Trying to imagine a person in a position of power thinking, "hmm, my employees complete their work in 20 hours so... LET'S ALL GO SAILING!" Instead, they are much more likely to swing the pendulum - hard - in the other direction until everyone (including the self-driven founder with exclusive, personal benefits for the company's success) is working 60+ hour workweeks. There's a lot of articles on "work/life balance" on this site; shouldn't that apply to employees as well?
Like "lines of code per day", the 40-hour week is a fuzzy and frankly poor metric, but an established metric nonetheless. In the startup mode with fewer employees, founders need to delegate responsibility to the managers to be aware of individual employee productivity and adjust tasks and/or employment accordingly.
Trying to imagine a person in a position of power thinking, "hmm, my employees complete their work in 20 hours so... LET'S ALL GO SAILING!" Instead, they are much more likely to swing the pendulum - hard - in the other direction until everyone (including the self-driven founder with exclusive, personal benefits for the company's success) is working 60+ hour workweeks. There's a lot of articles on "work/life balance" on this site; shouldn't that apply to employees as well?
Like "lines of code per day", the 40-hour week is a fuzzy and frankly poor metric, but an established metric nonetheless. In the startup mode with fewer employees, founders need to delegate responsibility to the managers to be aware of individual employee productivity and adjust tasks and/or employment accordingly.