Something Emily Guendelsberger pointed out in On The Clock was that this whole "when you clock in I own you body & soul" thing has no basis in productivity, health or anything else. Taylor wasn't trying to figure out "how can we do more with less" he was trying to figure out "how do we raise the expected level of your output so high that we can always penalize you for never meeting it." "If you can lean you can clean" as a work ethos was Ray Kroc working from the basis that he was paying for people's time, not people's labor. If he was paying you for 8 hours, he owned you body and soul for 8 hours.

We pay our receptionist hourly, and if she runs out of shit to do she whips out her Kindle. We pay our office manager hourly, and if she runs out of shit to do she goes home. Our professionals? We pay them on a per-contact basis. There's a baseline standard overhead fee per week because we know they've got charts to finish and messages to answer but otherwise, they're in the office when they need to be in the office, they're remote when they can be remote, and if they want to take three weeks to go to Japan, they need to block off their schedule and help us figure out how to cover call. They accrue sick leave, they accrue holiday pay, but otherwise they get paid for the work they do. Which means I have a couple employees that clear damn near $200k a year, and a couple employees that work a day a week because kids.

The receptionist that I'm glad is gone tried to take me to task once because she calculated we didn't have nearly enough support staff. She had an undergraduate degree in resource management or some shit and she determined that we had two staff per full time physician and it should be three to five. I pointed out that based on the definition used for "full time" we actually had eight. They hang out at the office because it's comfy and they can drink tea on the couch while consulting with their friends and arguing about politics in Portuguese.

Used to be you were salaried because you did the job that needed doing and then went home. Then it became you were salaried because you were tricked into working 90 hours a week for 40 hours pay. Now? Now it seems like employers are being forced to reconcile with the idea that productivity is more sustainably produced by capital expenditures than labor effort.

My wife spent four hours trying to get a new hire's Chromebook working with our server because the new hire just didn't want us to buy her a macbook. Hour 5? Amazon to the rescue.

LIfe's too short to torture people because you write their paychecks.