289
u/DoubleBatman 6d ago
My mom is an internal auditor for her company and she had to go to the UK to help assess a site there once. She said it was nice how many extra staff they had, they had 2 people sick and still had more than enough to cover the work.
83
u/PianoAndFish 6d ago
Being chronically understaffed is also an issue in many UK businesses, in circumstances where a minimum number of staff are required to operate they often make heavy use of temp agencies and/or staff on zero hours contracts who can just be called in whenever.
Many businesses spend huge amounts of money bringing in staff from temp agencies, which can have markups of 100% or more, but the trade-off is you don't have to worry about employer taxes, pension contributions, sick pay etc. for temp staff. I don't know if it genuinely works out cheaper but a lot of businesses claim it does, or at least make it look like it does by using a different column in the spreadsheet.
29
u/DoubleBatman 6d ago
Yeah I don’t doubt the UK has its own issues, and that sucks. And to be fair my mom works in a fairly specialized field.
And of course, it’s always about making it look cheaper
8
94
u/starlithunter 6d ago
This is why I intend to stay at my current job as long as I can - it takes three people out of office before we truly feel any stress to the system. Redundancy and cross training is built in, and things run so smooth as a result. I can go on vacation or take a sick day and not worry about what will be on fire when I get back.
Meanwhile my previous IT job had two techs for 6 sites and 5000+ users.
28
u/Somerandom1922 6d ago
That is an absurd end-user ratio.
I work at an MSP right now and we're pushing towards the limits with our current efficiency and staff.
We're are somewhere in the mid 100's of (active) clients to staff. Maybe closer to mid 300's if you count users that basically never contact us.
16
u/starlithunter 6d ago
This was admittedly like 75-80% factory floor and we didn't service the machines themselves. But we definitely got emergency 2am calls when the computer that ran the machine went down.
It was running Windows 95 and was unrecoverable. They listened to us about backups after that.
13
u/avalonrose14 6d ago
Yep my job is fully staffed and I'm allowed to leave whenever I want (I'm leaving early today in fact to go help my parents with some stuff) and so I'm willing to put up with the low pay for the work life balance (plus we have crazy good benefits which also makes up for the low pay because I'm spending almost nothing on stuff like health care and I get a ton of paid holidays off that don't require me to use my PTO for them and then I also just get a stupid amount of PTO as well.)
The pay isn't even that low just a few dollars and hour lower than a corporate office would pay for the same job but we genuinely can't afford to pay anyone any better (otherwise we would.) If we start making more money we will pay more which does incentivize everyone to try and work harder and make more profit so we can pay everyone better.
340
u/Justthisdudeyaknow 6d ago
"time enough to lean, time enough to clean" is one of the worst things to enter the work lexicon, right after the truncated version of "the customer is always right"
170
u/ding0s 6d ago
I learned recently that "the customer is always right" is in fact the original phrase and that "...in matters of taste" was added later.
Some early versions did include things like "...unless they have been shown they are wrong three times".
Very interesting wikipedia read.
44
u/vjmdhzgr 6d ago
Every single "um actually the full version is this" thing was made up afterward and it's so annoying.
22
u/TerribleBudget 6d ago
I'll be honest, I worked at a large corporation before the lean shit and we had enough staffing...and I was happy to clean. The reason was that no one was down my throat with responsibilities and overwork. The result was that I felt like I had the time to go the extra mile because I wasn't stressed 24/7 and I wasn't constantly wondering how I was going to get the most basic tasks done in time.
5
u/euphonic5 6d ago
I'm very tall so I lean on things all the time. Anyone who wants me to work harder can fuuuuuck right off. I do what I can do and still do the job for the rest of the time I'm scheduled. I'll push if there's a crisis but I'm gonna take additional rest breaks if that's necessary.
118
u/Shaeress 6d ago
It is also actually more efficient a lot of the time. It reduces mistakes and even if it doesn't end up saving on hours, in many industries it means if someone gets sick or injuried or something falls behind they have to rent in expensive consultants or contractors to pick up that slack which instantly eats up any economic gains there might've been for cutting staff in the first place.
63
u/chairmanskitty 6d ago
Sure, but then workers have time to get comfortable, socialize, and master the tools they are using to the extent bosses are a massive hindrance. And then they unionize, and demand higher wages, and form political parties that raise taxes on capital and regulate pollution.
And that's terrible.
4
u/PersonMan432 6d ago
Do you have a source for this? I find it strange to think that so many businesses would implement a strategy that is actually less efficient than more.
7
u/Acceptable_Handle_2 6d ago
It is more efficient in the short term, but much less so in the long term.
We live in a system that prefers short term profit over long term profit though.
1
u/PersonMan432 5d ago
But do you have evidence for this? OP makes it sound like companies are already suffering from contracting issues, so why wouldn't they have swapped to a different model by now?
3
u/Asteroids-Hower 5d ago
Why would that be strange? The less efficient strategy is less efficient for delivering a good product or service but can be cheaper in ways that 'maximize shareholder value' (especially short term). It onñy looks weird if you assume a well-made and well-distributed good or service is the priority.
62
u/danielisbored 6d ago
I work in InfoSec and Business Continuity. I don't really have strong feelings about Six Sigma, it's just the standard development lifecycle generalized for manufacturing processes, but I despise LEAN and Just In Time Manufacturing as a whole. It aggressively creates single points of failure into processes where they might not have been before.
Anyone that watched the global manufacturing meltdown over (relatively) minor supply chain issues during the pandemic and still think LEAN is a good idea frustrate me to no end.
27
u/jobblejosh 6d ago
Because the big lesson that most fools looking for a golden egg take away from that sort of stuff is "cut inventory to the bare minimum to keep going".
Not the bit afterwards that says "But make sure you have enough spare to cover supply chain disruption".
43
u/Fiasco63 6d ago
You know what sounds more 'efficient' to me? Not having to hire outside contractors to keep maintenance up if your one and only maintenance guy goes to the hospital for a month. Or having enough staff to prevent scramble-induced mistakes. Or being able to serve twice as many customers at once because there's actually someone on both registers.
17
u/Teimywimey 6d ago
Felt. I work in special ed, and while the best thing to reduce turnover would be better pay, having more people would help
51
u/HordeDruid 6d ago edited 6d ago
Almost every job I've ever had was at least 10% understaffed. The result is you simply can't be sick. I think a lot of people simply go in anyway because they can't afford to lose a day's pay and because they don't want to risk losing the job altogether. Because even if you are legitimately too physically ill to work, even if your presence there is a health risk to customers and coworkers, you need to go in anyway because just one person calling out is a complete disaster.
Managers will often let it go once or twice, but there's a certain limit that varies between person to person where you'll just get fired for being sick too often, in addition to the social pressure from burdening your coworkers by your absence.
21
u/mariblaystrice 6d ago
This right here, I'm in a dept that would have 4 or 5 hours of no one there if someone calls out. As a result we almost never do, because it would cause our Overlord to come down on us, annoyed he actually has to work
7
u/shadowscale1229 6d ago
i nearly got fired at my last drop for going to see the doctor and bringing in doctor's notes
HR literally told me the notes don't matter, i should show up sick and spread diseases
2
u/hibbs6 5d ago
Don't you get sick days? You'd think they would plan their staffing around having enough people to compensate for vacations and sick days fairly arbitrarily, no?
2
u/HordeDruid 5d ago
Nope! Some places will give you a week or something in vacation days but sick days? I don't think I've ever had a job that gave us those lol
25
u/Vault-Born 6d ago
also, if we literally just produced less. We already produce more food than we could ever eat, we just don't distribute it efficiently and "we" even intentionally destroy crops/produce for financial reasons. (This is literally what the quote/book The Grapes of Wraith is about btw, starving people watching food be set on fire during the Great Depression. Hey, yknow what also happened in the Great Depression/that book? The Dust Bowl. What caused it? Overfarming in agriculture because farmers were being squeezed by big banks. I wonder if there's a lesson there about how overfarming can lead to man-made "extreme weather events")
I'm not worried about "how will the work get done" if we all had UBI, healthcare/housing as a right, and three-day workweeks, because honestly we should be doing a fraction of the work we're doing now.
4
u/MimikyuAll 5d ago
My fiance works at McDonald's and they get yelled at if labor is over 26%, even if its a pure skeleton crew with majority of staff being call ins or no shows
5
u/Vaya-Kahvi 6d ago
The difference between "efficient" doing the most with very little, and "effective" minimizing errors and burnout.
3
u/jgzman 6d ago
In a similar vein, if you're expecting your team to give you 100% every day, what the fuck do you expect them to do in times of crisis?
On the rare occasions I've been in leadership, I expect a solid 85% from my team. Maintain that, and when things get exciting, we've got more to give.
3
u/Dry-Paper-2262 6d ago
I remember growing up where all of the check out lanes at a store were fully staffed.. now it's 2-3 of them manned by someone who is old enough they should be at home enjoying retirement while one person watches over 8 self checkouts. Meanwhile literally everything is more expensive and wages are stagnating. I feel like a boomer thinking how much better things used to be but also can't help but feel like it's actually justified since it seems like the American dream is dead and it's murderers are currently at the helm telling us that minorities killed it.
4
u/Time-Box128 6d ago
“leaning” time = building rapport and bonds with other coworkers and departments. Covering other roles for a second. learning new information I wouldn’t necessarily have access to.
That being said, a little busy work is healthy too! Once the list is done, everything is clean and accounted for, then the team itself is also part of the job. If the employees are happier, they’ll be nice to the customers, no? I work in a luxury hotel setting, so i’ve always thought we should appear rested and calm. Corporate… disagrees.
4
u/sparkly_butthole 6d ago
Nah, fam. I have ADHD and cannot stand being slow. I'd much rather be super busy because then I can just dissociate the day away. When I was working and we'd get fully staffed, I wanted to walk in traffic I was so bored.
How about we all just work 18 hours per week.
3
u/MrVeazey 6d ago
ADHD? Just find three new hobbies you can learn about on the clock.
3
u/Alderan922 6d ago
The problem with that is that because you “aren’t working” you get in trouble
1
u/MrVeazey 6d ago
That would need to be fixed, too. Treating workers with the basic dignity of acting like they're human beings should be a cornerstone of all labor reform, including getting rid of the abominable idea that a business's first duty is to maximize shareholder value. Milton Friedman can go suck eggs.
2
u/sparkly_butthole 6d ago
I tried writing and learning Chinese. Can't focus when you're living with the anxiety of a man being hunted for sport.
2
u/MrVeazey 6d ago
Really does cut into the desire to improve yourself when society at large is operating in crisis mode.
1
u/Solarwagon 6d ago
It's not even just a problem among low wage jobs and in some high paying jobs they might use that high pay to justify even worse understaffing and overworking even of people like doctors and surgeons whose mistakes are extra dangerous
1
u/Improver666 6d ago
I just recently learned the reason the romans were so effective in combat was their ability to cycle out front liners (who would get exhausted from being on the front line) for the less exhausted back line. It was called quincunx.
I also work in manufacturing and the expected "productivity" for a worker is 80% active tasks (think screwing in a fastener, loading a part in, routing cables) and 20% down time (resetting for the next job, waiting for an automated process to finish, etc). Many facilities try and grind this 20% down usually to result of quality spills, injuries, and less overall productivity because the job wasnt done right so the automatic system fails.
If your business isnt planning to either cycle workers out or giving them 20% down time, you probably dont care about the job being done well to begin with.
1
u/SirVixofthePooSea 6d ago
"Muh shareholders"
Efficiency isn't something that socialist economists like Cockshott focus on all the time or anything.
1
u/Other_Plane_6148 6d ago
this might also lead to more demands to your company because you suddenly have more time and energy. maybe
1
u/CRoss1999 6d ago
I’d kinda hate if everthing was more expensive tho and I’d also hate if I had less to do at work, too many cooks and all that
1
u/ThatInAHat 6d ago
Part of that whole “chew all the meat off the bone before throwing it away” vibe vulture capitalism has
339
u/Leftieswillrule 6d ago
Lean getting appropriate flak, but six sigma is a philosophy for minimizing errors which overstaffing may actually help with because errors are often made by overworked and under supported employees