The Old New Thing

There are anecdotal claims that in some companies, slacker employees (usually claimed to be in a union) will tell their newly hired hard-working co-workers to slow down or they'll mess up the curve for everyone.

ALL employees at our local Department of Motor Vehicles will shuffle VERY slowly to the water fountain and shuffle slowly back after every 2 or 3 customers.  I wonder if they could walk any slower.  (I claim that paying them 50 cents extra for each customer serviced would cost the state less salary money overall, since so many more customers would be serviced with fewer employees.)

Well, the employees in the grocery check-out lines HAVE to work hard.  Otherwise it would make the store manager look like a TOTAL MORON for only having 2 out of 20 lanes staffed during rush hour.

I've found it can work both ways. If an employee is somewhat more productive than some others, it can encourage others to work harder to try to match/beat them. In an experience I was witness to at my office recently, however, a single employee was so much more productive than the others that the others simply gave up because they didn't think they could come close to matching, so why bother? In that case it ended up hurting the overall effort, although eventually the slackers were replaced with better workers who came closer to matching the star :)

From what I have learned in the Windows division hardworking employees do not get rewarded with anything except more work, more responsibility, more stress, and longer hours.  But those employees that make stupid mistakes that cost co-workers thousands of man-hours and missed deadlines while they go on vacation get promoted along with their 1d10t lead who does not have a clue as to what anyone is doing.

My conclusion is that you should only work harder than others for yourself, because you want to. Don't do it in expectation of gain, because the slackers are in the majority (it's just that many are denominated "bosses" and "managers").

"10 Items or Less" is a cute movie where the higher productivity of one checkout clerk over another is key to the story.

The study mentioned should have also tracked whether baggers were present during a sale, the organization of the customer and the quantity of coupons, etc.  It does not seem like they chose the best occupation to study.

Maggie, considering how long they were monitoring cashiers, statistically speaking, coupons and variances in customer-driven workload pretty much come out in the wash.

I'm not finished reading the paper, but we can apply it to computer industry? We know that there are individuals that can be ten times more productive that others, so even if they slack off half of the time they still are five time more productive.

Apparently, one of the arguments behind government funding for university degrees is that people with tertiary degrees make their high-school-only colleagues more productive.

David Walker's comment reminds me of the movie Hot Fuzz, where, at the start of the film (before any spoilers come into play), the lead character is sent away from the city police to a quaint little village in the country, as his high arrest rates were making everyone else look bad.

Good movie, incidentally. I recommend it.

In the same vein as Hot Fuzz (but closer to Trainspotting), check out Cash Back - life working in a grocery.

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There is another thing that must be taken into account - how slackers influence the non-slackers.

I consider myself a productive person, but lately I noticed how my performance decreased.

Many of my colleagues are late, they leave earlier, they don't handle their assignments properly and require permanent supervision, etc. My morale has deteriorated, and I think it is my colleagues' influence (at least partially).