I’m in Europe and it might have cooked my brain a bit because I’m back to that ever present thought: should I kill this nearly 5 year old startup of mine and move on?
Can I share my thoughts on this from an employee's perspective?
‘Say I gave you a tool that let you take your 40-50 hour work week and do it in 20 hours…’
The truth is, workplace efficiency has very little to do with the employees themselves, simply because they have zero say in how things are run.
1. Employees report to hired managers, not the boss.
2. Managers don’t care if your work efficiency improves; they only care if you’ve been at your desk for 8 hours.
3. They won’t reward you for being more efficient; instead, they’ll give you more tasks — without raising your pay.
4. And they won’t decide to reduce your work hours just because they can’t give you a raise.
So, employees naturally tend to get tasks done, but they procrastinate whenever they get the chance. In other words, the excellence of big companies isn’t because their employees are special, but because they get paid well, which makes it worth it for them to work efficiently.
Yes I agree. And I think I’ve lived/worked in a bubble of tech in well-funded startups that have known this and paid for it, but that’s not the whole world. Thank you for sharing this and validating what I am trying to truly understand beyond my previous more surface-level thinking
Can I share my thoughts on this from an employee's perspective?
‘Say I gave you a tool that let you take your 40-50 hour work week and do it in 20 hours…’
The truth is, workplace efficiency has very little to do with the employees themselves, simply because they have zero say in how things are run.
1. Employees report to hired managers, not the boss.
2. Managers don’t care if your work efficiency improves; they only care if you’ve been at your desk for 8 hours.
3. They won’t reward you for being more efficient; instead, they’ll give you more tasks — without raising your pay.
4. And they won’t decide to reduce your work hours just because they can’t give you a raise.
So, employees naturally tend to get tasks done, but they procrastinate whenever they get the chance. In other words, the excellence of big companies isn’t because their employees are special, but because they get paid well, which makes it worth it for them to work efficiently.
Yes I agree. And I think I’ve lived/worked in a bubble of tech in well-funded startups that have known this and paid for it, but that’s not the whole world. Thank you for sharing this and validating what I am trying to truly understand beyond my previous more surface-level thinking
So much to say on all of this... would love to find some time to connect.
We’re overdue for a catch up