| My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place. If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day. I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that. This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works. It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work. In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all. Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects. |