4 ms·

Why would avoiding paying employees benefits be short-sighted thinking? If anything it was short sighted of the US government to ban increased wages during WWI

Why would avoiding paying employees benefits be short-sighted thinking? If anything it was short sighted of the US government to ban increased wages during WWII - leading to employers paying benefits which gums up the labor market.

wpietri 5y ago
It's short-sighted because employees are humans, which perform much better when healthy and excited to work. Stingy/hostile employers have high turnover and employees who treat work as a zero or negative sum game. A good example of this is the This American Life story on NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 Toyota took one of GM's worst plants and turned it into one of its best by treating workers with respect. Hearing the workers talk about the transformation stunned me.
- qqtt 5y ago
  Employers are also human, and prone to the fallible traps of responsibility that befall many people managers and executives, including but not limited too: * not trusting your team to do their work and by extension questioning whether they are working "hard enough" (or dreaming of ways to extract more blood from stones) * some flavor of impostor syndrome, needing to prove your value by making sweeping changes to the team process even if inheriting a successful team * not having either the back bone or clout to question status quo, including demoralizing cultural habits such as stack ranking There is a reason the majority of employers (including managers) are generally bad and the good ones are few and far between - it's human nature. I'm reminded of Microsoft Japan piloting a 4 day work week and announcing in 2019 that the trial ended up increasing productivity by 40%. They ended up not making the change permanent. One small company in New Zealand - Perpetual Guardian - did the same trial in 2018 and saw the same effect, they made it permanent. Most companies operate like Microsoft.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Are you suggesting basically every retail chain in America is using a fundamentally broken compensation system?
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Yes, because basically every retail chain a) can dump a lot of externalities on society at large, b) is or wants to be publicly traded and evaluated on very short-term metrics, and c) is run by believers in the managerialist ideology that dominates American business culture. Broken systems product broken systems.

wpietri 5y ago

It's short-sighted because employees are humans, which perform much better when healthy and excited to work. Stingy/hostile employers have high turnover and employees who treat work as a zero or negative sum game. A good example of this is the This American Life story on NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 Toyota took one of GM's worst plants and turned it into one of its best by treating workers with respect. Hearing the workers talk about the transformation stunned me.

qqtt 5y ago
Employers are also human, and prone to the fallible traps of responsibility that befall many people managers and executives, including but not limited too: * not trusting your team to do their work and by extension questioning whether they are working "hard enough" (or dreaming of ways to extract more blood from stones) * some flavor of impostor syndrome, needing to prove your value by making sweeping changes to the team process even if inheriting a successful team * not having either the back bone or clout to question status quo, including demoralizing cultural habits such as stack ranking There is a reason the majority of employers (including managers) are generally bad and the good ones are few and far between - it's human nature. I'm reminded of Microsoft Japan piloting a 4 day work week and announcing in 2019 that the trial ended up increasing productivity by 40%. They ended up not making the change permanent. One small company in New Zealand - Perpetual Guardian - did the same trial in 2018 and saw the same effect, they made it permanent. Most companies operate like Microsoft.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
Are you suggesting basically every retail chain in America is using a fundamentally broken compensation system?
- wpietri 5y ago
  Yes, because basically every retail chain a) can dump a lot of externalities on society at large, b) is or wants to be publicly traded and evaluated on very short-term metrics, and c) is run by believers in the managerialist ideology that dominates American business culture. Broken systems product broken systems.