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comment by ButterflyEffect
ButterflyEffect  ·  322 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Workers Are Happier Than They’ve Been in Decades

I pretty much have to let the people on team who have kid(s) work whatever hours and do whatever because if I didn't, they would probably think real hard and long and leaving because of childcare issues. Instead, I have arguably less productive, but more engaged, happier people to work with, who aren't thinking about leaving.





kleinbl00  ·  322 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

b_b  ·  321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Nice call on Indeed. There are 7 or 8 resumes and probably more that are right in my wheelhouse, so I'm going to try contacting some people in the next week or so. Still debating with myself what the best way to pay them is. I'm thinking as a contractor initially, since as the smallest of small businesses, it probably is best for legal and tax reasons to not have any employees. But then there's the question of paying hourly or salary. My gut says salary, since there will probably be weeks when the work is light and weeks when the work is heavy, and I know if it were me making the pay I'd rather have a steady income stream than feast or famine. Love to get your thoughts on that, since you have a lot more experience than me.

kleinbl00  ·  321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I mean... so we're clear: your company right now is "you and this prospective hire", yeah?

Why not leave that open?

You may find that the best candidate wants tuesdays and thursdays off and really needs healthcare for her family of four. You may find that the second best candidate is a financial freedom fanatic and wants to be able to shove 90% of her salary into a stack of quasi-legal SEP-IRAs. You may find that your best candidate isn't interested in leaving her current position but since she has no life she'll do your shit as a side-hustle between 8pm and 2am six days a week.

At a bare minimum, it's probably time to get an accountant? And ask them? 'cuz the reason my firm got $90k in ERTC while my cousin's didn't is his five employees are 1099s and mine are W2s. We've got a midwife whose pregnancy is going shitty and she can't work as much as she thought... who is also currently working for two practices (long, shitty story). We pay on a W2, they pay on a 1099... which means that while her stated wages with them are only about 20% less than ours, her actual wages are actually about 50% less from them because she's gotta pay self employment tax on 'em. And yeah - she got blindsided by that, which means they got her loyalty for so little that she doesn't quite break even? But that mostly means she asks us how to handle them and pregnancy isn't forever and she'll be back. She's got gumption. We're playing the long game and they're treating employees like livestock.

I'll say this: whatever corporate structure you build this thing out as? Won't last forever. But holy shit switching 401(k)s as a company is a cast iron nightmare. You have the room to be flexible right now, so use it.

b_b  ·  321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Always appreciate your advice, my friend. When we started Forever Labs, I hired a payroll company to handle the business end of paying out first couple employees, and that worked really well. In general the reason I don't really like hourly pay is that I think it's demotivating. I want to pay for value and not for time. If my hire can do as good of a job doing something in 6 hours as someone else can do in 8, then I don't see why that person should be punished for efficiency. And of course the converse is true too, that one shouldn't be rewarded for going slow. The way I see it, the labor component of project type work (as opposed to shift work, which is obviously way different) is worth X and that's what should be compensated. But that's just me. I totally get that everyone sees the world differently. I'm really excited to build something form the ground up with no predefined HR policies. Experiment and adapt. Gonna be a ton of fun.

kleinbl00  ·  321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Our compensation is very much shaped by

1) All our money comes from insurance companies

2) who never raise their rates

3) and deliberately hire troglodytes with no idea what's going on to fuck you over

4) while committing actual fraud in their contracting practices

5) and executing cartel behavior

6) to the extent that they threaten you with price-fixing if you compare notes on your contract compared to someone else's up the street

We have an entire industry that expects families to pay thousands of dollars a month and then acts like you're stealing from them if you try to use their services. It sucks.

PS. Square Payroll works really well until you try to integrate benefits packages. Then it eats shit. We have a payroll company that we switched to because the guys Square partners with (Guideline) suck so hard... but we still pay our birth assistants through Square for simplicity's sake.

ButterflyEffect  ·  322 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Also heard this morning from someone around here who reached out to a place and was told there was 9 month wait to get into childcare which is basically a "fuck you" timeline.

cgod  ·  322 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are always 9 month waits and there are always alternatives that are pretty satisfactory if you look around long enough.

When ever kids start school there are openings, it's the natural ebb and flow of one out one in.

uhsguy  ·  317 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah 9 months is basically next year when kids graduate. It makes sense now but didn’t when I was younger and we had our first