More on utilisation rates ... and productivity / undermining progressive measures

There is NO moral or ethical justification for calculations of utilisation rate (an attempt at measuring productivity) on anything other than what is in the law (e.g., fair work requirements around change such as “no disadvantage”) and/or industry agreements and/or the individual worker’s contract. 

Let’s assume the worker is a full time, permanent office worker in Australia. Typically, that means their official hours of work are around 38 hours (nominally 7.6 hours per day, five day week).

If the worker works for 42 hours in a week, 38 of which are “chargeable” (if that is the limited, inaccurate and outdated definition you use), the worker’s utilisation rate is: 

= chargeable hours / contract hours 

= 38 / 38 or 100%

Frequently, targets for productivity are set for workers, based on how senior they are (more senior positions have more work on administration, training, planning, and winning projects, so their expected percentage of time that is chargeable is often lower - although it becomes unproductive when specialists in one area are expected to also do work outside their speciality that is chargeable). 

If the position has an expectation of, say, 95% productivity, that has clearly been met. 

However, most companies don’t use that correct calculation, instead judging it on hours entered on timesheets, or: 

 = 38 / 42 or 90% chargeable time 

That WRONGLY suggests that the required time has not been met, when the truth is it clearly has. 

Trying to calculate utilisation rates/categories on ANYTHING other than the contracted/agreed number of hours per week is morally and ethically repugnant, as well as being, quite simply, wrong and disturbingly misleading. 

In my opinion, it is bad management scr*wing workers over. The troglodytes pushing it are, IMO, too often ignoring employment & contract law and/or mathematically incompetent and/or trying to push the already uneven power balance even further in favour of management, and using workplace bullying to create a psychologically hostile workplace. 

They are too often undermining change for the better.

It reminds me of the worst manager I ever worked for, back in the 1980s, who tried to formalise the expectations of unpaid overtime and came up with a schedule - which required up to one day/week or 20% unpaid overtime for some levels of seniority - that effectively lowered the hourly rate. 

I thanked him for his memo, and declined the offer to work for a lower rate of pay as I attained seniority.

But others did not!

And that is a problem. 

Apart from the obvious fear of losing a job, and those who were so unbalanced & incompetent as human beings that they would obsessively put their day jobs ahead of family, friends, and life (that manager thought the  slavish “salaryman” culture of Japan was “a good thing”!!!), it seemed to me that union negotiation in 70s/80s were mostly about getting aged workers more overtime - so not so much less hours as more pay - which is <expletive deleted> amathiac, and led to a frustrating - for workers - rigidity. 

And the terrible thing that has woken workers up - shaken them out of their unbalanced attitudes, fear, and complacency in  a way that the  1960s/70s  counterculture never did - was the pandemic. 

This does not mean no-one wants to go in to the office, or ever work unpaid overtime (especially those fortunate few who love their work, but also the many who take pride in what they are doing), but it DOES mean most workers have a healthier attitude towards work, and governments have been forced to recognise the evils of things like gig work, inadequate pay, and under-appreciating human beings. 

It also mean management is being forced to grow and change - which, much as the fossil fuel industry has been fighting against minimising the climate crisis, those bad managers who have character/personality flaws such as obsessively wanting to see workers on the office-factory floor beneath their magisterial/imperial gaze have been resisting. 

And, just as the dinosaurs failed to adapt after the asteroid, and the fossils have now been shown up for the evil IPOCs that they are, so too will those bad managers also go the way of the dinosaurs. 

It is just a matter of time, and how many human beings they destroy along the way ...

 

Some other posts which may be of interest on this topic are:  

• “The importance of retaining credibility in management”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-importance-of-retaining-credibility.html   

• “On hostile and unsafe workplaces - Part 2”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2022/09/on-hostile-and-unsafe-workplaces-part-2.html   

• “Management - failure to learn, and a call for business unit diaries”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/10/management-failure-to-learn-and-call.html   

• “An update on utilisation rate”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/04/an-update-on-utilisation-rate.html   

• “A 40 year cycle on unpaid overtime”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-40-year-cycle-on-unpaid-overtime.html   

• “More on the struggle to survive”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2018/05/more-on-strugle-to-survive.html   

• “Preview from coming news post: surveillance of workers, the UK monarch can rescind our laws, and bureaucratic indifference to the death of their victims”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2022/09/preview-from-coming-news-post.html   
  

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header; 
• 
  

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

• 
  
• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/