All Posts in Business Ethics

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Models leave things out. If they don’t, they aren’t models.

As an example, so far as I can tell economists leave the asymmetries wealth imposes on political and social power out of their models (although I know far too little about economics to say this with any certainty).

And so, for example, to an economist labor unions and other cartels distort marketplaces and are therefore distressing. Businesses, in contrast, do not represent an employment-supply cartel because employees can, in theory, shop for a better job in the same frictionless fashion that employers can shop for new employees.

It’s the model thing — a pretty theory that ignores an important practicality — the balance of power.

Employers, can, for example, uh … encourage … exempt employees to work more than 40 hours per week with no additional compensation. They apparently can, in fact, require any number of hours, so long as it doesn’t exceed 960, and that only because there aren’t any more.

Employers get immediate, tangible advantages from this (higher “productivity” as it’s usually measured). Sure there are trade-offs, like poorer quality and loss of the best talent, but they’re delayed and indirect. They can be lethal, but they aren’t lethal right now, and as any behavioral scientist knows, delayed feedback is ineffective feedback.

For the employee the disadvantages are immediate, tangible, and too obvious to bother listing. Often there are no delayed advantages either: Many employers act as though these extra, free work hours are an entitlement and not an investment employees make in their careers.

Nor can these employees shop for a better job as easily as their employers can shop for replacements, because they don’t have the time. They’re donating that to their current employer. Most don’t have the financial cushion, either. If an employee leaves, their employer can distribute their work among the remaining employees, but the employee will have to spend retirement savings to pay the bills.

It isn’t a subtle point: The employer has more power than the employee. Duh.

I’ve received quite a bit of correspondence over the years from IT professionals who find themselves trapped in this situation. Unsurprisingly, it seems to correlate with the employer’s size.

Here’s a particularly sad example: The executive sponsor of a very large application development effort in a Fortune 100 company was explicit about these “not being 40-hour-a-week jobs,” but was very hard to pin down on just how many hours a week the jobs were.

The result: Two funerals, millions of dollars and opportunity costs spent, large executive bonuses for holding employees’ feet to the fire, and my correspondent, among many others, laid off, all for a project that eventually failed.

How to turn this trend toward increasingly unhealthy workplaces around?

If you’re on the employer side of the equation, do what you can to take the long view. Healthy workplaces really do result in higher profits … not quarter by quarter, but they do.

Also: Make it official that you hire only the best, never settling for good enough. The best are at least ten times more effective than the average, at far less than ten times the cost. Hiring only the best is a brilliant financial investment.

And, managers who hire only the best generally remember how hard it is to attract and recruit them, and so are less likely to create working conditions that drive them away.

If you’re an employee?

First: Choose a career path for which you are one of the best. Employees might be easy to replace, but the best employees are always scarce, by definition.

Second: Don’t bother trying to persuade management that healthier workplaces are more profitable workplaces. If you’re working in a toxic environment, nobody in a position to do something about cares anything about it.

Third: Daydream about getting your revenge if you like, but don’t actually try to get it. You won’t, and anything you do to try to get it will end up putting you on the street (you work for an at-will employer after all) and making you so toxic you’ll stay on the street.

And fourth: No matter how hard it is, build a financial cushion. From now until the day you retire, figure you’ll spend a quarter of your career between jobs, so salt enough away when you have one to cover your expenses when you don’t.

If it helps, don’t think of this as a reduction in your lifestyle.

Think of it as an investment in the economics of power.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“There’s a lot of truth in fiction.”

I hear this from time to time, mostly, I fear, from people who don’t know the definition of fiction and haven’t thought through the meaning of “truth.”

For example, there I was, stumbling down the mountain. Why, you may fairly ask, was I stumbling down the mountain? And what, you may even more fairly ask, does this have to do with you?

We’ll get there.

First of all, let’s be clear about the nature of truth: None of us have access to it. The best we can manage is to accept the best explanations that account for the most unbiased evidence we can get … and even that isn’t easy.

As for speaking the truth, if we don’t have access to it, we can’t speak it. The best we can be is honest, and even that isn’t easy.

And as for fiction … there I was, hiking up the mountain. The route was harder than a stroll but easier than a climb. My climbing companions included my wife and various family members — all younger than me, but mostly not by all that much.

As we neared the summit, which we were trying to reach by sunset so as to admire it from the summit, I felt the first twinge in the side of my left knee.

But, you see, I’d read a lot of fiction in which the hero pushes through the pain and comes out the other side. Where the difference between winners and losers is will power. Where quitters never win and winners never quit.

And like a schmuck, I believed it. Without even realizing it, I’d accepted the fiction as truth.

From what we know of physiology, a number of different factors, either singly or in combination, reduce or eliminate a muscle’s ability to contract. As a former biologist-in-training, I knew this.

See, “will power” means your brain sends out “keep on contracting!” signals to muscles that are sending “my ability to contract efficiently is diminishing” signals back to it.

This is a good thing when the muscles are just whining over being pushed a bit harder than they’re used to (sorry for the technical jargon). It’s how you strengthen them.

But it’s a bad thing when they’re approaching their limits.

As I found out, because by pushing through the pain instead of taking a short break, my knees pretty much stopped functioning right as we reached the top.

Fortunately, one of my sisters had an elastic bandage in her kit and our guide had another, along with a pair of walking sticks, and everyone involved had a lot of patience. So we all made it down, it only took an extra couple of hours, and two days later I was more or less back to normal.

Why do you care?

Because many in management are creating increasingly harsh work environments. They may be project death marches. They may be understaffed operations. They may be some other type of workload where management started off asking for a short, high-speed sprint, got what it asked for, and decided its employees could run longer and longer distances (metaphorically speaking) at the same pace.

Up to a point they might be asking for a higher level of mental fitness. Most of us are capable of more than we think, after all.

But only up to a point. Beyond that point lies burnout, hypertension, and occasionally heart attacks and strokes.

Where is that point? That’s where it becomes hard, because, the “point” isn’t a point at all. It’s a blurry patch that’s in a different place for different people, and in a different place for different kinds of work for each person.

And that’s the truth.

But of course, it isn’t, just my best explanation of what I’ve seen over the years.

Because in spite of what you may have heard, people don’t really bring the truth with them when they come down the mountain.

Unless, that is, you think “truth” is a synonym for really sore knees.

* * *

Correction: Last week I related my tale of woe regarding Windows 8’s “refresh” feature, which ended up uninstalling all my Desktop applications. It turns out that had I simply re-installed MS Office, everything would have worked … the system apparently kept track of the installation key and automatically applied it to the fresh installation.

My apologies to Microsoft. It still shouldn’t have happened, but the fix was less painful than I’d thought.

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