Work hard or work smart
Americans are classified as “hard workers”, but not necessarily the most productive, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. It has compared America’s output per worker, and output per hour, with that of other rich countries.
Using output per hour, however, shows a different picture. Employees in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and France all churn out more than Americans’ $50 an hour.
In South Korea, workers make long hours but they are not very productive per hour. This could be proof that workers are motivated best by shorter hours and more holidays.
I think that shorter hours and more holidays might be a good indication. I’ve also discovered what helps with productivity is the incentive system, especially in manufacturing setting. I live in a town that is big on furniture, and most company would pay their employees by production or piece work, only get paid for what you produced, but your base wages will never go below minimum wages. For some manufacturing company that piece work can’t be computed so readily, then there’s an efficiency system (part of a costing system) that measure the employees productivity, that might convert pounds produced into standard hours and use this to divide by actual hours worked to get an overall production efficiency, and this I’ve noticed that people move around a lot faster than just getting paid by hourly wages. At the end of the month, then the employees would get a bonus check base on their production efficiency for that month. This is a great program for manufacturing company, there’s also not much worry about not being able to delivery to your customers as promised.
Well, Nye, as a business student I learned about Henry Fayol and Frederick Taylor who had similar old school ideas about productivity as you…in the 19th century
Generally, these ideas are considered obsolete and not applicable anymore in the post industrial societies.
To quote Taylor: "It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adaption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced
cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of
enforcing the adaption of standards and enforcing this cooperation
rests with management alone.
I don't think it works this way anymore in Western societies. Things that count right now are empowerment, enjoyable work, good social interaction and good primary and secondary payments.
If you give me a bonus for simply delivering more products than my collegues, I will probably hinder my collegues in some way to highten my chance of obtaining that bonus. It will become an unproductive rat race. Total productivity of the company won't be raised that way imho.
Hi Padek, it really surprise me that you didn’t think it’d work, I’m thinking may be it’s because of different society and environment all together. The efficiency system that I’m talking about is based on the team work effort, therefore people work in department as a team, but part of the bonus also comes from the efficiency of the overall plant, which means that different departments then try to work together as a team. I do have to admit that there’s a lot of jealously towards department with higher bonus, but they know what to do if they want that too. Getting paid by production in my opinion is not bad if you’re willing to work hard, most females that work in furniture industry around here look like ‘sheman’, why do you think I called one of my sisters, my “GI Joe sister”. All of this is not based on Theory, but widely practice in where I live.
As for my personal opinion, I’d be much happier with shorter hours and more holidays, but it’s not an option for me here.