Re: 2018 VFL Rd 1: Northern Blues vs Collingwood
Reply #109 –
The whole Simpson's episode was a commentary on the concepts like those in you describe in your workplace, a trend that swept through Silicon Valley years ago. Workplaces offering that sort of environment quickly became the target of less than motivated employees opportunistically gaming the system. It is one of the factors that are said to have contributed to Silicon Valley's mini-crash years ago, and why most surviving organisations have now restructured to limit the scope of employee choice! Out of that also came Hot Desking, which is an accountant psychopath's solution to the problems the earlier concepts created.
Hot Desking is basically trying to achieve 100% return from a capital resource by ignoring/eliminating the human element as an effect, it is built on the premise that workers can work as much or as little as they like as long as their station is staffed and operating at capacity! It does this at the expense of consistency and quality. What happens is you end up with job sharing and part-time staffing generating massive under-employment and eliminating penalty rates while keeping things running 24x7. It seems attractive to new mother's in particular, until the kids go to school and they find they cannot get full-time work, and their husbands have reduced wages due to the job sharing pressures on the marketplace. Millennials are a particular victim of this.
Either concept might work in some limited scope, but they cannot be generalised.
If you leave a loophole, there will always be someone less altruistic who is willing to do their very best to take advantage of it. If you try something like this with a playing group there is a very high risk just that at some stage one or two individuals could undo your whole construct.
The concepts are great, if the employees are altruistic robots, the type that send you a work email at 3am in the middle of the holiday season.
I don't know about your sector, it's size or scale, I'm not making a comment about where you work.