[seanstickle]

Once again, I have to point to the Results-Only Work Environment — http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards. ROWE isn't the only way of doing this sort of thing, but it's a good approach.

Companies hire people to produce results, not to sit in an office for a certain number of hours. Given this, stop trying to manage where and when people work, and start focusing on whether they are delivering results.

This endless parade of articles about work hours is reminiscent of people discussing the threadcount of the Emperor's clothes.

[tanderson92]

Forgive me if I am missing something that is obvious about ROWE, but what is to stop management from shifting the goalposts in a ROWE ? By continuously requiring more from their workforce they are receiving more hours of work from them while being able to say "We do not force set hours, we only require reasonable results from our employees" ?

It simply seems easy to manipulate.

[seanstickle]

That's a great question, tanderson92.

Unless you've had a remarkable work experience, you'll find that bad management shifts the goalposts in a 40-hour work environment too. "Work harder, work faster, work smarter!" This behavior is independent of the environment. The advantage of ROWE is that it removes a lot off waste (hours tracking, telecommuting paperwork, microaggressions about hours worked, etc.) and lets people actually focus on the work.

If you have executives that want to destroy the company by crushing the workforce then, yeah, no environment will stop them.

[adeptus]

So what's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload when there's no limit to how many hours you work? The usefulness of a set limit of hours is that it protects the employee from work overload.

[seanstickle]

That's a reasonable concern, adeptus.

What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?

I do not mean this at all flippantly. I've worked places (and I'm sure others have as well) where the amount of work assigned is undoable in the amount of time available. People burn out, people deliver poor quality, people quit.

A ROWE is not meant as a mechanism to protect employees from destructive bosses. And, for knowledge workers whose work cannot be mechanically reduced to hours, neither is a 40-hour week.

A ROWE is about removing waste in the work process so that people can focus on the work they're hired to do, not on outdated ritualistic traditions about work that no longer apply.

[vertex-four]

> What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?

The thing is, under such a system, you get fired and that's the end of it, and the employer suffers for it as well as you. They can't push people to spend more than their 40 hours - they have to find somebody else who's willing to put up with it for 40 hours a week, or explicitly require more.

In the ROWE system, employers can collectively gradually push their employees to work more and more. 10 years down the line, everyone could have 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do a week, and no recourse, because every employer has gradually done the same thing - after all, if they can get more work out of you, they will.

[Jedd]

A lack of recourse would only be the case if, as you say, 'every employer has gradually done the same thing'.

In an ideal world, all employees are able to be mobile, and would gravitate quickly away from bad employers, incentivising employers to not be bad (basically), and/or removing those employers / organisations from the environment.

I respect we don't live in an ideal world, but equally we don't live in a 100% evil - but somewhere in between the two extremes. So in practice you would see the same things that happen now - employers that aren't evil are able to obtain and retain better employees, in part because they don't engage in the kinds of activities you're describing.

[lentil_soup]

I agree, and actually in a lot of countries you couldn't just get fired. Your employer would have to prove you really are slacking off, which would be hard if they're giving you more than 40h worth of work per week.

[maigret]

They'll think they do, but they won't really. Research is showing clearly that 60 hours a week is not sustainable longer than a couple months. Afterwards, you get less efficient than if you only worked 40 hours. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

[ekanes]

I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but you should know that culturally, using people's names when replying to them the way you're doing often comes across as condescending.

[briandear]

The employee could quit and go work somewhere better. A manager knows the value of employees, if the place where I'm working now starts to shift the goalpost, then I'll walk and they'll lose whatever value I provided. It would take long for a manager to end up with an office of incompetent people because all the good ones would have left. Why do you think Google provides all those perks? Because they have to compete for labor just like everyone else. We aren't slaves despite some popular opinion suggesting it.

[mikepurvis]

Hours tracking is hard to get out from under. In Canada, for example, tech companies get an annual tax rebate for R&D-related expenditures, under the government SR&ED program. One of the requirements for making the claim on any personnel expenses is signed timesheets.

[desdiv]

Revenue Canada says [0]:

Individual time sheets that allocate time to SR&ED and non-SR&ED work are a good source of supporting information. Time sheets can be used to show the reasonableness of an SR&ED labour claim. Time sheet codes may be based on business projects that do not align to SR&ED projects. In such cases, other evidence may be required to support the SR&ED labour allocation.

So there are alternative means of proving SR&ED labour allocation.

[0] http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/clmng/slrywgs-eng....

[joesmo]

I think there still needs to be a cap, probably around the 35-40 hour mark. Likewise, eliminating PTO generally seems to be a bad idea that can be abused by managers to keep their employees from actually taking PTO. I agree that leaving these issues to be implicitly resolved between employers and employees is a recipe that invites abuse, but if maximum work hours and minimum PTO are specified, ROWE is a pretty good policy.

[conradfr]

Do Scrum. This way employees do their own time estimate and commitment to deliver. Replace them when burned out.

[e12e]

I probably agree (I have to read up on ROWE).

One thing is that "work week" mean different things in different contexts. One point of reference are full-time employees, that are paid a certain yearly salary. They typically work around 11 months a year (give or take a week or two), and are paid once every 12 months (with various takes on how vacation is paid for). The hourly wage is only a number used when calculating compensation for extra hours/overtime etc -- and compensation is based on more or less doing the same, every day, all year.

So what happens when people cannot, or don't want to work "full time"? In retail, "results" typically would mean you're at your post, servicing customers. In engineering, it doesn't really matter as long as the milestones are met.

You might need a reasonable yardstick against which to measure performance, if you want people to be able to adjust how much and when they work. I don't think there is a "one-size-fits-all" solution (well, beyond: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- which I think is a fine idea, but it demands some restructuring. Not perhaps only feasible under communism, one might view the idea of Japanese "employee-for-life" as another realization of the same idea).

All that said, counting hours, for most jobs (ie: those that aren't on the way to be automated away, anyway), is probably the worst possible measure of productivity -- and if one thinks compensation should be tied to productivity -- it is probably the worst possible basis on which to base compensation.

The benefit of measuring hours, lies in the simplicity. If people only work when at work, if they mostly work when at work, then hours at work should correlate with values produced, for that worker. You'd still need to price those hours (8 hours of amateur work, vs 1 hour of someone that's good at their job -- could readily be of the same value).

[wastedhours]

I'd kind of agree/disagree-ish. As I've commented on another HN thread about this, YMMV, but I've made peace with the fact they're paying for 37 hours access a week to my brain as much as the specific outputs I produce. I don't sit with people with my skillset, so I can help others (what's often referred to here as "interruptions"). Regardless of how much productive time I get out of that (c. 25, maybe), I'm there for questions to be asked of me, and to help others - and that's as much of my role as rolling out code.

[nhebb]

How would that apply to the woman in the article, Ahlem Saifi? She works at the airport and at a market. A Results-Only Work Environment might work for some knowledge workers, but I don't think it would apply to the majority of the workforce.

[seanstickle]

See my reply to prostoalex at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679172

[prostoalex]

How would this work in restaurant business, hospitality industry or retail environment?

[seanstickle]

The same it applies anywhere. You want results from people in the restaurant business, hospitality industry, or retail environments, right?

A Results-Only Work Environment isn't a Remote-Only Work Environment. You work where and when you want, as long as your work gets done. If you need to be in the restaurant during certain hours to achieve your results, then that's where you are.

The focus is first and foremost on the results, and everything follows from that.

[nhebb]

So a Results-Only Work Environment works because it focuses on results. Got it. That may work fine for programmers, but when knowledge worker theory meets the reality of a mass workforce, you're resorting to a circular argument. The GP cited businesses that need employees available at all hours when the business is open. That's the only way to get results. So in the context of a 35 hours work week, I don't see it as applicable. Convenience stores, restaurants, and hospitality businesses would just end up hiring more part time workers.

[enjo]

I would encourage you to read the book "Maverick" which examines a lot of this in detail. It's interesting the environments they've applied these types of structures to. Including line-manufacturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29

[mattm]

Disagree. It only really works for workers that are actively producing. For jobs that are reactionary (mainly service jobs where customers come to them and they are expected to deal with them) it doesn't really work. You need someone in the store or answering the phones during certain hours.