This was not as dystopian an idea I thought it would be from the title. I'm all for innovative ways of cutting down on unnecessary meetings - creating an internal currency to meter/limit them is a clever idea.
Brilliant idea actually. When people are paid to spend time, and with very little oversight on how they spend it, people tend to get lazy.
I personally started to not go to meetings that fit certain patterns:
- is there a less senior, but capable engineer that can do it without me? If so, great. Lets make it their project [edit: this is to help them increase their impact]
- is there a weekly meeting that fits 'status checking' style? Do not go. I am mostly not needed anyway, and if i am they can reach out to me
- does the meeting involve >5 people? If so runaway, it cant be productive anyway (except if it is some sort of review with vps on project launch etc).
I try to be available and approchable anytime, and doing just the two above cuts my meetings by more than 50-60%.
For others, i try to ask an agenda and whether things can be resolved offline
Meeting creep, process creep are real things that get in the way of productivity. I can see how "showing" some monetary impact of having a useless meeting can help reduce it.
I knew a guy that did exactly as you describe above.
Probably most productive employee of the firm, solid tech skills.
He's was let go after about 14 months of the above.
Also I suppose that's good for him, employee salaries are always forced down/up to the average of the company. So if you figure out you're really good at your company it's probably the time to find a higher paying job. And if you're bad you should cling on to that job.
The point of a company is to do things that one person can't do by themselves. If you reject most of the coordinating activities, you've rejected the company.
(And according to Coase, the other function of a company is to reduce the friction of making deals: if you need to negotiate a contract every time you want to get a programmer to do their job, you decrease the value of the programmer by the cost of the negotiation.)
Meetings aren't real coordinating activities. They're generally listening to a boss drone on about stuff that could have been said in an email for an hour and people asking pointless questions that mostly only pertain to themselves.
Unfortunately its very difficult to act unilaterally, for most people just not showing up to meetings is a good way to ensure you will never get a promotion, or worse, receive a
"performance improvement plan" aka we are documenting a case to fire you with cause.
Nobody applauds your productivity gains, they just think of you as a smug jerk that thinks your time is worth more than anyone else's. Same thing with leaving at 5pm sharp in many businesses, it doesn't matter if you outperform the rest of the office combined, you WILL be singled out and delt with.
My case is a bit easier, as I was working in advertising, and it is easy to quantify the impact - which is kind of the point in the article (quantifying negative impact of a meeting, for example). Depending on your manager, they will also fight for reducing meetings to necessities only, and find ways to work more in harmony (for lack of a better word) instead of the relatively forced nature of meetings. For most solid engineers, 10 minutes chatting on IM/in person every now and then is more productive then weekly forced meetings (where everyone stares at their laptop). We came up with plenty of improvements where I pinged someone or they pinged me, and it was done soon after. Everyone knew their responsibility, and they did not hesitate to ask for help where they needed.
However, your point does sound plausible, and very likely. When everyone is fine with status quo, the one that challenges it can be singled out.
I agree with you if you naively do that isolated, but if you play the political game you can get more value for your productivity (like becoming an ambitious manager’s secret asset and then riding on their promotion and just having they back you up when you skip a meeting)
Careful tho. If you don't show up at enough meetings and subtly tell everyone all about your own accomplishments and diminish those of others, people will ask, what does he/she do again? And you'll be put on the next RIF.
You dont need to diminish others to prove your own. That is the key to a healthy org. I give a lot of praise to engineers when it is due, and tend to insist on taking things where i think its dull work (i personally feel sad punting on dull work, and try not to do it), so it works both ways. By skipping good chunk of meetings, i spare more time to eng, and hands on help.
One could say you don't need to charge for conference rooms in a healthy org, either. Like a Sufficiently Smart Compiler, though, where do I find a Sufficiently Healthy Organization that every single employee is completely above politics?
To be honest, reading the article made it sound even worse than the title. Having everything at your company priced for individual workers (from PCs to desks to smaller things) is a lot of nonsensical stress placed on workers. I already do enough econ bullshit outside of work, the last thing I want to do is start keeping spreadsheets for things that my workplace should provide me.
Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right up
Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously.
You start charging them for the meeting rooms
Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.
These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach.
It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses.
The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself.
Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates.
I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something.
Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software).
The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models.
This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people.
Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure.
So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation.
TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).
Facebook has vending machines for common hardware with the actual cost to the company listed. Everything is free, but it’s there to make you pause and reflect on whether you need it.
It's hardly complicated econ work. Naming it Will was an apt choice, in my opinion. If you really need something done to accomplish your job, you'll pay for it. If it's not worth the cash, maybe you overestimated its value.
It also strikes me as a great way to make people feel invested in their work, since they're constantly evaluating its real worth and apparently free to move to teams they believe are more valuable
The cognitive load needs to be high; it’s the thought required to make better decisions about time and resources. Normally little thought goes into these things.
Plus, it seems that over time it becomes easier to operate more effectively. A team who has decided to save $200 a week by skipping status meetings isn’t thinking about them anymore beyond a periodic re-evaluation.
When people don’t feel a cost for a thing, they have no reason not to continue to ask for it.
It’s the same reason you have to have rush rates for a contract programming business. There will always be people who insist they have to have certain work done urgently. If your rate doubles and they still need it...it’s truly urgent.
If it’s not, you’ll quickly find out and save yourself a lot of headache.
Do you not think this would introduce a ton of mental load just keeping track of everything?
You're almost a one man business, doing their own books, and then you've got the sources of conflict that come with that. What if you an a colleague agree to split the costs of a meeting room and he doesn't pay? So already you're introducing rudimentary contract law, and having to keep track of people that don't pay their bills.
This does raise an interesting question of whether you'd get meta employees providing services for the employees, perhaps credit ratings, banking, perhaps you could book up all the meeting rooms yourself and sub let them.
Ultimately in these situations you're doing the bidding of higher ups. If they decide you're having too many meetings, they'll find ways to cut down the number of meetings, then some thing will go wrong, lack of meetings will be blamed, and they'll be rolled back out again.
I'm sure there are people in Japan that are dishonest or forget, or get sick and don't come into work on the relevant day.
The app possibly could handle most of it, there surely has to be a point somewhere where the decision to share the room has been made, but hasn't been formalised yet. There may be a system where it requires both of you to agree to rent the room, so you aren't left with an unpaid bill, you may be left without a room that you needed though, which may be worse.
But Japanese people never make mistakes. They always pay their bills. They are always on time. They are robot gods.
Turns out they actually do do all of the things you suggest, but that's not how they perceive themselves to be, so 'they don't do that'.
True story - I worked on implementing a billing system for a Japanese utility company and when our team asked for the requirements around how to handling dunning when people don't pay their bills the response we got back was "Japanese people always pay their bills."
They should charge for sending emails where I work. They'll copy peeps from a 5 different departments at times, you know just to keep them in the loop. It is unreal.
> Or sometimes it’s just about pride: One project that attracted funding was to buy ad space at a professional baseball stadium in Hiroshima, home to Disco’s main factory, for marketing purposes. About 400 workers pooled $140,000 of their own bonus money—or about $350 each—for the privilege to see their company’s logo after work, even though the impact on the company’s bottom line seems doubtful at best
That somewhat conflicts with the prior narrative that everyone is super conscious about measuring everything - then people are throwing (their own) money away in a stupid ad campaign which is pretty much guaranteed to be garbage in ROI.
Supposedly, you're free to switch managers at any point. Then again, switching teams helps to get out of a bad manager relationship, but it doesn't help build a good one.
That’s not how bonuses work. I think it is entirely reasonable to give employees extra, unexpected and non-compulsory payments of some large fraction of whatever real money they demonstrably saved the company.
In Japan, virtually all full time employees get a salary and a bonus as part of their compensation. As stated in the article, the bonus is often as much as the salary. Japanese employees usually get bonuses either once, twice or three times a year on a regular schedule. Usually the bonuses are essentially fixed, although you don't officially know what they are until you get paid them. They are fixed enough that if there is a big change, it is usually a big surprise. The system is different for each company, but often salary is based on seniority/position and bonuses are based on how well your department performed -- though some companies also do bonuses based on seniority/position. Again, different companies do things slightly differently, but it's not uncommon to use this system so that everyone knows exactly what salary they should receive based on their seniority/position, but then the company can adjust it arbitrarily based on how happy they are with you.
That is how this particular set of incentive bonuses work. If every marginal dollar you spend on a meeting reduces the amount you get on your bonus, then by definition you are spending money on the meeting out of pocket.
>> They don't pay out of pocket, which would generally be illegal in most First World nations...
I've been at an employer where the procurement process was so arduous that employees were encouraged to just buy some things themselves, or risk not meeting MBOs (e.g., cloud compute instances, licenses for desktop software, etc.) In most cases, the manager forked out their personal credit card (realizing they would not meet their MBO and would lose out on a much larger bonus.)
Not saying this is acceptable, just that is does happen.
A way to apply this to a startup today is to have a budget for each team (or even individual) that they can spend on fun activities (office beer, team bonding night out, or whatever other activity, something people look forward to) and have each meeting or conference room use cost money from that budget.
I think very quickly unnecessary meetings will start to disappear.
According to the article, you need to pay the person too if you want a meeting with him.
> “For example, today I paid Will for this meeting room and also for Naito to come in and spend his time to talk to you,” Sumio Masuchi, head of Disco’s press team, tells Bloomberg reporters
I feel like there could be negative externalities (unintended consequences) from this. For example, meetings should take place, but nobody wants to deal with the cost - so people avoid the meeting altogether - to the detriment of the company . Or, people end up approaching individuals at their desk - and the collaborative nature of meeting in a conference room is avoided - not to mention increased back-channeling and untimely interruptions.
Except the chosen system seeks to avoid your "wasteful" scenarios. What you're describing is already in the status quo for a "normal" company.
From wikipedia, the company had a profit margin of ~15-20% in FY16 on 1.2 BUSD in revenues with ~4k employees. That's ~0.29 MUSD/employee in revenues, giving decent headroom to book rooms at $100/hr (Remember that these are quasi-dollars.)
Yes, but why would I want to save the company 10 000 USD by spending 100 USD of my "quasi dollar" bonus? Do I file a reimbursement? It would be really interesting to read the actual rules for this place.
A lot of costs and benefits are not easily measurable, and e.g. someone else might get the benefit of it rather than me just paving some part of the ground for him.
In general this system seems to be really sensitive for toxic players. How do they keep back-stabbing in check?
I would guess that some industry position is giving the company their edge, like Valve can have flat do-what-you-want organization because they are at the top of the pyramid eating a bite of every game makers lunch of the platform.
>Yes, but why would I want to save the company 10 000 USD by spending 100 USD of my "quasi dollar" bonus?
Because the system incentivizes spending that 100 USD on activities that track to KPIs and your compensation, rather than backstabbing or building hypothetical need-case infrastructure.
I mean, the idea is interesting, but I have hard time believing it's good. It sounds insane, but maybe other company de facto rules are more insane? Without trying it out I have a hard time judging the feasibility, even though I believe it is destructive.
The quasi dollars are actually squared up in Yen at the end of the quarter though. Which means there absolutely is a huge potential for unintended consequences.
I'll pick a contrived example, but bear with me. Imagine you've been thinking about some tricky problem for hours and have written in pen all over a printout of some architecture diagram, scratching things out and rewriting them back in, and so on. It's getting pretty messy, and it would be kind of nice to just start fresh with another printout. But you (or the team) have to pay 10 yen to print services to get the copy. Now personally in this situation I would be strongly inclined to just deal with the sloppiness and focus harder to try not to lose my train of thought. I don't really want to be in the habit of randomly shelling out of my own pocket if I can just work a little bit harder for the same result. But this is irrational - a clearer head when working on a hard problem is absolutely worth 10 yen to the business. This seems like a small cost, but that's all that the business was going to save through this scheme anyway! Every single item has this same problem, from "I'll just do it myself instead of paying Joe to do it at $90/hr" to "I'll just walk down the street to get a cheap lunch instead of splurging on the office snacks."
This is a really, really hard psychological problem, and you can't expect everyone in the org to adapt. This is like telling people that instead of washing their car or walking their dog or whatever, they should hire a service to do it for them, because amortized over decades a programmer's spare time working on side projects is probably going to be more profitable than the time of a car-washer or dog-walker. It just feels bizarre and wrong to shell out cold hard cash in order to avoid a little bit of work, for a difficult-to-quantify long-term benefit.
And beyond the difficulties faced by people honestly trying to change their instincts for the benefit of the company, there's the problem that in reality the employees are rational actors whose interests do not align exactly with the company's. You could scarcely imagine a system more tempting to game. It's impossible for any company to exactly pin down the value of each engineer and compensate them accordingly, so success for everyone depends on good faith and aligned incentives. But under this system, every decision becomes: pay personally out of my own pocket, in exchange for a roughly-equal value returned through the benefit of the company as a whole. It's right up in your face every single time, every single day. Think about the dollar cost of some proportion of employees sometimes failing the daily ethical pop quiz and putting their own interests ahead of the company. I bet the employees are thinking about it- and wondering how much they should change their own behavior to compensate. This scheme has then transmuted the tragedy of the commons into the prisoner's dilemma, where everyone has to renege in order to avoid getting screwed. And think about the toxic effect it would have on engineering teams if the usual currency of social credit were replaced with cash. A favor suddenly takes on all of the interpersonal implications of a $250 cash loan out of your own wallet, because it literally is. No thank you.
The cynical side of me also notices that employees are effectively paying out of their own pocket to conduct everyday business, and they get paid back by other employees also conducting the company's business, but any net gain is necessarily due to billing out externally- i.e. the business's overall profitability... like equity holders! Equity holders understand full well that they're responsible for tolerating the ebb and flow of business profitability but conventionally employees are not expected to bear the same level of risk. I wonder if this is a micro-optimization by management at the workers' expense. Whether set up this way deliberately or not, the non-employee equity-holders seem to profit from the fact that the employees likely don't realize how much that risk premium is really worth. (And to address another commenter's point that these are all bonuses anyway and the employees don't stand to lose any money, I think that if bonuses are regular and expected then a sudden drop in compensation due to emergent book-balancing is not any different than straight-up docking their pay.)
A lot of developers in open space offices will grab an unused conference room when they need some quiet to focus on tricky code.
Probably would want to pass on that with this policy. Assuming it's even true, given it's on Bloomberg which with its various pronouncements this last year has proven as reliable as The Sun. Maybe they just made it all up.
Ideally we bring offices back for swes. When i had a room with 3 more engs few years ago, my productivity was much higger. Less interruptions, more focus.
Ideally being the operative word. I absolutely loved having an office, but unfortunately, I don't think it's likely to happen, especially at the majority of places which have switched to open floor plans.
My current employer has gone even further and gone from open floor plans where people don't have offices, but do have their own desks, to a system where people don't even have their own desks and they keep their stuff in lockers. (So yeah, desktops are being phased out).
I just work remotely now - I'm significantly happier and more productive than if I needed to deal with lockers and open floor plans and all the other office bullshit on a daily basis.
That does sound terrible to not have desks. We used to joke around about pms and their navigation from meeting to meeting without sitting at their desks.
Little did i know, it could be a future i may have to find myself in :)
I don't have any permanent seating location at work. I just sit wherever I want, including in the gym or outside, if nobody's immediately asking for collaboration on something or to discuss something. I like it a lot this way.
I’m curious how economical this is: at a desk you can customize out door yourself, but if you’re sitting anywhere you might frequently end up in less-than-optimal situations…
I was more thinking of a shared workstation setting, which i am sure doesnt rrally exists
Laptops are not ideal work machines for most swes. At the very least they need a large screen, and more functional keyboard, and at that point you might as well give them a full workstation.
At the office I worked at that did this, there was a docking station with two monitors a keyboard and a mouse permanently at each desk. So you could, in theory, just plug your laptop into the docking station at any desk and start working.
I bring my own laptop and it's fine. It's a "gaming laptop" so it has more than enough power for whatever I need to do. I also use it for Unity3D dev. HP Omen 15-ax250wm with an SSD replacing the HDD
I don’t know. I’m willing to pay $5-10 to get work done at a coffee shop. I must think the result justifies the cost. I’m also aware I could save this money if I learned to do the same work at home. Four developers paying $25 each to reserve a conference room isn’t too different of a situation.
That is the attitude the company seems to be enjoining. I just thought it interesting that the previous poster (apparently) assumed programmers should be immune from the same decisions the rest of the company makes when some of them already make decisions to trade money for productivity or perceived productivity.
That's only good if they didn't also cut down on useful meetings.
Also, maybe people are just having meetings where it's cheaper: outside of the $100/hr conference rooms, or somewhere outside of the premises entirely. (Izakaya, ramen place, ...). Or in virtual space: by using video conferencing from their desks?
You can't reduce meetings by jacking up the cost of meeting places, if you have not cornered the meeting place market.
I think this idea works only to the extent that people hate meetings; it will certainly cut down on meetings which people don't want to attend in the first place. Problem is, sometimes you have to drag people into meetings in order to get information from them or other cooperation.
Escalation. Right dose of escalation is healthy. Our vp at the time complained about things not getting escalated enough (and he is very blunt person, so i believe it).
> Good lord have they never read Coase[1]? The point of working at a company is that, like, there are pens, and desks, and a place for your umbrella, and the ability to commit to continuous work on a project for a sustained period rather than constantly shaking things up with never-ending auctions for resources and people. If it’s just a bunch of by-the-day freelancers at rented desks, why have the company at all? (In fact, it's a mixed bag: “Disco’s operating margin has risen to 26% from 16% since the experiment was implemented eight years ago,” but “engineers have quit, complaining the approach detracts from their ability to focus purely on research,” and “the relentless focus on quarterly profits can encourage short-term thinking.”)
> Colleagues who back a project with Will may, if it works out, earn a return one day.
> There’s a penalty system for inefficient behavior, which includes piling up unnecessary inventory or even working late. Overtime hours have fallen 9% since penalties were implemented in 2015, aligning with the Japanese government’s goal to improve work-life balance. “Economic forces are doing all the things managers used to spend time on,” says Naito. Employees can earn extra Will by helping each other: A parent who wants to see a kid’s baseball game can pay a colleague in the currency to finish a report. A software engineer can earn extra by offering coding skills to another team. Creating Excel macros or translation work are typical requests.
Not correct, employees also get a profit share if their idea makes money.
These doesn't sound like downsides to me personally. Moreover in today's world every employee is a one person company with poor returns. The moment you lose your business value, company would fire you anyways.
I don’t believe they all achieve equally, and I don’t know what they do with the money other than the article mentions that some people who do well there buy nice cars. It sounds like their lifestyles might inflate to match their income, which would delay retirement, but I can’t think of a way to determine the extent.
I have personally seen some companies divide the total facility across teams to try and focus on each team's ROI. Even non-core business activities like HR is spread across different teams so that the company has better view. I have found such optimisations to be an overkill. Because in larger scheme of things these costs are peanuts.
The same case appears to be with this company too. While it does sound great to have people not use meeting rooms for unnecessary meetings the bottom line effect is going to be negligible. The negative effect might be that either people will try to include as many as possible people to spread the cost or they might actively use their desk spaces for all meetings to avoid paying the costs.
I wish more places would do this not for meetings but for meeting rooms. Meeting rooms in some orgs are a huge pain to get, which actually leads to a negative feedback cycle of people booking them far in advance "just in case" and then not using them.
In Sweden we prize consensus very highly. To the extent that's possible, we try to debate things and do what everyone in the organization agrees to do rather than having a manager decide by him or herself and then execute. Our ministers don't even have executive power, their powers are very limited and they must seek approval from our parliament for everything they want to do, they can not really order anyone to do anything.
This has resulted in a culture where we have mind boggling amounts of meetings to offer plenty of time for debate and really make an effort to form consensus. If we can't form consensus, a decision is made anyway by the manager of course, but we want to make absolutely sure it was not because of lack of trying.
Some places are worse than others. I had a colleague who worked as a developer at a government agency and by his account 4 hours a day to code was a good day, the rest of the time he was stuck in meetings and checking his emails.
And, for some reason, I sort of like it. I believe in the power of the crowd to make good decisions. The price is the fact that we spend staggering amounts of time discussing and debating things before we make a decision. Introducing something like this system would probably be met with huge protests by management and the workforce.
As long as the meetings are not a cermonial part of some process they acctually are very useful.
In a big company communication is one of the biggest obstacles and alot of time need to be used for communicating.
Superficcially decreasing the amount of meetings seems like a bad idea generally. What will happen is just that key people will get the info and others being left in the dark.
There's a really cool app I saw a while back that did calendar audits... typical for 20-40% of employee time at tech startups being spent in meetings, most of it useless and poorly run and managed.
This environment sounds like hell. The company is pushing the entire process and overhead of management into every facet of employee life but not distributing commensurate benefits to employees except a handful of lotto winner that serve more as performance set pieces than an actual compensation model.
Because most of those things they're cutting: meetings, reports, OKRs, forecasting, planning? Those things exist to keep the company legible and transparent to its owners. These activities often feel pointless because other than feeding information upwards, they don't always serve a purpose.
These toxic activities tend to cast a pall on the genuine hard work that line workers experience making a business actually function on a day-to-day basis. Those meetings, often critical for drawing out consensus, now are perceived as from the same pointless, poisonous well as the other activities. The net result is that only the most overwhelming personalities and cliques of employees can succeed, and that limited success becomes a 0 sum game. Cooperation gets branded as overhead.
And it seems like now the company is so utterly devoid of leadership but so intensely addicted to a tall hierarchy that they're "crowdsourcing" their business plans to folks for the privilege of competing for those fixed-size bonuses more effectively? Other than play-pretend they're on Shark Tank and make sure beans stay counted, what do the executives and upper management there even do?
You'd have to be pretty desperate or pretty close to a sociopath to enjoy that environment. It's a synthesis of the worst qualities of most corporate excess: overwhelming personal responsibility, arbitrary numeric axis of evaluation, constant performance justification, ruthless peer competition. But it's got no real benefits over a normal job other than a small handful of people getting performative payout. You can put in the effort to your utmost and circumstance can still deny you that payout even if the company succeeds.
The atomisation of the workforce. It's easier to manage individuals than a group that negotiates. The loss of tribes is probably the biggest change since the advent of modern manufacturing. The ideal end state would be robots that cooperate for goals and don't negotiate?
Applying the price mechanism to direct employees use of resources does have all sorts of compelling advantages even if it does introduce some overhead and certain weird pressures. I think the article makes a compelling case.
This is an interesting article, but it is hard yo know how much they are just focusing on the good points. I would love to read a detailed critique from an external agent.
Really interesting article. This actually seems like a really smart move but only in short term. In the long term, they will definitely suffer because the employees will take poor decisions in order to complete in the cut throat environment and high turn over. Perfect example of this approach is GE. They started implementing something like this in 90s and in 2000 it was one of the most valued companies. By late 2000s GE was completely ruined. It is not even a Fortune 500 anymore.
