Mentioned elsewhere is that increase handoffs (which happen with shorter shifts) also increase the odds of worker error. Where exactly the sweet-spot is is probably an open question.
Or would it? Perhaps running easier shifts and staffing better to handle things like employees on sick leave, would lead to less attrition, fewer sick employees, and better job satisfaction.
If you can convince the employees that you're on the same team, they might also be more open to communicating inefficiencies like "this process is crap, if you change these steps you'll have fewer defects and the line will run faster". Saving EVEN MORE money and time.
Another facet of this is that with more people comes more communication needs. So either more management or things get dropped.
So while it seems like a 25% drop in hours would only mean a 25% increase in number of employees that later number will go up much more just to handle the increase in communication.
Generally speaking, you should have more employees than the bare minimum required to operate. That way, you have enough staff available to, say, cover when someone calls in sick, gets in an accident and takes short-term leave, goes on vacation, quits unexpectedly, etc.
When wages are already close to the marginal value add, increasing the wage floor means needing to cut hours. When wages are not, then increasing the wage floor has little effect on hours or people hired. If there's already sufficient buffer, it might even result in fewer jobs over time as companies attempt to get by with less wiggle room in headcount.
It also depends on prioritizing high quality work. Plenty of places would be happy to have you at below optimal efficiency for twice the time to make up for communication inefficiency.
The same queuing problem exists all over in computing as well and is similarly poorly addressed often as not. Japanese car companies and more generally lean engineering is all about fixing this. I highly doubt worker assignments are anywhere near optimal and are probably mostly whatever the job foreman feels like is right.
Some groups have this down to a science for their particular industry (say, Apple supply chain logistics) and others aren't even aware of the issue and pass it off as expected.
It would be an interesting study to get queuing theory people, lean experts, or some such qualified group to look into public construction and maintenance projects to simulate and analyze optimal vs. actual. No question this would be very hard to do because unions hate this kind of thing and people don't like being measured over their shoulders and the basic implication that they're "lazy" or inefficient or whatever. (it's hard to measure and improve worker output while actually making the worker happier too because there tends to be a Stanford Prison Experiment vibe where you get managers nitpicking lunch breaks and the basic pleasantries of working instead of bulk errors like allocating skill sets)
Wherever possible, a company would have three workers filling out a shift rather than one.
I think there would be productivity effects, though, as noted by another poster. And not everything scales linearly in the necessary manner for this to work (but many things do). One upside, though, is that the number of jobs would drastically increase.
As the company gets bigger this becomes less of an issue because there is communication overhead anyway. And don't forget the other side of the coin: As you increase the number of employees you decrease the risk of a bad hire and similarly the risk of knowledge gaps when an employee leaves. There are already so many inefficiencies; Even if two people each working 20h are less efficient than one person working 40h, this difference will be negligable.
That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them.
And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle.
If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it.
By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.
It is not mentioned in the article but a many places has also opted to implemented a 2 team shift. This mean that instead of having production during 8 hrs each day and seeing significant drop in production during the later hours, they instead got 12 hr of very effective workers. One hospital that did this has reported significant increase in number of surgeries, decrease in mistakes, few'er sick days, lower turnover rate, and easier time to recruit. The doubling in employees are paid not by taxes but instead with higher efficiency, and as such we might not need to build new hospitals in a while if this was implemented as a national policy.
Isn't there the assumption in this article that tasks will come in faster than one person can deal with them, which of course leads to an exponential/snowball effect.
They are coming in at exactly the speed that one person can deal with them. Which means that in the long run the worker is always working, and lines can get arbitrarily long. That is what causes his "quadratic".
A second worker makes the odds of a long line drop dramatically.
It's not just a matter of having less people, it's also a matter of having less full timers (which saves on various costs as well as lessens the likelihood of unintentional overtime). Great flexibility for the business, sucks for the employee.
Think that is the point. If their is expense equipment, high capital. Then companies will try to maximize the current labor first, grind them down, before taking the leap to hire more labor. Like running 2, 10 hour shifts, with few hours downtime, will be better than running 3, 8 hour shifts, at 24 hour uptime. The incentive is to stretch labor head count out, before adding more.
I think you underestimate the areas where full (or significant) staff is needed. What about manufacturing jobs, farming, transportation and logistics (especially transportation of ppl not goods), services (including public services).
I'd say all the services which require face to face interaction will become way more costly if such buffers will be needed to cover off hours. For example: there is a notion of skeleton crew and the service might not be operational without that crew so the choice is actually to spread the cost of off hours low load to the high load hours or close the business for low load hours.
reply