Tag: Jobs
What motivates people to work hard? (Or: Productivity and Frederick Herzberg)
Imagine a man sitting across from you. He has brown wavy hair, kind eyes and a broad smile. He is dressed in a black suit and talks, very appropriately, as if he is a professor of esteemed learning. Leaning forward in his chair, he speaks slowly and methodically. Think of a time when you felt ...
How To Get a Job As a Generalist
I've had various people write to me following the release of my TEDx video earlier in the year. The most common question by far has been about how to get employed as a generalist. Often, the person concerned has built up a diverse range of skills, experiences and knowledge bases and wants to know how to ...
Long Working Hours Are Making Australians: Unproductive, Mentally Ill, Physically Ill
Research indicates working more than 48 hours a week is associated with significant declines in productivity, more mistakes and more mental health problems. Yet the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons reckons working up to 65 hours a week “is appropriate for trainees to gain the knowledge and experience required”. It’s an attitude that explains why a 2017 audit found ...
The Systematic Mistreatment of Casual Workers
* This is an article written by Chloe Byrne, featuring quotations from myself and others on casual work and employment laws. Casual employees within the retail and hospitality sectors are often systematically exposed to wage theft and mistreatment by employers, industry sources have said. An expectation of working unpaid hours outside of rostered shifts has ...
South Korea is Shutting Down Computers to Stop Overtime Work, We Should Too
Recently, the South Korean government announced that they will be automatically shutting down government computers to stop overtime work. Computers will be shut down preliminarily at 9pm on Fridays, before being shutdown at 7pm, after a six month waiting period. Should we be following suit? In Australia, working hours are actually higher today than in ...
What Will The Jobs of the Future Look Like?
My book Essays in AI looks at the future of traditional work and the upheaval about to hit the economy from AI, automation and new technologies. Having already seen a rapidly changing workforce in the early 2000s, the future looks confusing and bleak for workers. New technology will fundamentally shift the way we work - transforming ...
We Should Have a 15 Hour Working Week (Says an Economist from 1930)
By 2030, Keynes wrote, we should all be working 15 hours a week at full time wages (not pro rata). The question why haven't we got there yet? I answered in a previous post, which you can read by clicking the link. Here, I share John Maynard Keynes' full essay from 1930 on the topic. At ...
What happened to the 15-hour workweek? Productivity gains went to the top 1%.
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological change and productivity improvements would eventually lead to a 15-hour workweek. But, despite significant productivity gainsover the past few decades, we still work 40 hours a week on average. Keynes’s reasoning was that by producing more with less (also known as being more productive), all of our needs would be met ...
On the Future of Pointless Jobs, the 9-5 Work Day and the Robot Revolution
When we see the world through the lens of how things currently are, it is almost impossible to imagine things differently without in some way imparting some of the existing dynamics into the imagined future. Ask a random person on the street today why they work a nine to five job, and they will give ...
An Entitlement Complex, or Gen Y’s Quest for Meaning?
In the late 1950s, Frederick Herzberg conducted surveys on what we now term “The Greatest Generation,” those who fought during WWII. Selecting a group of factory workers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Herzberg asked “what do you like and dislike about your job?” After months of research and a literature review of thousands of similar studies, Herzberg concluded ...
