Look at it this way:
worker A makes 10 widgets an hour. In 8 hours, he makes 80 widets.
worker B makes 20 widgets an hour. In 4 hours, he makes 80 widgets.
Why should the employer care about which one works more hours?
Also, how many widgets will worker A make in 4 hours?
If worker worker A is not at risk of termination, bar any incentive program rewarding excess production, worker B will likely produce 80 widgets in 8 hours.
Worker A will make 40 widgets in 4 hours.
Now you're saying people should be judged on their outputs. Interesting change of pace.
In reality he's unlikely to draw 2x the salary for 2x the output, though, because he's operating from a deficit of information and again, the manager/hr person's main goal isn't actually efficiency.
If they're smart, though, they'll give him a performance bonus based on productivity over a minimum marker, maybe staged as productivity goes up without a quality drop to squeeze out as much as possible. At a certain point, though, money becomes less of a driver for most people so that's not the only thing they'll do. They will also tie his performance to the team as a whole, create opportunities for building 'team unity' and maybe put together artificial competition so he actually cares about team performance. Then his colleagues will push him to perform better.
Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.
By the way, I've never seen someone be rewarded 2x the pay for being 2x as productive without a commission model.
And if they are on commission, nobody cares how much time is spent in the office.
>Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.
I don't think that's true. I've worked construction jobs and you're expected to do what you're expected to get done in a day of work, not work hard necessarily. Sometimes you work hard, sometimes you don't. A lot of time is spent uselessly. I found the same thing in corporate environments.
An honest day's work for an honest day's pay would actually be pretty unusual, especially given that for it to be honest the workers would have to understand the labor market implicitly, what they could get at competing companies and what their labor was actually worth to the company employing them. Most of the time none of that happens.
Having Worker B come in late and leave early sets a bad example for all the Worker As (and breeds resentment among them). Worker B staying all day and screwing around half the time and distracting Worker A so they get 8 widgets done an hour instead of 10 is bad, too.
Give me 10 average people over 5 great ones any day. Average people can get better when they work together. Great people get bored and move on. Average people are just fine for most jobs.
And I assure you that I’m decidedly average and unspectacular in every way.