Reduced hours not reduced value
When the lockdown started lots of organisations rapidly changed their working practices, and charities were no different. Charities recognised that the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crash was going to drastically affect their ability to help people and to fundraise. The need for many charity’s services increased at the same time the money needed to pay for those services decreased. Charities responded to the massively reduced income by attempting to reduce one of their largest expenditures; salary. Some people were put on furlough, and others were offered reduced working hours along with the reduced salary to match.
Those who went to reduced working hours, of which I was one, accepted working four days a week for eighty percent of the original salary. And for a while I tried to stick to that. I’m not sure why, probably because that is what I was told to do and I hadn’t yet questioned the logic. And the logic is interesting, because at face value it makes perfect logical sense. You are going to be paid 20% less so you should work 20% fewer hours. But only makes sense if you are using an industrial mindset that associates value to time spent doing something. As if human beings are machines with a hours counter that clicks on as we are busy working and stops when we stop. This carries the underlying assumption that every hour has the same value as any other hour. But humans aren’t machines, and valuing human being by the time they spend doing something isn’t the only logic that can be applied here.
Instead of rewarding someone for the hours they spend at work, we could reward them because they bring value to the organisation. Not, and this is an important point, for the individual units of value they deliver, but more generally because them being a part of the organisation makes it better in all of the hard-to-define ways that people do. People bring ideas, and personalities, and jokes, and smiles, and a listening ear, and knowledge, and experience, and something they read in a book, and their ability to form relationships with other people that make it possible to communicate and collaborate. These are the things we actually value in people so these are the things our organisations should pay for. Divorcing units of work (be that hours spent or widgets made) from reward confines the industrial mindset to a previous point in history where perhaps it made sense for a little while, and elevates new thinking about rewarding people in ways that better fits the knowledge economy that we all increasingly operating in.
The charity I work for is a knowledge organisation. It takes the knowledge that one group of people hold and gives it to another group of people for them to utilise to improve their opportunities and make their lives better. We’re not a service organisation or a product organisation, they are just the means with which we deliver that knowledge. Tesco doesn’t call itself a van company just because that’s the means with which they deliver groceries. In the reward-by-hours-spent way, its easy to see why so few people spend time learning and developing their knowledge, because why would they if they are being paid for their time rather than their knowledge. But in the reward-by-value future, the knowledge worker is going to be measured by the all the characteristics that they hold as a person that are worth something to the organisation, and being able to learn new things will be an important one. Charities understanding that they are knowledge organisations might be the first step to creating a platform business model for charities, but that’s a thought for another time. For now, we’re talking about how we should break the connection between work and reward and instead establish a connection between reward and human characteristics like knowledge, ethics, personality, etc.
Personally, separating the reward I receive from the time I spend is easy, but that’s because I’m a bit weird. I am intrinsically motivated to achieve things, hopefully good things. I am not motivated by extrinsic things like pay or peer pressure. I take the pay because I need it to live, but if I didn’t I would do the work for free. I get to spend my time thinking about how to solve complex problems for people that need help. I think that is awesome.
So, if the reward I get from the organisation I work for is no longer tied to the time I spend doing that work, either because of my particular motivations or because in some alternate-reality organisations see sense in what I’m suggesting, then working reduced hours for reduced salary makes no sense. I should continue to contribute the value I can to the organisation, which will be different each day and will change over time as I learn more, and the organisation will continue to reward me based on the overall value I bring and with the monetary amount that equals being based on the realities of the situation we find ourselves in. I’m not suggesting I should be paid the full amount of my salary just because I am contributing my full value. I want my reduced salary to be part of the greater good, following from the many examples of solidarity we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, if we all take a hit we can all get through it together.
Weeknotes #203
This week I did:
Changing the rules of the game for charities
Reuben Turner from Good Innovation wrote an article about the need for a change in how charities approach fundraising to think more about engagement over efficiency and flourishing over formulas, and I wrote a response about how Friedman’s ‘rules of game’ for an organisation (including a charity) being to maximise profit is a narrow view that doesn’t take into account of human behaviour, and that profit, whilst a good measure, might not be the best target.
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix – but for charities
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix classifies services by the amount of in-person support is required from employees to enable the service to function, and by the amount of customer contact and/or customisation the service requires. I looked at a way to apply the model to identifying the type of service a charity might develop based on its available resources and the needs of its users.
Charities need better digital technology for communicating with their service users
I wrote about the things I’ve learned recently about digital communication technologies used by charities based on The Catalyst’s article ‘The top ten digital challenges facing the charity sector‘ which showed how a number of charities were struggling with identifying and using the right platforms for communicating and providing digital services with their service users (number 2). I think charities are facing this struggle because the products on the market are not designed to meet their needs. They need a different kind of digital communication technology, one that is built with privacy and security in mind that allows people from within the organisation to talk to people outside.
How the COVID-19 crisis is changing the debate on digital transformation strategies
I watched the online seminar from Birkbeck about the effects of a crisis on the digital transformation of businesses. It concluded with the obvious, that there will be winner and loser businesses and industries, and that the crisis will accelerate the transformation (not just digital transformation) of businesses that do survive.
The steps of a service
I applied some of the thinking I learned from Good Services to helping us articulate the steps we were putting into a service and the language we used to describe and refer to those parts of the service. I put the ten steps that we settled on into a single document and all of the people involved inputted their knowledge about each of the steps so that we could be clear about what happens for each. It was a really good example of collaborative working that progressed us towards the next step in designing the service. I would what we’d see if we had a separate service design team investigating how we go about developing services?
This week I studied:
Digital enterprise
“How digital technologies have changed the way organisations collaborate and network. It explains how digital social platforms have enabled new ways of organising and building relational networks. Based in industry research, the lecture shows how different corporate departments are benefiting from the advance in digital technologies for collaboration and communication, becoming networked enterprises. It also discusses how to engage the workforce and customers in these transformations, and how to explore new forms of organising (such as open innovation and crowdsourcing).”
The most interesting idea we discussed was that these social platform technologies have enabled the creation of organic networks and social ties in contrast and in addition to the hierarchies of an organisation. The weak ties between people in different teams become channels of information and innovation in ways that fixed structural information flows never can.
This week I thoughts about:
Working in the open
Following on from Oikos Digital’s building in the open approach, I’ve been thinking about my workflow for learning and writing, and making it more open. My public Trello board includes a column for what I intend to do this week, which gets filled with things from the other columns such as books to read, lectures to listen to, blog posts to write, etc., and then are moved to the Done column. It occurred to me that my three objectives map quite nicely to a pipeline of inputting, processing, and outputting. ‘Getting an effective education’ brings information into me, ‘Live an intentional life’ fits what I do with the information, how I learn from it, being focused, etc., and ‘Have an impactful career in digital charity’ fits the outputting of the knowledge I develop. Next I want to think about how I turn my workflow from a pipeline into a platform, and why I would/should do that.
Good Service
I’ve been reading Lou Downe’s Good Services – How to design services that work. It’s a fantastic book and I’ve learned things that I’ve been able to apply successfully at work the next day. To me, that’s a sign of a good book. It has so many good ideas, even if your job isn’t building services (good or otherwise) like mine. The idea that I’ve been thinking most recently is about how a team is only as strong as the weakest link, and it seems to me that specialists create more risk of weak links and generalists reduce the weaknesses. So maybe delivering something that relies on a chain of specialists probably has less chance of being successful than generalists who can overlap their skills and abilities.
How products and services work together
I’m still thinking a lot about how products and services fit together. My latest idea is that they should fit together like a zip, with the customer journey coming together and running through the middle. This means that we can still define differences between what a product is and what a service is, that they can be separate things, but that they rely on each other in order for the customer to be successful. I think maybe that the parts in the customer journey where the user has to stop and do something they use the product, and that when the user has to move onto the next step, to know where to go and how to get there, then they are using the service. This means that product and service need each other to succeed. Still struggling to explain the difference between them though.
This week people tweeted about:
Working in public
Nadia tweeted about her book ‘Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software’. The open source movement is interesting to me, a little bit because I’ve studied it (and feel a little frustrated with the irony of a university teaching about open source with copyrighted lecture materials that I would get in trouble if I made publicly available) but also because I think of it as a model for more than just developing software. So, this book is on my list.
New to digital ways of working
What would you recommend someone reads if they are new to digital ways of working? Steve recommended the Product Management learning list for government and The UX Coach suggested Books Vs People and What does being digital actually mean?
The cozy web
Maggie Appleton tweeted about the dark forest and the cozy web which makes so much sense. It explains many experiences of using the web, with the dark forest being the big public bits of the web like Twitter and ads on websites, and the cozy web emerging in response to that, which we see with the rise of enclaved communities of like-minded people writing email newsletters and communicating in WhatsApp groups.