Money stops being a lever once someone is paid fairly, and what replaces it is time. A results-oriented environment prices an employee's output the way value-based pricing prices a service: you understand what the person can accomplish, rather than buying a fixed number of hours and hoping. The difference gets paid back in hours people actually own.
All value is perceived value
I spent years as a marketing consultant answering one question for people: what should I charge?
What I learned is that it never comes down to a dollar amount. It comes down to the value of the thing the person is receiving.
Take a beer. At Northside Bar in Wicker Park on a Wednesday at 10pm during the open mic, it costs six dollars. The same beer at five in the afternoon is four. That same beer at Wrigley Field is twelve.
Nothing about the beer changed. Money has value because we agree it does, and as Philip Morgan puts it in The Positioning Guide for Technical Firms, all value is perceived value.
Make more and you will probably spend more on nonsense. Make less and you might budget better. It is relative, and it is perspective.
Time is the exception. Time cannot be purchased. But it can be given back, and that is a lever almost nobody pulls.
The thing I did to Aaron
One day my web developer, Aaron, finished a project at 3pm.
When I realized I had nothing else for him, I scrambled to find work to fill his last two hours. And why would I not? I was paying Aaron to be there until five. I should be getting every dollar I could out of him.
Then I stopped.
I asked myself what I was doing with Aaron's time that was more important than him spending it with his children. Giving him little crap projects because he had to stay until five, so he could then drive home in traffic at the same moment as everyone else, taking even longer to see his family.
It was a jerk move, and it was mine.
If I was going to ask Aaron to spend time away from his newborn daughter to work for me, I had better be certain that time was being spent effectively. Which meant I needed to be more prepared. I needed to know exactly which tasks I needed from him so I could do my own job.
The failure was not his hours. It was my planning.
What the ride-share drivers understand
Next time you are in a Lyft or an Uber, ask the driver why they enjoy it. Nine times out of ten the answer is the flexibility. They work when they want and as much as they want, and it lets them feel like their own boss while working for someone else.
It makes sense when you look at what they are actually given. Nobody tells a driver to drive around between nine and five. They are told: you will make this much if you do this many rides.
I think ride-share drivers often understand their upcoming work schedule better than most of the working world does.
That clarity is the thing. Not the app, not the flexibility in the abstract. Knowing exactly what needs to get done.
The reward problem
At most jobs, what is your reward for finishing your work early?
More work.
Instead of encouraging people to work more effectively, that drains motivation. It trains people to operate at a lesser level, because there is no benefit to them in excelling. Just the same consistent paycheck, every time, regardless.
You cannot fix that with a bonus. The metric is producing the behaviour, so the metric has to change.
What changed when we ran cycles
Three things, and none of them were about pay.
Cognitive closure. Any entrepreneur knows the feeling of never being done. Work is rarely over at the end of a day, a week, a quarter, or a fiscal year. Finish one thing and here are a thousand more. With cycles my team stopped trying to get through everything and started completing the things we had planned to move the organization forward right now.
Expectations were clear. Like the Lyft driver who knows how many rides the week needs, my team knew what was expected of them. And if something came up mid-week that got in the way, that was fine, because there was already a meeting scheduled. It just needed to be done by then.
It stopped being about how much time went into a task and became whether the task got done. Which also makes the real problems visible: if someone is missing deadlines, either you have a person who cannot do the job or a manager setting unrealistic expectations. Cycles make that easier to uncover, address and correct rather than hiding it under people quietly working late.
Everyone was less stressed. Regular on-cycle meetings gave my team somewhere to vent, rather than letting frustration boil over into their work. The Friday check-out did most of that. It also stopped me dropping random tasks on people mid-week, because my team was respectful of their own time, which made me respectful of it too.
The part that is really about families
Somewhere along the line we started downplaying the importance of raising children, and I think that contributes to a lot of what we see with mental health. Society has pushed parents toward more time working and less time with their families. More time at work, less time in their community.
I have lost count of how many times I have heard about how expensive daycare is, and about the parents working extra hard to pay for it. Parents spending time away from their children, to make money, to pay someone else to spend time with their child.
I cannot be the only person who finds that ridiculous.
The most valuable thing a business can hand someone is not on the payroll. It is the hours they get back, and a company that structures itself to give them is offering something a raise cannot match.
The whole method is in the guide to running your work in six-week cycles.