My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists
chrisashworth.org
chrisashworth.org
I'm sure I could come up with some reasonable answers to those questions, but I want to hear what you guys have to say.
E.g. if you hire a programmer for three days a week and they go rock climbing the rest of the time, You probably get about the same productivity as hiring a programmer full time, and you don't need to pay them for the rest of their time.
The thing is, so many problems are solved 'in the background' - When I hire a knowledge worker, really, I'm paying for the background processes when they are in the shower as much as anything else.
Now, things are different if you are splitting someone with another job of a similar type, I think. In that case, if you are providing more interesting work and/or better motivation, you can 'steal' some of the background processing from the other job, but the other way around is also possible. (a win win is also possible here; your guy can learn something one place and use it at the other, etc... but it's less of a sure win, I think, as, say, hiring an artist to work on your customer support when they are not doing art.)
Of course, if you are hiring someone for a rote job where performance doesn't vary or matter, or where burn-out doesn't happen, none of this applies.
Are we hired for our skill, or to warm seats?
In corporate america, I'd say to warm seats.
During the dotcom boom I had an interview with a software company founded by students where many programmers worked 60%. They had some coordination problems. The company went down in the dotcom bust. My previous job was with a company where everybody worked 4 days a week. They wouldn't let me work 3 days after they had tried it with one employee and were not satisfied with the results. Before I worked 3 days a week as an economist and it went pretty well.
There are other jobs where part-time is more usual or even the norm. Many artists become part-time teachers.
My wife and I started a business together and took (and 5 years in still have) about 40% of our previous joint earnings collectively (and she was working part-time). We did this 1) to work together, 2) to bring up our children ourselves, 3) to bring art to the masses, 4) because we're crazy.
It's amazing but this month I managed to eke another £12 per mo off our (domestic) outgoings. We could definitely use more money but I've been surprised by how much we managed to cut our costs. It seems that if we went back to our previous pay levels we almost wouldn't know what to do with the money (except we would, pay off the mortgage for one).
tl;dr I think you'd surprise yourself by how frugal you can be.
Why?
Well, take John Harrington's example (photographer).
You book a one-hour shoot, for say $200, to make it an easy number to play with.
Your job is to show up, set up the lights and backdrops, do the necessary makeup, get the executive portrait for the financial report (or whatever), and get out of his way.
Now, the exec suddenly says, "I only have 30 minutes, so you have to get it done in that amount of time."
Do you take a pay cut? No. You charge double, because to do the same work in half the time, you have to be better.
If I can get my work done in 20 hours/week, and another engineer takes 40 hours/week to accomplish the same task, I should be getting the higher hourly rate, not the same hourly rate.
Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.
PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first. I think that is the lesson.
Still, 80k in NYC sounds like an entry-level position.
(1) smart
(2) motivated
(3) conscientious
and
(4) take very good care of them
The takeaway from the article, stated more bluntly, is that if you can be flexible on the hours, then you can have (1)-(3) for cheap by hiring artists or other people who need or want flexible hours.
To bad managers, it's only about money, but it has been very well documented for a long time that beyond a certain point, salary is not particularly important to a lot of people.
It is also well documented that most employees do value things like flexible working hours, a few extra days of annual leave, and real support for training in new tools and skills to keep up to date. We also tend to get offended when companies try to take over life outside work in one way or another. Much of this comes down to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, so employees can enjoy the lifestyle they prefer without work interfering unnecessarily.
Smart managers recognise this reality, set their working conditions accordingly, and reap the rewards. It's just a shame there are so few smart managers around.
It's a world away from "come in after 9:30am" or "here's a laptop and a phone, now ur never not at work"
Bad managers actually think they're being generous with allowing staff to move their day forward or backward by a half-hour to avoid the worst of the traffic. This demonstrates such a staggering lack of perspective that it could be a Dunning-Kruger case study.
Good managers, meanwhile, start from the premise that as long as the employee is making a reasonable effort, getting the job done, and not putting any other aspect of the business at unnecessary risk of harm, working arrangements can be whatever everyone is comfortable with.
Basically, bad managers default to saying "no" on work-life balance issues, while good managers default to saying "yes" and will say "no" only when they have a clear business reason for refusing.
And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.
Pick people who have irregular work (part-timers, social workers, freelancers) but who are also brand champions.
With envy, a fairly flexible (sadly-)non-artsy worker