Email and Meetings: The 40 Hour Workweek
This story is part of a book I attempted to write in regards to my experiences in project operations and software development. Instead of just sitting on the 41K words I’ve written (not including the probably 100K words of just brainstorming), I thought I’d share fragments instead. #projectshare.
A cultural work expectation we have is that, at least in the United States, we need to work at least 40 hours a week, and those of us who seem to work less than that must be lazy or unproductive.
We conflate the act of “working” with productivity, yet these many actives are do are fairly meaningless and are hardly the most productive way we can spend our time at work. At a deeper level, we associate “working” with the ubiquity of the 40+ hour work week, not realizing that for many companies, that mindset isn’t really valid. The main reasons we work 40 hours a week is not because it’s some sort of optimum unit of time, but because everyone else, for the most part, also works 40 hours a week.
Imagine being part of a company that worked less than 40 hours and could, in theory, empty the office at 3pm. That doesn’t quite work when package deliveries might happen as late as 6pm, and it especially doesn’t work when you know that your competitors are filling in those 40 hours or more with alleged work.
I say alleged work because chance are, your competitor isn’t any more efficient or productive than you are, at least not if they’re following the same traditions of the workweek as so many other businesses do.
Our modern society demands that we work. It’s built into the cultural identity of many nations. The United States is notorious for having an entrepreneurial spirit where employees excessive hours late into the night and on weekends. The Germans are renowned for their highly quality and timely work, and the Japanese are known for their productivity, efficiency, and long hours as well. Great Britain started it all off with the first Industrial Revolution and we’ve been working long hours ever since.
With the coming of the First Industrial revolution came the concept of the work week as we know it… it just happened to be several days a week and as many hours as possible. Then it was reduced to six days to recognize certain religious practices and finally down to the five day work week we’re all familiar with which has persisted since at least the 1920s, but long hours were still the norm. It’s likely the robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries felt robbed (pun intended) of the productivity of their workers could have generated with an extra day of work (which they were so rudely taking off), so the Barons simply pressed on with the tradition of longer workdays, pressing people to work for ten to sixteen hours a day. It was the pressure from various social movements that finally reduced the work day from grueling ten hour plus days to, well, slightly less grueling eight hours days, leading to our 40 hour work week. There is no reason for it to be that way other than it sort of ended up being balance between the demands of labor unions and changes in the political winds and the demanding, larger than life personalities of the robber barons and their desires for produce more with the workforce they had.
Actually it was a well known captain of industry, Henry Ford, who really solidified the idea of the 40 hour, 5 day work week. He also championed increase in the pay of his employees. It wasn’t completely altruistic. He knew the more money his employees made, the more they’d spend, possibly on one of the very Model-Ts the produced. Also, it turns out that having a cutting edge (for the time) point of view on employment meant Ford could attract more skilled and experienced labor, improving the quality of the cars that rolled off the assembly line. It ended up being win-win for both employer and employee alike.
Except that times have changed considerably since the days of the Model-T and in the United States and many other developed nations, we’ve moved away from manufacturing industries and are now have a majority service based economy.
As workplaces evolved and work itself moved from mass scale physical labor to service and desk jobs, something that did not shift was the mentality that “work” does not mean the same thing as it did in the 19th century, or long before the Industrial Revolution itself, even. Even from the end of the 20th century till today, concepts like “productivity” and “work” are all too often simply equated to “more people in seats” equals “more productivity.” Or at least the perception of productivity. This mindset is a holdover from an era that ended more than one hundred years ago. Technology has evolved to point where doctors, lawyers, and even computer programmers themselves are fearful that they may be automated out of their jobs, yet companies still often hire people apparently to just fill out office space with human bodies.
So here we stand in the truly most modern of era, the present day, the Age of Technology and Information, a post-post-Enlightened world… crammed into cubicles (or open space plans that are simply social facades to hide the fact that they are still cubicles. Ironically, the inventor of cubicles was saddened by how his innovation was used in such a mind-numbing, cost-saving way).
And in our cost-saving cubicles, we rely on three tools that are also often chosen less because they are effective or the correct vehicle for the project at hand, but rather because they are ubiquitous, and relatively speaking, “free.” We focus on these three tools: Meetings, spreadsheets and emails., because of their inherent ubiquity. No business office in the world that attempts to lay claim to being “modern” and “forward thinking” lacks email or spreadsheets, and and since being social is a fundamentally human thing, no business at all lacks meetings.
However, while free in terms of cost, they are costly in terms of the effectiveness of a project team if not implemented and used correctly — and there is a correct way to use all three of these tools, especially together (of course, the whole point of this book is to get companies how reliant they are on these tools as a system in the first place, then dissuade them from using them as a system; maybe individually as part of a bigger, different, more specific to a company’s culture and mission yes, but as a system consisting of these tools as a core, no). Used holistically, as part of a broader program that combines other modern tools and ancient behaviors together, meetings, emails and spreadsheets can be useful. However, we’ll find that these three tools are actually more effective when used less, not more often. Not unlike the concept of doing less work in order to generate better results. This is truly the modern way of doing work.
The problem with books is the need for continuity. Not so with posts! More to come with regards to ubiquity of email, meetings, and spreadsheets. More details (as they become available) here: https://kecskes.net/projectshare.
