Keeping control with reduced hours

What happens when our hours get cut? What happens to all the jobs that we usually fill our time with? How does the same work get done in fewer hours? They are all very good questions to ask, and sometimes we need answers to these questions because our world of work has shifted, and we suddenly need to deliver the same work in fewer hours.

It never fails to amaze me in the government sector how people have a "point one" or "point four" time allocation for a particular element of their job. That portion might get slashed in a budget round, yet the work tasks remain - and usually remain linked to the worker's performance indicators. Further, it is extremely rare that job sizing is undertaken in times of shrinkflation: in fact, I would suggest that job sizing is as rare as unicorn excrement. 

The decision on what is important is often left to those of us who are doing the work. Most times, in my experience, with little to no guidance on how we are to determine what parts of our former job still needs to be done, what gets left, and what must be handed over to someone else.

A very pragmatic senior management friend of mine is one of the coolest, calmest, clearest-thinking customers you would ever meet. Their advice is to: 

1. Firstly decide what jobs which we WANT to do; working out those things which will fit with our reduced hour budget. We aim to keep the jobs where we use our expertise, but to jettison those admin tasks such as reporting which don't require expertise, and those jobs which are 'nice to haves' as opposed to those which keep the money flowing in. And, realistically, software and AI should collectively be able to create reports. We shouldn't really need meat people for that (despite AI hallucination; Lingard, 2023).
   
   
2. Then we make a list of those undesirable tasks and remainder of our role which we have no time for. We put the estimated hours against each of those tasks. For some of us this will be immensely easy, because we will keep a daily diary and roughly note down how many hours each task takes. A simple add up will help us to get a feel for how long each one takes. For those of us who have not had the training to keep a daily log, we will need to hurriedly create one. We can go back over the past week, then try to keep a daily note for however long we have before we need to get back to our manager with our budget proposal. And hopefully, if we have been in the "damn, why didn't I keep a note of that" camp, we will keep daily notes from now on, because it is very, very handy ammunition to have in our possession.
   
   
3. Finally, we pass the undesirable list to our manager with the hour estimate, and advise them that -  as our reduced hours are insufficient for these to be completed - these tasks will need to be allocated to another. We should NOT ask what jobs we should stop doing: WE should decide what we want to leave behind, and simply pass on the remainder of our former role, which we are no longer going to be paid for, with the estimated hours each item takes. Once those tasks are passed on, they are no longer our problem. 

Of course this is ideal world stuff. But deciding ahead of the game what we want to keep and what needs to shift elsewhere leaves us at much less chance of being left with the bits of the job that anyone could do (and which is even less motivating). Being active in the process helps to give us back some sense of control.

Good luck: these processes take courage. Like many things worth doing, it is not easy, but it is liberating.

Sam

Reference:

Lingard, L. (2023). Writing with ChatGPT: An illustration of its capacity, limitations & implications for academic writers. Perspectives on Medical Education, 12(1), 261-270.  https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.1072