Pizza Scales
“Does it come with cookies? I like the cookies.”
One of my favourite questions when interviewing a candidate is:
“You arrive on a packed Friday, a completely full day. Something important pops up and now you have 12 hours of work to do in an 8 hour day. What do you do?”
Try it some time, the answers are more varied than you might think.
Classic fresh out of school answers are, ‘I’ll just roll up my sleeves!’ or ‘I’ll pull a late night!’
Part of me believes this is just a remnant of an education system built around stress and cramming. Another part of me believes that this is the answer they think I want to hear. As though there’s an expectation that companies intruding on personal time is standard practice.
The answer I’m looking for is something along the lines of:
Talk to my manager, inform them of the situation
Reassess priorities quickly
Determine if something can be delayed
If not, can someone help?
If not, can my manager help?
If not, what is the policy around overtime?
Now, I’m not against extra work, but it feels like it should be a last resort. It definitely should be rare, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted. There are emergencies, critical buying days, new product releases; these all are worthy pretexts for asking extra from your team.
Let’s Just Crush It Out
At one company I experience routine requests from leadership. “Hey, order in a pizza for your crew and get them to crush out the last bit of work tonight.” Once again, for the right circumstance and reward, the ask is warranted, but this was popping up every other week.
The team started questioning the motive. It wasn’t connected to some critical release, or some seasonal buying event, it was just an ask for more. To make it worse, we were all salary with no overtime.
Justifying the Call
When you put out the call for extra work, people have to recognize that the work is legitimately important. If you put out the call routinely, it probably means bad planning, failure to prioritise or people are being taken for granted.
Whenever we had to do extra, I would take the time to do a root cause on why.
Why do we need extra work?
We’re behind schedule -> Is this a failure of planning, effectiveness or scoping?
We see an opportunity -> Is this a shift in priorities that was unforeseeable?
There was an error -> Was work done poorly, rushed, etc.
There is a major event -> Could this have been scheduled and planned accordingly?
Almost every circumstance in a root cause of extra labour can be traced back to something that was avoidable. Quality assurance time can mitigate the impact of errors. Effective planning and scoping should increase the probability of hitting deadlines.
In my experience, most causes for extra time can be traced back to leadership decisions. Often meaning they’re asking their team to clean up for them.