Management is not about getting people to work harder and longer at the expense of people’s personal lives. However, this is a common tactic despite its ineffectiveness.

There are two ways to view this problem:

• Spanish Theory of Value: Only a fixed amount of value exists, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth is to extract it more efficiently
• English Theory of Value: Value can be created through ingenuity and technology

Quote

The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in.

These managers will trick their workers into accepting hopelessly tight deadlines and convince their workers that they need to sacrifice whatever they can to meet that deadline.

The resulting overtime is spent invisibly to the Spanish Theory manager, who considers all work to be done within a 40-hour work week regardless. Similarly, “undertime” is also spent invisibly, since workers will still need to rest.

Quote

Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you’re just wasting time.

Workaholic-ism, on the other hand, can cause a person to put in sustained uncompensated overtime. However, this overtime is not endless. Eventually, people who find themselves in this situation will burnout and quit. You cannot ask any worker to work in expense of their personal lives.

Productivity is often talked about in terms of taking measures which make less work enjoyable, such as increasing the pressure on workers, standardizing procedures, and mechanizing the process of product development. However, these productivity conversations often lack a discussion concerning the cost of turnover, which affects productivity levels.

Quote

People under time pressure don’t work better; they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and their own job satisfaction.

Source: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition, Chapter 3