About 40 hours is a somewhat mistitled essay, thoughts relating to working hours, work impact, and work efficiency. (I think it would have strongly benefited from being split into multiple essays.) To me, the article’s two main points are:
- Companies want to maximize the amount of work done in a given amount of time. Can this be done by asking people to work more hours (longer days and/or longer weeks)? Yes, but only on the short term; afterwards the negative effects start compounding fast, with drops in employee satisfaction and work quality. Therefore, “crunch time” (temporarily working longer hours to meet a deadline) is best thought of as borrowing working hours from the future, and will have to be repaid with interest.
- Given the above, companies should not want employees to over-work. But over-working employees can be difficult to detect! The company culture needs to be such that employees feel comfortable with exerting back-pressure on additional work when they are at capacity: some of the work needs to be dropped. Employees abusing this mechanism would be detected during performance reviews.
I like this essay, I think it’s a sober, approachable analysis of a complex topic, that takes care to evaluate both the employer’s and employee’s position. That said, I have some arguments against the points made, which mostly boils down to: there is no such a company, there are only people, and people are flawed.
All of the essay’s statements assume that companies are perfectly rational actors, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Companies are abstract entities with no direct will or cognition, only abstractly understood interests. In reality, they depend on managers to correctly establish what the company’s interests actually are and then actually act accordingly. This is virtually never the case, because managers are people, and people are almost never perfectly rational actors: they have their own interests, biases, strengths, and limitations.
The essay’s analysis concludes that companies should not want employees to over-work, but actually there’s certainly a company model based on hiring people, making them work as much as at all possible without any regard for the long-term, and then firing them once their performance drops too much. This of course is an extremely toxic environment to work in, but if there are strong enough incentives (such as a very high compensation), they may still have an ample pool of high-quality applicants for jobs. This may even exist on a smaller scale within otherwise reasonably health companies, such as on the level of departments, teams, or roles, mainly because of mismanagement. (The essay would call this a dysfunctional organization, but that’s a symptom, not a root cause: the root cause can only ever be mismanagement, because again, organizations are dependent on managers setting up functional hierarchies, incentives, and dysincentives.)
Next, employees exerting back-pressure inherently relies on them being able to correctly determine when they near maximum capacity, but this is very difficult to do reliably. In my experience, when given more work than they can handle, people tend to: a) silently drop tasks as they are forgotten or deemed not important enough, or b) silently go into crunch-time and start working longer hours to try and stay ahead of the tide of work, eventually leading to the same negative effects as discussed earlier, or c) silently begin decreasing the work quality in an effort to decrease the amount of time needed to complete it. This is, of course, a bad situation to be in, because now their manager has to correctly be able to diagnose the underlying problem. All too frequently, the above symptoms get categorized under the generic “poor employee performance” umbrella, usually leading to negative performance reviews, increased frustration on all sides, and employees leaving. Again we end up as mismanagement.
All of the above points are about organizations consisting of people, and people are limited. Unfortunately there is no real solution to this problem, and that can be clearly seen at every level of society (from the personal to global). I think the only thing that we can do is keep this core truth in our mind and build redundancies into every system. For example, organizations should not rely completely on the employees to detect when they are operating near maximum capacity: managers at every level should always on the lookout for possible symptoms of this. (To their credit, this happens automatically in many organizations, as managers want to do well by their reports. I’m just pointing out that this is critical.) To cope with poor management, management layers should be partially overlapping and/or be multi-dimensional (such as the matrix organizational chart), both enabling multiple managers at multiple levels and with different perspectives to recognize the root cause of an issue.
Above all else though, regardless of what company you work at and at and in which role, remember the ground truth: those that report to you are people, and those that you yourself report to are people as well, for better or worse.