. Wanted to go I think it was Spain.
Yeah. He was wanting to go running at the bulls. And I said, look. If your work gets done, you didn't have to take the PTO. Like, I mean, you could put it in the system and all this and the other, but, like, if your work gets done, just go go do it in Spain.
You know, just make sure some the the KPIs are met. And I don't care. Right. And he structured everything around where he spent I think it was, like, 2 weeks in Spain. He did the first part of his work over there.
Mhmm. He had his time to do all the stuff he wanted to, and then he did some other stuff while wrapping up sightseeing and then came home. And so it was still a way actually, this is kind of blending the unlimited and the remote component of it Right. Is he got the best of both worlds. At the end of the day, what it was was the clear culture and accountability made it easy.
[:Right. Part of what enables people to have those conversations and for those conversations to go well is a reputation of delivering. If that employee had a reputation of being a slacker, hadn't met his goals, you know, hadn't hit his KPIs, I think you have a very different conversation when he asks if he can work from Spain for a month. You you gotta gotta earn the right to have that conversation, but if you have earned the right, most of the managers that I've worked with, particularly for knowledge jobs, they don't really care where you are, as long as you're getting it done. Right.
Right. Right.
[:Alright. So let's move on to the third one. Transparent salaries.
[:Yeah. Oh, boy. So I've got a client who does this. They've got a lot of job descriptions, so the the roles are very narrowly defined, and they have a posted salary for each title. It's even.
It's consistent. Whether or not it's fair, I think maybe we could debate. But I don't know. Have you seen companies do this?
[:You know, most of the companies I've worked with have always been fearful of Mhmm. Sharing salaries for, I I would say, for the the right reasons, but it's not about just being transparent in the salary. If you just open up a spreadsheet and share everybody's salary down the line with no context, you are going to have a mutiny on your hand because there are people you pay more. There are things as that and the other. I think it's, I think the fear behind it stems from the lack of discipline in running a business from a the actual business side of the business, not on what the product or service you sell.
Okay. The thing is, like you just said, if you have a clear accountability chart, if you have clear you know, just the the 5 bullet we'll start with the simple. The 5 bullet points, accountabilities, expectations for that role, and you have a salary range that's associated to it that's fair, you know, take some industry averages and whatnot and stick your thing on there. I I think people can people are smart because they can figure out what it looks like. I I think where it falls apart is when you don't have the clear accountability defined or the clear structure, then there's ambiguity in what that person's job is.
Right. And a lot of times, if that job may be twice as hard as yours, but because you don't see the other side of it, you're like, well, it's not fair that person makes 30,000 more a year than I do. Right. Well, yeah. But they also have to do double the work you do.
Right. So so I'm I'm working against
[:the stress because they've got a bigger number on their forehead that they've gotta go find every year or every quarter, whatever that situation is. Yeah. Stress is a part of it.
[:I've got a $10,000,000 sales quota. You got a $1,000,000 sales quota, and you wanna know why we're paid differently. Well Right. If you want a bigger number, take on a 10,000,000 sales quota. But you know what?
You've missed your sales. Your $1,000,000 sales quota, you you've missed it 2 years in a row. So why would I give you a higher quota if you can't hit the quota for the box you're in?
[:Yep. But
[:Yep. On the other hand, and this is where the cooler accountability comes in. You know, Dana, you got your $1,000,000 quota and you've been hitting 3,000,000 for the past 2 years in a row. Mhmm. Maybe we should put you in this other box.
I don't think people really have a problem with people getting paid more or less. I think it's when people are getting when there's a wide gap between the same role because we think that person's better at it. That is where the real problem comes in.
[:Part of this is just kind of not having good HR hygiene, if we can call it that, and keeping things current. Some of it is also just not having clear expectations of what is it that you're accountable for in this role. I've seen this with a large organization I was a part of that had grown through acquisition, and rightsizing all of those titles and comp bands was a massive undertaking. I mean, it was a big company. It was probably 20, 25,000 employees.
You had s v you know, an SVP title making 150 and an SVP title making 350, and it's just like, oh, gosh. So that requires a lot of work that has to be done in advance of transparent salaries. I think if you just open the kimono and show all the salaries without doing the rationalization first, you are gonna create massive problems for yourself. It's not about being transparent with the salaries is
[:the issue like you just said. Yeah. It's everything around it is the issue, and when you shortcut all of that, when you start to expose salaries and and let's be honest, people talk. I mean, especially in a small business space, small medium business, people know everybody else's salary. Now if you got 4 or 500 people, there's some degradation there, but I guarantee you there's clusters of people that talk about their pay.
[:Yeah. In well managed organizations, every title has a pay band. So I don't really know what transparent salaries give you that a well run organization that has built trust with their employees couldn't have by default with pay bands. Right? Pay bands were not huge.
I mean they're probably 5 to $15,000. If you're your 1st year as director, you might be on the lower end of that, and the the more tenure you have, you move up the pay band until you get to a point where you're ready to try to jump to the next level. That's that's how this is done well, but if people know you have a director title, they know you're in this band. And I don't understand what additional detail there what what what do you gain by that?
[:Well, I think I think the issue is you create tension among the team members. You create Right. Comparison. I think it's that fear or that result comes when you don't have everything else structured, especially when it's or or here's one that happens a lot. Right?
We hired somebody in this, this SVP role. They're not a fit for it, but we like them. They're making 150 a year. And so then we move them to this director role, and we put another SVP in there, but we keep them their salary. And then now this person's making, you know, $30,000 more than the other director peers, or we put them as an individual contributor.
And now you've got this discrepancy in salaries, and that's because we moved somebody from box to box to box when in reality, what we should have done is even if we wanted to move them to a different box, we should have fired them from that role and then hired them in the other role. I mean Mhmm. Being dramatic here. But
[:Right. With the pay With the pay. Commensurate with the role. Right. Right.
[:So I think where a lot of times we get in trouble is we do all these things is we we give somebody a salary. It it's really above their their ability, but we promote people into this this pay band, and then the it's it's above their ceiling. And so then they get moved elsewhere because we like them, and then you They're
[:maybe they're a culture fit, but they're not in the right seats, so you change seats. That seat's not as valuable of a seat, but they're being paid more than the seats worth.
[:So Yeah. And because we don't wanna have the hard conversation, and we wanna be good, you know, we wanna be good people because we like this person. We don't wanna screw them over. Not not like, that's never the intention. So then there we we start getting salaries all over the place, and then we don't wanna be transparent about it because we don't want people to know that we're paying someone way too much for a role where somebody else is doing yeah.
And and Yeah. Someone that's contributing probably even better to the role is making so much less. So at the end of the day, I don't think it's the issue with being transparency on on the numbers. Mhmm. Issue is everything around it.
You know, here's this one right here. Buffer says or they reported increased trust and alignment among employees. I'm going to guess the reason why they had trust and alignment is because they were sharing data that allowed everybody you know, that sharing is trust. Transparency is trust.
[:Right.
[:But I'm gonna assume the system was designed with all this in mind for a win win solution as opposed to a red line and then fear hiding it.
[:So one of the other kind of controversial work strategies I've seen to improve productivity and morale is no meetings. So certain days or times of the day where employees are not allowed to schedule meetings, and the intent is that it gives people, it gives employees uninterrupted time to focus on work. I have done this in a couple of different places. The one that comes to mind is I was the product manager and kind of reporting manager for a team of developers. And so I had a project manager working for me and, engineering, you know, development team working for me as well.
And I just you know, I love the technology that we're working on. I'm a little bit of a nerd, and so I would walk by just all the time, hang out with my team, and, you know, nerd out on what they're working on. And my project manager, who is awesome and I have the most respect for her, she was like, hey. We love you. Go away.
And, and I was like, oh my gosh. If I'd, like, in the way, am I screwing things up? And she's like, yeah. Like, we've talked about what they need to do. Now they need time to go do it, and you need to stop throwing around other ideas so they can go do what you ask them to do.
And so we put in a policy where at least I was not allowed to meet with the engineers. I think it was, like, Tuesdays Wednesdays. So they carved out 2 whole days. So Mondays, we'd get our act together. Tuesday, Wednesdays, I was not allowed to talk to the engineers.
I could talk to my project manager, and then Thursday, Friday, we could do some other things, but they carved out 2 whole days of no meetings so they could just be heads down getting stuff done. And, honestly, our team was so much more productive when I was not allowed to not only schedule meetings, but even, like, swing by their desk.
[:I love this policy. I'm a huge fan of it. I run it even even in my day to day now. I think this is definitely a knowledge worker issue. Absolutely.
Somebody that has you know, if you're working in a marketing department or, you know, sales, finance, anything that requires you to sit down and think about the task you're doing or developer, you know, drawing creatives, doing marketing campaigns, deep analysis, stuff like that. I love it. And I think the the issue is, we know, we all have managers. Mhmm. Right?
We we have people that kinda help generate the kind of work and give the direction, then we have the people that do the work. The problem is is, like, in that case where you are the project manager, it is you were coming up with ideas and you had stakeholder feedback. And it was great you wanted to share it, but it was it was the wave hitting the shore every single time breaking the concentration. Mhmm. And so it's, like, even even conversations I've I have with my executive assistant every week, it's, like, no meetings.
Well, all these people wanna talk no. Nope. I've got to get work done. Mhmm. And the context switching, I can't have a meeting and think for 30 minutes and then have a meeting and think for 30 minutes.
Like, I I have I this thing's gonna take me take me 6 hours to do. You have to clear my schedule. Well, too many people need to meet with you. Tough. Then something is wrong with the system.
Mhmm. Because if somebody needs to meet with me, then something is not being done. I think or my belief is it's a lack of journey in the processes. So I actually think baking it into your processes is very smart because of context switching. Mhmm.
If you context switch the average person 3 to 5 times a day, you're automatically losing a, you know, 10, 20% of productivity. Alright. Let's lack of concentration.
[:So let's define context switching. So if you're thinking about a certain problem, maybe you already know this, but just to make sure we're all clear. If you're thinking about a particular problem or for me, it's a particular client and I'm I've got all of their problems kind of loaded into my brain and I'm thinking through things and then another client calls me and I've gotta drop everything I'm thinking about and start thinking about something else. I take a 15 minute phone call with another client, and I go back to my other client. I don't pick up where I left off.
It takes some time to kind of reload what I was thinking about, and then I can get back to where I was depending on the complexity of what you're dealing with. Most what they call deep work requires almost 45 minutes to an hour of loading your brain with the problem so that you can actually solve it. And if you spend less than that, you're just wasting your time.
[:I'm gonna use analogy of, of the old computer from, you know, the the the 90. I'm sure this goes all the way back to the eighties, but we use the nineties, early 2000.
[:Okay.
[:You hear the old hard drive just cranking up. Right? And that program, the first time you open it up, and it opens up, and it's slow, and then it's running, and it's, like, okay. It's in RAM. It's running.
It's great. It's fast. And then you close the program, and what does it do? It dumps the RAM Mhmm. Which is fast, and you gotta load it back up on the hard drive again.
[:Load the load the
[:next one. Like, that's so if anybody that's, you know, used a computer in the late nineties or early 2000, like, just the pain or dial up, you know, just the context switching when somebody picks up the phone and the Internet And you lose your dial up. Right? Through the whole cycle. Oh, ping.
You lose everything. Yep. Right. Yeah. Your download your download got destroyed, so you gotta redownload your song on Napster, and you gotta start all over.
Right. Anyways
[:Been there. Yeah. I think we don't realize how often we waste time switching contexts. Right. And context can be client to client.
It can be project to project. It can even be task to task. Right. I'm working on this one spreadsheet and then somebody calls me and asks me about that PowerPoint. And I'm like, okay.
Yeah. Hold on. Let me pull up the PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I fix that problem, and I go back to the spreadsheet. I'm like, crap.
Where was I in the spreadsheet? And it takes me depending on the complexity of what I'm working on, it could easily take me 5 to 10 minutes to figure out where I was and get back to doing what I was doing. In really complex things, it I have been in spreadsheets that are just massive and complex and interconnected and all the referencing cells. I mean, it takes me 45 minutes to figure out where I was and what I was doing and and get back to the point of adding value. And that context switching is a massive tax on nearly every organization I have ever worked with.
[:Well and I think there's there's two levels of this. Right? Context switching is always happening. And I and I'm gonna go a little controversial here. You know, Tom will be happy.
Is I think there's a level of of of male and female in this. Right? Mhmm.
[:Alright. Traditionally.
[:Now I know there are females that operate this or women that operate this way, and I know there are men that are the other way, but we're gonna go with just the the generals. Right? Men are the filing cabinets. We open the drawer. We pull out the folder.
We work on it. And then someone says, I need you to go do it. So you close it back up. You put it in the drawer. You close it.
You go to the next door. Right. Whereas they say women are like the spider webs. You know, they've got all the stuff all over the place, and they're just working on it all the time. Like, that's me and my wife.
I'm like, slow down. I gotta close the drawer. And she's like, no. No. No.
It's on the spider web over there. Right. I think you get, like, project managers. Their job is to go across a very wide net, but not very deep. Mhmm.
And so that's the thing is a lot of project managers because they're they are juggling, you know, we'll we'll we'll call ping pong balls. Yep. They're not very light. They're or sorry. They're not very they're not very light.
Yes. Ping pong balls are very heavy. Right. I can't lift one. The the ping pong balls are are very light, and you can juggle them.
You know? You can have twin 20 of them going on time. Turn that into a 5 pound weight Yeah. And try to juggle it. No.
Can't do it. You're not gonna get very far with it. And that's that's the difference is I think where you don't have harmony between those people that need to juggle the 5 pound weights and the people that need to juggle the ping pong balls Mhmm. That is where the disconnect comes, and that's where the policy of no meetings come in because that forces the the ping pong juggler to get all their stuff in a row so that the other person can do the work correctly. Yeah.
You get an increased velocity, but we have the fear say we the the people that are managing a lot of the work, we have the fear that by not having that meeting right then and there, the work's not gonna get done. Right. Or if we don't pass this information along, but we're too focused on what we need to do as opposed to what the end goal is. Right. And that's where I think this policy that, I think we're looking at Asana here.
You know, as Asana basically says what they forced it on, no meeting Wednesdays. Yeah.
[:I think that was the example.
[:Here you go. Peter Drucker quote. Meetings are a symptom of bad organization.
[:Ouch. That stings.
[:So, you know, agile scrum. Right. Scrum was built around the fact that if you did all the proactive work upfront
[:Mhmm.
[:Then the team has 2 weeks to go get all the work done, which doesn't bring you're not doing the context switching of switching the backlog around. Right? That's why now the team has the ability within the sprint backlog to, you know, to move stuff around and manage it, but that's that's juggling the ping pong balls versus putting a feature in, pulling it out, changing the the requirements, etcetera, etcetera. Right.
[:Yeah. I'm in the process of implementing scrum with the team right now, and they've never done that. And it's it's really hard when the the way you have worked has been very reactive. So your boss says something, and they're like, cool. Let's go have a meeting, and talk about that.
And it's like, woah. Woah. Time out. That's that's not the right thing to do. But I've been in many organizations that just love meetings, feels like it's being prod productive, and we're not actually accomplishing anything because nobody knows what success would look like.
I'm challenging my team now to say let's define success up front before we do anything else. They're like, oh my gosh. That's gonna take so much time. And I'm like, is it? Is it really gonna take more time than what you're doing today Where you do something, and then you do it again, and then you do it a 3rd time because nobody knows what you're actually chasing, and you keep having more and more meetings but no more clarity?
And so I do like that agile scrum methodology because it forces clarity upfront that then gives the team autonomy, and hopefully trust. The leader should have trust that their team is going and doing the things that they said they were gonna do. Right? And that was the big check for me as a manager was, okay. Am I okay not talking to my team for a day or 2?
Do they think I'm still doing my job? Right? Maybe some insecurity on my part. Do I still think they're doing their job, control issues on my part? And it's and those first couple of iterations were a little hard for me because I was like, well, what if they think I'm just, you know, doing nothing all day surfing Facebook?
But what I found because I had a good team was that they were heads down. They were getting stuff done, And if I left them alone, they were actually more productive than if I was constantly scheduling meetings with them. By forcing certain,
[:you know, deep work days, it forces more proactivity to be effective in there. And I think if you're reactive going into the no work day
[:Mhmm.
[:You're you're not gonna have more collaboration, and you're not gonna be more productive. Right. So you have to do the proactive work, the hard work up front. You gotta go to the green line to make those days effective. And then the other sense of it is, let's go to the employee side.
Some employees may feel isolated without regular team touch points. If their team is their, you know, their their community
[:Mhmm.
[:You know, their friends in some cases, sometimes those meetings are the means of social interaction. Sure. And so sometimes we like having those meetings just so we have that interaction, and I think that's that's a culture problem. Yeah. So I I think in the sense of if you're gonna do this, then you also need to be intentional about driving, you know, good culture interactions as opposed to just continually head down work work work work work work.
Right. Which, again, also, I think, flows into the 4 day work week, which flows into, you know, remote work, you know, PTO policies, etcetera, etcetera.
[:In well run organizations, there are fewer meetings with greater clarity and purpose. Are we really having the right conversations, or are we avoiding the things we really need to be talking about and talking about things that are more comfortable?
[:Right. And so then let's go with the final one here. Employee surveillance and monitoring. Now you wanna talk about one of the worst policies you could ever put in place in
[:my opinion. Oh my gosh.
[:There's an individual I know. I'm gonna send a link to this recording and and and duke it out with him because he actually records the screens of all of his employees. Woah. Okay. But he's very open about it, and they've turned it into a productivity tool.
So I actually like the way he's presented it. Interesting. Well, as long as his stance is as long as you're working, it's taking screenshots of what you're doing, and then you go in and catalog your work. It's like your time tracking and your work log, and it's how they also, like, catalog the work that they share to the customer. So they've turned it into, like, an actual productivity tool to help you be better, and then the side effect of it is it's a gotcha if you're not doing anything, then they use that as an accountability tool.
But I would say he's got a very strong culture. Right. He's very transparent about it. There's a lot of trust in it, which is why it works. I think most people use it as a gotcha.
And the reality is, you know, what is this? This this survey here found 60% of employees feel demotivated when monitored. Oh, yeah. Indicating surveillance can have road trust and lead to burnout.
[:Yeah. I was part of an organization that began implementing monitoring. I lost several coworkers to what was rumored to be policy, you know, handbook violations. Wasn't always clear what that was. Some of it, I'm sure, was very bad behavior, and some of that was probably just accidental unintended consequences.
But I would say my experience and what I heard from my peers was kind of exactly this, a lack of motivation when when being monitored. But what do you do in a world of remote work? COVID hits. None of us were prepared, and now you've suddenly got a work force that's not coming into the office anymore. Like, how do you make sure that your people are actually doing what they say they're doing and not just surfing Twitter all day?
[:Well okay. So I'm gonna I'm gonna use a a quote here from Jason Fried. He's the cofounder of Basecamp. It says the best way to hold employees accountable is to measure outcomes, not activity. I think too many of these monitoring surveillance systems are to monitor activity.
Right. It goes back to the whole dial for dollars. If you don't make a 100 phone calls a day, then you're fired. Right. That's an activity that doesn't you know, a 100 phone calls a day doesn't guarantee you sales.
Now if you make 0 phone calls a day, you're guaranteed 0 sales. Right. But monitoring activity doesn't actually accomplish anything. You need to measure the accomplishments. We go all the way back to what we've been talking about is culture.
Setting the expectation, the accountability chart. Now I think there's nothing wrong with measuring, let's say, Jira. If you're using, you know, Agile scrum, and we're talking about development shop here, and you're using story points as a user to measure and you're measuring the velocity of the team. Like, it's okay to have measurables. Let's not confuse employee surveillance and monitoring with KPIs and management.
Mhmm. Everybody needs a number to be held accountable to Right. Because that's the scoreboard. Yep. If you don't know what the score if you don't know what inbounds, out of bounds, and how you, you know, score if you will, then how do you know if you're being successful?
But if you know those rules, I think I can't remember one of the quotes earlier. It was talking about the Netflix one. Mhmm. Culture is not the 4 words on the on the wall. It's the guidelines.
Right. So if you had the guidelines and you're measuring the outcomes, you don't need employee surveillance and monitoring. Employee surveillance and monitoring is because of poor culture, poor structure, poor systems, poor everything, and so it's a very reactive mindset. It's a very reactive, practice, and it's just stupid. If you're doing it, you should be in business.
If you feel the need to monitor and run surveillance software on your employees,
[:I would question whether or not you have the right employees. I think that's more of a you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself if these are really the right people in the right seats with the right job descriptions.
[:I would say I don't know if it's ask if you have the right people. It's you have a fucking clue on how to run a company because you're doing it the wrong damn way. I'm sorry. It's not do you have the right people. It's are you the right leader?
[:Woah. That's harsh.
[:Because that's a that's a gotcha. And if you're running your business on gotchas, you're running it on fear. You're running it on not an abundance mindset. Yeah. Again, there may be some scenarios where something like that may be needed, and that's not what I'm talking about.
If this is like some, you know, company that's running government contracts and secrecy is a huge thing and you gotta blah blah blah. That's not what I'm talking about. If you feel the need you have to do this, then you are not looking in the mirror and setting the right expectations as a leader. You have not defined a clear structure, clear outcomes, clear accountability, and the problem starts with you as the leader. Right.
It's not the people. If you have a 100% lazy people working for you, I don't even know how you got a business started.
[:Right. That that again is a you problem. Right.
[:So, you know, here it says, does monitoring increase productivity, or does it destroy trust within the workplace? It 1000% destroys trust.
[:Yes. Absolutely.
[:Only only scenario that I've ever seen at work is the one I shared a minute ago, and that's because the culture was set up and they leveraged it as a productivity tool. It's not a gotcha.
[:Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not a weapon to be used as against the employees. Alright. So we've talked about a couple of different they're almost employee engagement strategies.
Right? You've got the 4 day work week. You've got unlimited vacation policies, transparency on salary, no meeting days, and employee surveillance and monitoring. Just to recap, which ones are you pro and which ones are you against?
[:Oh, I'm a 1000 of percent against the surveillance and monitoring one if that
[:wasn't clear. It's subtle, but I got I picked
[:up on it. I'm on, like, a mission to wipe you off the planet, your business off the planet if that's what you do for a negative way.
[:Mhmm.
[:Ivan, you're safe. I like the way you use it, Ivan. I am definitely for the for the no meeting policies.
[:Yeah. I'm I'm very pro that.
[:First, I'd say that's reactive, but I think you need to bake that into the process to force you to be proactive. If you could build the proactivities in it, the outcome is the no meeting policy, which then creates less fatigue and burnout. I actually like the 4 day work week if we're talking about an in office environment. I think that forces more people to get more work done, especially when you got the commute back and forth. I think having that extra day is a good subtle or, not a good subtle.
I think that's a good replacement for if you're gonna take remote away. I think having remote and the 4 day work week is probably a disaster. Unlimited each, PTO policies, I love that one. It's gotta be executed right, but I do believe it's a great it's a great tool when leveraged correctly.
[:Yeah. Transparent salaries. I'd say No.
[:I'm all for transparent salaries. Yeah. I I think that's that's a culture component because if you can't trust your people with the data, then you haven't built the right culture. Build the culture, and it's just a moot point at that point. So now if you're if you're in a position and you've got yourself in a bind and you're trying to get there, kudos on you for trying to get there.
Now you got some hard work ahead of you. So that doesn't mean just open up your books tomorrow and go, well, I'm gonna be transparent today. Well, that that'll end in disaster, but moving towards that direction to get there is definitely a a good thing to do. So I'd I'd I wouldn't expect everybody just to automatically know how to do these. It is a journey.
You know, you do have to go through all four components with any one of these. You have to define what's the vision, why you're trying to do it, the the sorry. Yeah. The vision. The the journey.
What's the path? How do we do this? How do we manage it? What are the SOPs?
[:Mhmm.
[:The culture expectations. How do we behave? And then the the results, the measurements, KPIs, or how do we measure success behind this? I think with any one of these, it could be a great tool except for the surveillance one. That one just needs to go in the trash.
But, otherwise, the other if you go through the 4 Right.
[:You'll have success. So I would love to hear from some other people, maybe some listeners, or anybody who follows us on shows from media. Where do you disagree? Where have you seen the policies that we hate work well? Where have you seen the policies we love be a disaster?
We've caveated a couple of our recommendations, but I would love to hear if people have a different experience. Maybe there's something we're not thinking about. I do think the surveillance and monitoring, putting the asterisk on it, you know, this is a a government contract or some sort of a security firm. Alright. Maybe that makes a little bit more sense, but I'd be curious if somebody else has seen a way in which employee surveillance and monitoring has actually been a pro for their culture as opposed to a con.
Or maybe some ways in which, like, 4 day work week, unlimited PTO has blown up, and been a bad experience for people. Love to hear your questions, comments, and experiences. Please share them with us on social media.
[:Alright. We'll give a tease out for the next episode. Next episode is bore out in Fortune 500. Bore out. I had to, I had to research this one a little bit.
Being bored at work, and I'm willing to bet there's some of these things that we talked about today that are gonna play into
[:Probably. Episode.
[:Tune in and learn about more out next.
[:Make work not suck. Our podcast that talks about exactly that, our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co host, Daniel Steer.
Join us each episode and make work not suck.
