If my job was easy to measure I would be paid on my outcomes instead of being paid to be at work.

If I was being paid for my outcomes I would manage my time entirely differently and would find ways of being more productive than I already am so that I could work less hours. I think this is a hard pill for people's bosses to swallow, that their employees do have the capacity to be more productive but they won't because we're being paid to be at work and so incentives are not aligned.

My boss is very happy with my productivity and I am very productive. I don't think he could conceive of me being any more productive. But I know that if I could arrange my own days and hours I would be more productive. But this would be inconvenient to him and so he would likely rather have me predictably available than fully optimised. Which is an understandable tradeoff if frustrating from a personal perspective as you feel as though you're wasting time. It's just that your wasted time is actually valuable to someone and that's hard to grasp intuitively.

Yep... typical Schrodinger's product evangelist troubles.

I'd make a third distinction though. You can be paid for time, work or outcomes. Outcomes and work aren't the same thing, necessarily.

> You can be paid for time, work or outcomes.

And all three have uses. It seems like one of the common mistakes we make when talking about labor productivity is underestimating time as an output. We see a job's time-per-task decline and ask why it remains a full-time job, but in many cases the answer is that part of the job is being available 8 hours a day, and more dead time between tasks hasn't changed that.

Yeah but my job has all three elements. Long term improvements and projects, being on call and making sure all the widgits are spinning, and doing tasks for X time a day

If I was making 62 burgers an hour it would be easier to quantify but rarely are things so fixed

"a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done"

And soon some genius will come in and think "How about we worked a few hours more? This would give us even more output" and soon we are back to normal.

And the worst part is, they might be correct.

If the productivity gain really was about improved focus and energy, they'll be wrong and waste everyone's time. But there are some hints in the article that it wasn't just that; other companies have seen productivity rise than fall back, while Perpetual Guardian implemented performance improvements to offset the change.

I assume diminished hours directly improved productivity some. But if half the gain was from process improvements or increased motivation, then some clever wag is going to come along and notice that they can use those gains to cut staff instead of hours.

This is so true. Over years I have realised that my productivity is pretty much similar if I worked 7/8/9 hours. Over time the longer I work the less productive I am. There was a nice quote I once read on HN - everyone have fixed budget for quality thinking. working longer does not increase that.

You can refresh the fixed budget via a siesta power nap

We can start an experiment with the HR department and measure if confliction resolution rate is the same.

Same for recruitment department to see if hiring rate is the same.

Just throwing it out there that not all white collar job productivity is unmeasurable.

It seems... rather too convenient that a 20% work reduction would produce a 25% increase in productivity for a nice neutral result. I don't doubt that working fewer hours improves productivity, but do we really expect the two to line up so neatly? I've seen two explanations for this, but neither really satisfies.

Claim one is that time off recharges and focuses us. We get more sleep, are less distracted by outside tasks (e.g. calling a doctor who's only open during work hours), burn out less, and still get the full benefit of outside-work productivity like having a new product idea at 10PM. Some parts of this make sense; outside-work insights still progress at seven days per week, and an hour off work for calls and errands is an hour that can be directly recovered. But the rest is puzzling; why should rest and recreation repay themselves so precisely in work output?

Claim two is that productivity isn't limited by office-time in the first place. A powerlifter who doubles their workout time won't see any benefit because they're hitting physical limits already. This makes much more sense; we've all had experiences like struggling with a problem that looks obvious the next morning, or sitting around unproductive because our most urgent work is blocked by some external factor. But again, the shape of the result is surprising; surely not all of that lost time is recovered by taking time off. Mental fatigue would be better answered with 6-hour workdays, and some of those external blockers are always going to be unpredictable and unscheduled.

There are a few other views that make more sense, but are rather less promising. The article mentions that other companies trying this see a productivity spike and then lag, which could imply it's just a reaction to the novel approach. The discussion of productivity plans, and the interviewed employee who reduced multitasking, imply that this might just be a loss offset by other noncontingent process gains. (The matching result, then, presumably consists of people seeking process gains until the loss was offset.) The company could simply lack 40 hours/week of substantive work, which again could be cured with reduced hours or increased work.

Or perhaps employees were output-limited not by mental fatigue but by, essentially, giving-a-shit. One of the big insights of productivity studies is that "can't do more" and "won't do more" aren't clearly distinct when you're relying on internal motivation; there's no clear way to say that "won't" is happening on a different, volitional layer. If people were working 40 hours a week with 25 hours of 'drive', constant productivity makes more sense.

> Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been.

And then there's this, yes. Uncomfortably often, Taylorism isn't about process improvements but squeezing relaxation and well-being out of a job. If you can't measure productivity well externally, then a move like this might get employees to 'Taylorize' themselves because the harder work will be offset by the wellbeing from more time off. If you can, then they'll get Taylorized from the outside, and the offset will tend to be higher wages or nothing at all.

> Or perhaps employees were output-limited not by mental fatigue but by, essentially, giving-a-shit. One of the big insights of productivity studies is that "can't do more" and "won't do more" aren't clearly distinct when you're relying on internal motivation; there's no clear way to say that "won't" is happening on a different, volitional layer. If people were working 40 hours a week with 25 hours of 'drive', constant productivity makes more sense.

I think this makes the most sense. Assuming I understand right what you mean, it could be described more simply as "work expands to fill the available time", a common enough criticism of sprints in agile (cases lasting longer than they normally would because there's still days left in the spring).

Yep, I was almost exactly thinking of "work expands to fill the time", plus maybe a bit of "people take more and longer breaks when they work more hours". It's not a huge distinction, but I think "increased productivity" makes less sense as more output for an hour's work, and more sense as shaving off unproductive time.