The anti work people would’ve been the first in the gulag. “Those who do not work do not eat.”
Ironically it’s a lack of capitalism pushing up the housing prices, not too much. The housing market is highly regulated preventing houses from being built, apartments being made out of warehouses etc, and labour has been crushed by state subsidized migration.
I agree an approach to office work that was task-based instead of "look busy for 8 hours" based would be a vast improvement in corporate culture. I've often thought about what this would look like from a management perspective. How would one handle a team of people doing this? It's so generally against the grain of current management approaches that no one would dare try. But someone should!
I work in a banking sales role and this is pretty much how my job works. My boss couldn’t care less what I’m doing day to day much less hour to hour. Some weeks I do virtually no office work. I’m on the road visiting clients and sites. This is all self determined. There are times when the hours are demanding and the amount of “real” work is punishing but that’s all work I have committed myself to. As long as I hit my sales and risk targets, no one else cares that much what I’m doing.
There's nothing particularly unusual about that. I've been lucky enough to always work in such organizations, regardless of how big or small they were. Although the contracts of course still technically said you were expected to work a certain number of hours per week, and too much piss-taking would get noticed, the reality is that nobody measured how many hours you worked nor did they care. For example, just a few weeks ago my manager - this is a large multinational software corporation - told me explicitly he measures me only by whether I complete my tasks in a reasonable amount of time, and that it's perfectly okay to take more holidays than I have balance for. My manager doesn't even work on the same continent as me, even though I work in an office, and I'm effectively left to get on with it without any supervision.
Many of my jobs have been like this, and I think it's simply normal in my industry. It does however require very high quality managers who have a deep understanding of the work that people are doing. I'm fortunate to have mostly worked for excellent managers or myself in my career, a privilege that I do not take lightly, and the worst problems I've had with management were mostly when I reported into people who had no understanding of the work being done in their organization. This rapidly leads to presenteeism and an obsession with worked hours done because they have no other way to understand if people are scamming them or not.
Lots of smaller and privately held companies are like this. Large, public companies need predictable, quarterly results in order to keep the whole thing moving. Plus, when you have layers and layers of management, it’s difficult to determine if anyone is actually accomplishing anything particularly useful.
Agreed. However, I've never encountered a smaller company like this. At least the ones I've worked at and the ones I've seen don't follow this approach. Would love to see it though.
I guess what I was really thinking of was the times I’ve worked for startups. I shouldn’t overextend my anecdotal observation to small businesses or regional companies or whatnot.
The anti work people would’ve been the first in the gulag. “Those who do not work do not eat.”
Ironically it’s a lack of capitalism pushing up the housing prices, not too much. The housing market is highly regulated preventing houses from being built, apartments being made out of warehouses etc, and labour has been crushed by state subsidized migration.
https://www.theflyingfrisby.com/p/how-the-economy-works-tutorial?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I agree an approach to office work that was task-based instead of "look busy for 8 hours" based would be a vast improvement in corporate culture. I've often thought about what this would look like from a management perspective. How would one handle a team of people doing this? It's so generally against the grain of current management approaches that no one would dare try. But someone should!
I work in a banking sales role and this is pretty much how my job works. My boss couldn’t care less what I’m doing day to day much less hour to hour. Some weeks I do virtually no office work. I’m on the road visiting clients and sites. This is all self determined. There are times when the hours are demanding and the amount of “real” work is punishing but that’s all work I have committed myself to. As long as I hit my sales and risk targets, no one else cares that much what I’m doing.
There's nothing particularly unusual about that. I've been lucky enough to always work in such organizations, regardless of how big or small they were. Although the contracts of course still technically said you were expected to work a certain number of hours per week, and too much piss-taking would get noticed, the reality is that nobody measured how many hours you worked nor did they care. For example, just a few weeks ago my manager - this is a large multinational software corporation - told me explicitly he measures me only by whether I complete my tasks in a reasonable amount of time, and that it's perfectly okay to take more holidays than I have balance for. My manager doesn't even work on the same continent as me, even though I work in an office, and I'm effectively left to get on with it without any supervision.
Many of my jobs have been like this, and I think it's simply normal in my industry. It does however require very high quality managers who have a deep understanding of the work that people are doing. I'm fortunate to have mostly worked for excellent managers or myself in my career, a privilege that I do not take lightly, and the worst problems I've had with management were mostly when I reported into people who had no understanding of the work being done in their organization. This rapidly leads to presenteeism and an obsession with worked hours done because they have no other way to understand if people are scamming them or not.
Lots of smaller and privately held companies are like this. Large, public companies need predictable, quarterly results in order to keep the whole thing moving. Plus, when you have layers and layers of management, it’s difficult to determine if anyone is actually accomplishing anything particularly useful.
Agreed. However, I've never encountered a smaller company like this. At least the ones I've worked at and the ones I've seen don't follow this approach. Would love to see it though.
I guess what I was really thinking of was the times I’ve worked for startups. I shouldn’t overextend my anecdotal observation to small businesses or regional companies or whatnot.