Quality vs Quantity
Work less, earn more. Many individuals all over the world have this common goal in mind. Unless you’re at the top of a prosperous company or born into money, this goal is certainly hard to achieve for the average person. The correlation between the hours that one works and the amount of money they receive has been in place in many companies for over a hundred years. Minimum wages can barely keep up with market inflation and due to this more and more people fall into poverty. The market for jobs is a strenuous one, especially nowadays with more and more college graduates unable to find work due to demands of years of experience in certain fields.
Without work and still having to pay off enormous college loans and miscellaneous bills, many people will find themselves working high demand jobs with low pay just to get by. One of the many jobs that draws these types of individuals in is a delivery driver for companies such as Amazon. The pay is relatively decent compared to minimum wage and you are paid hourly. The kicker though is that you always have a set amount of deliveries per that day. Due to this, the drivers who are more efficient in their deliveries finish faster. That would all be fine if they were not punished for it, and yet due to the pay being hourly and no set hours, the faster you complete the job the less you are paid. This situation has caused many in this position to draw out the delivery process in order to earn more, and be less productive. This also implies that if two drivers had the same amount of deliveries but one driver took twice as long to finish the task, they would be getting paid double the more efficient driver.
This doesn’t completely justify the fact that working longer hours is never better than working faster. But what it does do is bring up the idea of efficiency in one’s work. Unlike a retail worker that will work a set shift from opening to closing, many jobs out there are more or less work until the job is complete. In this type of work, as long as it is completed to the satisfaction of the company, the workers will be paid their wages for the time they put in. If it is completed in 40 hours, they receive 40 hours of pay, 30 hours will earn them 30 hours of pay. Even if the job were to have been the exact same task. In the article “The $2,000 Hour: How Managers Influence Project Performance Through The Rework Cycle”, the rework cycle is a chart in place to roughly manage the work done. It compares the amount of work completed to the quality of said work. The comparison of work time and quality work hours is what’s demonstrated by this chart. As the article stated, employers would pay nothing for the hours put in where workers had not performed well, and thousands for the hours that had actually made progress on their project. In this case unlike the delivery drivers, working less, yet actually being efficient and thorough is rewarded.
Of course, the position in a corporate chain like the ladder is very much different than an entry level job at a delivery company or similar jobs. Yet in both cases the work is performance based. Why is one rewarded and the other punished for being efficient and productive? The problem is that in the system we have in place, the correlation with money earned and time spent at work have been so indoctrinated into the way we live we wouldn’t even think to question why a 9 to 5 job is so common. Work 8 hours, get paid for 8 hours of work. In many cases, the average worker is not slaving away for 8 hours, and maybe gets 5-6 solid hours of productive work done at that time. There is a point in which working tirelessly long hours hinders work performance, in which quality diminishes. If companies were to offer incentives to those who produced quality work for the entirety of their time on the job, this may not be the case. If your house has a leak and you need someone to fix the roof, would you choose a person who offers work for an hourly rate, or someone who has a fixed price. In most cases, the person with the fixed rate. Why? The price may seem a bit much, for example if the fixed rate was 220 dollars compared to the company that offers 80 dollars an hour. The fixed rate may be finished in only two hours, and seemingly you paid 110 dollars an hour. But for someone offering an hourly rate, they would have worked less efficiently and taken 3 hours. Therefore you are paying 20 dollars more than the fixed rate.
Efficiency and quality are the only things that should be considered when being paid. If a company were to offer a position where you work less hours and are paid the same amount, then the question of work quality and efficiency come into play. As in the previous examples, this is very much prominent, as work is more or less on the employees time. Rarely are employees left with overdue work and not enough time to complete it, and on the flip side, many people are dragging out their work in order to receive the pay that they deserve. If companies had greater incentives to employees, this would not be the case, and efficiency would skyrocket.
Work less, earn more. This is a statement that formerly seemed like a reach to achieve, and yet, with the given examples, it almost seems as that is the way it should be. Earn what you give. If you give quality and produce results, why does it matter if it took three days or five days if the result is the same and pay should follow accordingly.
references
Cooper, Kenneth . “The $2,000 Hour: How Managers Influence Project Performance through the Rework Cycle.” Project Management Journal, vol. XXV, no. 1, Mar. 1994.
Liu, Jennifer. “Workers Report a 4-Day Workweek Improves Health, Finances and Relationships: It “Simply Makes You Happy.”” CNBC, 24 Feb. 2023, http://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/24/worlds-biggest-4-day-workweek-experiment-shows-big-health-benefits.html#:~:text=Employers%20and%20workers%20around%20the.
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
—You mean twice as much PER HOUR.
—It’s a critical distinction you can’t afford to miss.
—And, it could easily be remedied by allowing the faster worker to return to the depot early, demonstrating ability and speed, and encouraging management to give her more packages to deliver the following day. That would benefit management.
—How to benefit the worker?
—Pay per delivery?
—Is there ANY WAY ON EARTH to make that fair?
—If I deliver 85 boxes to one address and come back early, do I deserve to be paid 85 times as much as the driver who had to drive 50 miles round trip to deliver one package to a remote address?
What’s your proposal?
—I’m reacting now like a typical critical reader. Your reader. So you get the idea how your arguments sound so far.
—Do you endorse this plan, which puts the employee completely at the mercy of the manager whose position enables her to set the value of the employee’s work completely? No one in her right mind would ever consider doing anything remotely innovative in a situation where guessing wrong could result in weeks of uncompensated labor.
—Just asking.
—Your paragraphs are too long.
—This one ended here.
—I’d say nobody is being penalized here. The worker who can get the job done in 6 hours gets paid for two hours of goofing off or shopping on Amazon.
—If you really want to pay for performance, establish the criteria and pay per piece of work. It’s how sweat shops operate, and to the sweat shop operator, it seems completely fair. But to the workers who would have to be Superman to earn a living wage on the basis of what’s being paid per increment of work, it’s recognized as terribly exploitative.
—This is a good example.
—It also illustrates the problem.
—I don’t know how many hours are needed to fix my roof successfully. The roofer does. I could easily choose the 220 guy and find out the next time the roof leaks that he should have spent 5 hours on a good fix. Or I could choose the 80/hour guy and pay 400 for quality work.
—Judging “productivity” is always the problem with your thesis.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t take my questions as criticism of your writing. If you make a good case for ANYTHING, NO MATTER HOW COUNTERINTUITIVE it might sound, I will champion your effort and the accomplishment of making the nutty sound sane.
But it’s my job to poke back.
That’s all I have time for. You didn’t ask for Feedback. These Notes are the gift you can’t return.
Provisionally graded. Revisions are strenuously recommended (required, in fact, for arguments in your Portfolio), and Regrades are always available following substantial improvements.