The case for a four-day working week

Over the last six months, I’ve had a unique opportunity to rethink everything about my company.  Aside from working on the value proposition and all those good things needed to carve out a niche, I’ve been thinking about work-life balance.  And not just for me – for staff, too.

So many times, we hear people and businesses go on about it, but I don’t think any of that really works in the long term. Various efforts are made to give people social / team based activities and give other perks while at work.  However, the pressures of client deadlines, work schedules, etc., all conspire to force us to work longer hours and make us sacrifice the things we were going to do to get the balance we need.

Then there are the weekends.  How often do you feel like you’ve only just wound down and then realise it’s Sunday? And then the grind starts again.

I think a more radical approach is needed to achieve work-life balance and to do something for staff that properly differentiates the working environment from others to make it an attractive place to work.  I think that truly, the last thing people really want is to have time filled with team bonding activities when they could’ve been at home instead or doing something else completely different.

Starting from 2013, I’ll be instituting a four day working week for all staff.  That is, the whole company will operate on a four day week – Monday to Thursday – with Friday a mandatory day off for everyone.

How will this work?  Simple.  No change to salary (same pay), no change to annual leave (four calendar weeks), no change to billable hours (32 hours per week).  I only expect people to bill 32 hours per week anyway.  The company’s profitability models are based on 32 hours.  Why not do that in four days instead of five?  After all, we all know the maxim – Work fills the time available.

Rather than trying to invent the next contrived activity to keep people motivated and create an attractive workplace with other meaningless games and trinkets, why not give people what they really want – the time to the things they’d rather be doing than going to work.  And here’s another maxim – Who, on their deathbed, ever said they wished they had spent more time at work?

I think the only real way to achieve work / life balance is to have more time for the life component.  Just imagine what you can do with a three day weekend, every week.

Building online social communities: Helping your members cross the observer / participant barrier

This article follows on from our previous one ‘Long time listener, first time caller’.  In this article, we discuss what you need to do to foster and promote the necessary user behaviours within online communities to create a sustainable active community. We build on our ‘Observer / participant barrier’ model from our earlier paper to show you how to successfully manage your members as they start the process of engaging with your online community. We use strong social psychology models as a basis for the recommendations on how to work with your community and include a checklist of dos and don’ts.

You can find it on the PTG website under ‘Our Thinking’ and then go to the ‘Psychology / Social’ section.

You can also download it directly from here.

Let me know what you think in the comments…

Long time listener, first time caller – Why people do and don’t engage in a community

In this paper, we discuss the psychology of why people simply (and passively) observe a community while others actually participate and contribute. We discuss the process and decisions people go through when locating a community, choosing to sign up and participate in activities (e.g., sharing of information), through to becoming a ‘long time member’, or in some cases a leader (or super user) in a community. We present our ‘Observer / Participant Barrier’ model illustrating the critical leap people make to become active members in a community. Anyone who’s interested in creating a successful online social network /community should take a look.

You can find it on the PTG website under ‘Our Thinking’ and then go to the ‘Psychology / Social’ section.

You can also download it directly from here.

Let me know what you think in the comments…

Does your NPS survey tell you exactly how to improve loyalty and referrals?

I’ve written a new paper on the PTG website.  In this paper, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Net Promoter Score. Its strength is in moving beyond satisfaction to loyalty and referrals. Its weakness is that like nearly all surveys I see, it provides no explanatory or predictive power. That is, you can have a good score or a poor score and not know why. Without this insight, you don’t know what to do more of, less of or differently.

This paper is Part 1 of 3 and starts with a discussion about the NPS and surveying, followed by Part 2, where I’ll show you how to design a rigorous causal survey. In Part 3, I’ll take you through how to quickly and simply analyse a causal survey using multivariate statistics.

You can access the paper from the PTG website, under ‘Our thinking’, in the ‘Psychology / Social’ section or directly from this link: How to make the Net Promoter Score truly actionable.  I hope you enjoy it.  Look out for parts 2 and 3 in the very near future.  If you have any views or comments about what I’ve said, please let me know…

Trust me – I’ve been doing this for a long time

I rang Telstra to cancel my data pack (see the post here for an explanation). The customer service rep, trying to be helpful and service oriented, asked me if she could ask me a few questions about my account usage to determine if I’m on the right package. I said ‘sure’ and this is what followed…

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Merging projects in open source land – building on strengths and stopping unhealthy competition

Slashdot, one of my favourite websites, features a story on the Compiz and Beryl Projects merging. Why is this important? If you look through the major open source software repositories (like freshmeat, sourceforge), you’ll find tens of thousands of projects. More than a few of them are attempting to do the same thing, albeit from different angles.

I’ve always thought there is healthy and unhealthy competition. Healthy competition occurs when players compete against each other with their products and services with the view to improve quality, commoditise products and services and reduce prices, all in the effort to provide greater value for customers (i.e. users).

In contrast, unhealthy competition, is where players are so focussed on beating each other, that they cut prices, engage in predatory practices and sacrifice quality in the effort to ‘buy’ business. Their focus is not on the customer, but on how they can beat their competitor.

Open source software, I think, has a significant advantage over commercial operations in that the values of the people involved are the primary motivator, rather than profit at all costs. What are these values? They are about delivering projects focussing on the end users, doing things better than others have done and a focus on quality.

So why is the merger between Compiz and Beryl interesting? The source article from Linux Tech Daily suggests that the rivarly between the two projects had denigrated into a slanging match. I’ll bet that there is probably no truth to any of the accusations that people were making.

These two projects, and others like it (such as Looking Glass) have the potential to spawn a revolution in the user’s desktop. For all the advances of Microsoft Vista and Apple OS X, these two OSs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Meanwhile, other more revolutionary projects are making significant impressions, like Jeff Tan (Jeff’s personal site can be found here).

What we need is more collaboration, not competition, in this space. There are so many smart people with smart ideas. We do not need them to start infighting and losing focus on what they’re trying to do. It’s so easy to get caught up in a slanging match and all that happens is a rapid spiral into a death vortex.

Provided the surrounding value system is right, and people on the projects are thinking more about the end goals than themselves, then healthy collaboration amongst traditional competitors is possible. There’s more than enough kudos to go around – and if the project turns commercial to recoup the costs of development and fund the next project, then there’s usually more than enough of that to go around, too.

We’re seeing around us many social networking site being built in the ‘back shed’, later being sold for hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of these projects – provided sensible things happen with the funds -like paying people fair and reasonable salaries and funding the next revolutionary projects.

Even though I run a for-profit commercial organisation, I spend around 10% of gross margin on R&D and innovation, when in Australia, the national spend is around 2% of GDP. Why? The plans I have to shake the foundation of IT drive me to channel profit into activities that will have a far greater positive impact on people than me driving down the road in some silly sports car. (Mind you, if it all works out, maybe I’ll treat myself to a little one )

How to succeed in business – fire your top sales people

SignonSanDiego reports that Circuit City’s cost cutting strategy is to fire its top sales people.  I don’t know about you, but I always thought to succeed in a sales business you need to attract and retain the best sales people.  And good sales people cost money.  I wonder what will happen when they’re sales drops as fast as the cost cutting?

Perhaps a better strategy would have been to weed out the poor peforming sales people.  It’s not hard to do – you just look at their sales figures.  At the same time you’re doing this, you can analyse the proportion of sales your top people bring in compared to the rest.  It’s not unusual to find the top 10% of sales people bring in 20 – 30% of all sales.  Now why would you fire those people?

NASA shuts down its futuristic think tank

New Scientist features a story on NASA shutting down its think tank. This think tank focusses on the fringe and far-out ideas related to spaceflight and aeronautics. It receives around $USD 4M per annum – not a very big budget at all.

As a business owner-operator, I can understand the importance of trimming fat from bureaucratic and inefficient parts of organisations, but cutting R&D is probably one of the most shortsighted things you can do.

I spend around 10% of sales per year on R&D (around $AUD 250,000) and I use its outputs to develop new products and services that help me differentiate PTG Global from other firms in the market.

Back to NASA. Perhaps NASA should seek matched funding from industry? The recent growth of philanthropy from numerous dot.com and IT millionaires and billionaires and the interest in space flight suggests there would be many people interested in doing this.

If I had the funds, it’s something I would invest in. Investment could even be sought using private equity style funds, with investments from $30K. on this basis, i would definitely invest in it.  The think tank would also need to shift its thinking to include the commercialisation of its R&D to provide investors a return in their investment.

As an avid fan of Star Trek, space exploration is the final frontier and something we should not lose focus on. It’s too easy to look inward and forget about the bigger things that can cause far-reaching societal change.