My experience is that employees are on average only 30% utilized

Previous to WFH they hid this. But now if they're remote... they are starting side hustles, working 2nd jobs, etc.

In the past couple of years I cannot count how many ‘full remote’ folks told me that they were working part-time jobs on the side while still working a full-time job. There have been a bunch.

I remember one friend telling me about how he had a full-time job, a half-time job and his own startup.

Does this make him an awful person?

No, of course not. It just makes him an ambitous one.

You see in the current system…. if a person is good at their job they will only be 30% utilized

Because that is all the time your average job takes if we are honest.

Are some employees in fact spending a lot more time doing their job than just 30%? Yes. Of course some of them manage to keep busy the whole day.

But how much of that is really needed (if they are good)?

Or to put it another way… how much of that, if it was their own business, would they figure out how to optimize such that they could drastically reduce the amount of time?

I think now with ‘work from home’ we are starting to see the smart ones do exactly that. Because they wanna free their time up.

They’re starting to second guess the utility of lots of meetings.

Because now they’re no longer trading off against just idly staying busy in the office… they’re trading off against spending time with their family or running their own side hustle.

This especially holds true of managers

A good manager will turn more and more of what he does into a structured process that works without him.

I remember when I first joined Groupon back in early 2011 to run their Ukraine business. When I started we were about 15 people of which about 7 were sales people I had inherited.

I’d never run sales teams before and so for the first couple of months I went really deep on how to hire and manage good sales teams.

And as I got better i turned everything into processes. I created teams that competed against each other with a team scorecard that was always visible on a screen in the office.

I motivated them through team bonuses. And empowered the managers of those teams to make their own hiring and firing decisions because they were better at it than me (ie. I never considered myself a great ‘sales’ person. I’m a strategist.)

And after about the first year… I had gotten the whole thing to run like clockwork with 100+ employees while only spending about 25% of my time on it. I literally started my own startup on the side, which they later found out about and got pissed off at. LOL

And we delivered results. We positively grew sales between 10-20% month-on-month for my first 14 months.

I remember comparing against ~45 international Groupons and concluding that except for a few that were opened during that period, we had a higher average growth rate than all of them.

Plus we went from #3 to #1 player in Ukraine. And based on scraping our biggest competitor’s site we’d become 3x bigger than the #2 player.

I’m not saying this to toot my own horn…. I’m saying this to make the point that you don’t need to work like a dog to produce results. You need to work smart.

We should embrace this fact and not try to punish it

What I mean is that… you should not try to squeeze out as much work as possible from each member of your team.

Rather in my view there should be a very clear value provided <> compensation relationship. And as a manager you should expect everyone to be on par here.

So if a person is delivering less value than what their compensation equates to on the market then you should pressure them to deliver more. But give them the tools & processes to do it.

But if they don’t get there.. then you are also within your right to look at the market and find someone that does hold their weight.

And if a person can deliver more value than what their compensation equates to than you should put a clear plan for how that person can take more responsibility and earn more.

Or perhaps if you cannot pay more, than you say something like.. “Hey.. this is all we can pay you. But after you finish what is expected if want to spend your extra time doing your own endeavors than please feel comfortable with that. You don’t need to hide it from me.”

And this, my friends, is how you KEEP THE GOOD PEOPLE.

The good people SHOULD be motivated to start their own side hustles. It is part of what makes them good.

And if you threaten them to the point that they leave..then all you’ll be left with is a bunch of corporate zombies who are 100% reliant on keeping their job.

In offering & embracing freedom… you attract & retain the people that are good.