4 ms·
Two big reasons off the top of my head: 1. Two people working a 20h week does not mean the same costs as a single person working a 40h week (think payroll, sof
by buro9 5y ago
Two big reasons off the top of my head:
1. Two people working a 20h week does not mean the same costs as a single person working a 40h week (think payroll, software licensing, pension admin, healthcare, etc).
So costs rise as a result.
2. A job generally has a base load of admin and toil (communication, on-call, interviewing, PR reviews, etc) and you can't reduce or distribute the base load well enough to yield productive output from the remaining work time with part-time workers and some of this adds more toil when distributed across more people (i.e. on-call requires more handovers during the week and takes more communication).
So productivity is reduced.*
For companies to consider doing this they'd need to perform an trial to satisfy themselves that the above can be overcome. But even doing that may not be possible with existing employees and risks instilling discontent amongst those not in the trial. It's high risk to try.
* Unless the entire company is 100% part-time and somehow base load is fundamentally reworked, in which case #1 still applies.
- Tyr42 5y agoI'd also imagine you just have more communication overhead with more people. E.x. standups will take longer if you have twice as many people working half as much. And communication costs might even scale O(n^2) of people, not hours worked. I think that makes part time workers unattractive.
- lupire 5y agoEasy solution is to not have standups, which are wholly unnecessary.
- jvvw 5y agoI worked part-time (3 days per week and the 2.5 per week) as a developer for 7 or 8 years and found that you had to be as ruthless as you could get away with with 2. I deliberately worked Fridays as it was often quiet and easy to get lots of work done. It worked pretty well but I don't think it would have worked for all projects. Stuff without too much communications overhead was better. I was full-time first and requested part-time by which time I had proved myself, knew the systems etc.
- jsdwarf 5y agoNot to forget that you might have multiple part-timers on your team who are doing different work hours. The shared work time dimishes which makes it more difficult to hand over tasks etc.