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La Bourse  /  Volume V  /  Nº V.02  /  Workbook — the Gainshare employee

A woman reading in an armchair in a room of plants, a tall window and hills beyond.
Plate V.02 · Workbook — the Gainshare employeeThe Third Hour.Every calorie spent has to be replaced, and the replacing is not an interruption of the labour. It is the other half of it.

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter V.02 · Work as Metabolism

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement — where a defined share of verified improvement returns to the people who created it. This chapter gives you something most gainshare members never get: the arithmetic to tell whether your scheme is measuring the term of the identity you can actually move, and whether the thing being shared with you is a gain or a debt you are taking out against your own body.

THE ONE QUESTION THIS CHAPTER PUTS TO YOUR SCHEME

Your gainshare measures something. Find out which of these three it is, because they behave completely differently and only one of them is honest about hours.

        Y/N   =   (Y/H)   x   (H/N)

  output per worker   =   output per hour   x   hours per worker

If your scheme pays on output per hour, and hours are cut, you get paid automatically for doing nothing. Output per hour rises mechanically whenever hours fall anywhere the elasticity is below one. That looks like a good deal for about two cycles, and then the baseline is reset and you have been paid once for an accounting artefact and permanently measured against it afterwards.

If your scheme pays on output per worker, you carry the full risk of the hours change. A five-day week to a four-day week is a 20 percent cut in hours, and holding output per worker flat requires output per hour to rise 25.0 percent. If the firm shares that gain fifty-fifty, your half is 12.50 percent — of a rise you had to produce entirely out of intensity.

If your scheme pays on total output with no hours term at all, it is not a gainshare. It is a piece rate with a nicer name, and every fatigue cost in this chapter lands on you and is invisible to the measure.

Find out which one yours is this week. Everything else in this workbook depends on the answer, and most schemes have never had the question put to them.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: read your own mechanism

Exercise 1.1 — Trace the measure (2 hours)

Take your scheme document and your last statement, and answer in writing:

  1. Which term of the identity is the measure — per hour, per worker, or total?
  2. Are hours in the measure at all? Whose hours? Contracted or actual?
  3. Is unpaid overtime counted anywhere? If not, the scheme is systematically blind to the cheapest way of improving the number it pays you on.
  4. What is the share percentage, and is it of gross improvement or net of costs?
  5. What happens to the baseline when a gain is realised?

Question five decides whether the scheme is worth being in. If the baseline resets to the improved level each period, every gain you make raises the bar you are measured against, the same effort yields less each cycle, and eventually nothing. A well-designed scheme holds the baseline fixed for a stated term or ratchets on a published schedule everyone can see coming.

Exercise 1.2 — Find the gain that is already there (1 week)

Somewhere in your team, hours are being spent that produce nearly nothing, and you know where. The chapter's arithmetic says where to look first: the marginal hour of a long week. Above about 49 hours the elasticity falls below one; by the twelfth hour of a shift the relative risk of an incident is about 2.00, double the first eight hours, for 50 percent more time.

List five places in your own week:

  1. The hour of the shift where your error rate is visibly higher.
  2. The handover that is done twice because it was done badly once.
  3. The task that is only ever done at the end of a long day.
  4. The overtime that exists because of a rota gap, not because of demand.
  5. The thing everyone knows is waste and nobody has costed.

Do not evaluate yet. You need one; five is so you have a choice.

Exercise 1.3 — The appreciative conversation (45 minutes, with a colleague)

Ask exactly this, and then stay quiet:

"Tell me about a stretch here when the work was going well and you could have kept doing it. What was the rota? What did we protect? What did we refuse?"

Take notes on the conditions, not the outcome. You are building the case that a change is already proven inside this workplace — which is a far stronger claim than one built on somebody else's pilot.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what you are owed

Exercise 2.1 — Value the overtime you would give up (2 hours)

This is the number that makes the conversation possible, and it is the one most gainshare members have never computed.

The chapter's worked plant: 200 workers at $28.00 an hour, 5.0 overtime hours each a week, 48 weeks.

  overtime hours     200 x 5 x 48            =     48,000 h/yr
  overtime cost      48,000 x 28 x 1.5       =  2,016,000 $/yr
  straight-time equivalent                   =  1,344,000 $/yr
  THE PREMIUM the firm is paying             =    672,000 $/yr

That premium is the price the firm is currently paying for the hours in the part of the curve where they are worth least. It is not a favour to anybody. It is a line item that a shorter, better-staffed week converts into something else — and the argument about who gets the difference is the argument you are actually in.

Exercise 2.2 — Compute the whole verified saving, not just the wage line (2 hours)

  wage line saving   2,016,000 - 1,774,080   =    241,920 $/yr
  injury saving      12 x 42,000 x 0.20      =    100,800 $/yr
  turnover saving    36 x 9,500 x 0.15       =     51,300 $/yr
  ---------------------------------------------------------
  VERIFIED ANNUAL SAVING                     =    394,020 $/yr

Note which two of those three lines your gainshare almost certainly does not count. The injury saving and the replacement saving are produced by the people whose bodies stopped being injured and who stopped leaving — and in most schemes they land entirely on the firm's side of the ledger because nobody wrote them into the measure.

That is the single most valuable claim in this workbook, and it is arithmetic rather than advocacy: (100,800 + 51,300) / 394,020 is 38.6 percent of the verified saving, produced by the workforce and shared with nobody.

Exercise 2.3 — Find the firm's break-even, so you know its real risk (1 hour)

  plant contribution   200 x 48,000          =  9,600,000 $/yr
  break-even fall in output per worker
                       394,020 / 9,600,000   =       4.10 %

The firm's entire exposure is that output per worker falls by more than 4.10 percent. Knowing that number changes the conversation completely, because you stop asking for a concession and start discussing a shared risk with a stated size. At a 2.00 percent fall the scheme nets $202,020; at 5.00 percent it loses $85,980.

Ask to be paid out of the band between those. That is a defensible ask, it is arithmetic rather than sentiment, and it is the first time most negotiators on either side have seen the number.

Exercise 2.4 — The honest negative you must carry yourself (1 hour)

Be the one who says it first.

Below about 49 hours a week, the best-identified productivity-of-hours curve we have says output is proportional to hours — so a cut from 46 hours to 38 is predicted to cost 17.4 percent of output per worker, and holding it flat would need a 21.1 percent rise in output per hour.

And the four-day-week evidence is much weaker than its reporting: the UK pilot had 61 organisations, self-selected, unblinded, revenue self-reported, no control arm. The one trial with a control — Svartedalens — produced a genuine but small 6.67 percent rise in output per hour, bought with a quarter more headcount and about twelve million kronor.

Carrying the honest negative yourself is the strongest position in the room. The person who has already named the weakness in their own case cannot have it used against them, and is the only person present whose figures anybody has a reason to believe.

PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Propose the two missing lines (1 day)

Ask for the injury saving and the replacement saving to enter the gainshare measure, with these terms:

TermAsk
Injury measureRecordable injuries and their loaded cost, twelve-month rolling
Replacement measureLeavers × replacement cost, twelve-month rolling
AttributionBoth counted at the unit level, not the firm level
BaselineThe twelve months before the change, signed
VerifierInternal audit, named
ShareThe same percentage as the existing measure

The firm's honest objection is attribution: injuries and resignations have many causes. The honest answer is that this is exactly as true of every other line already in the scheme, and the fix is a rolling window and a signed baseline, not exclusion.

Exercise 3.2 — Get intensity into the measure (1 day)

This is the clause that protects you, and almost no scheme has it.

Hours fall, output holds, output per hour rises — and the scheme pays out. That is the signature of success and the signature of pure intensification with the breaks removed. The two are indistinguishable in every measure your scheme currently has.

So propose that the gainshare pays only if an intensity measure is also held: breaks actually taken, the count of unbroken work blocks, or hours worked outside the counted ones. A gainshare with no intensity term pays you to dismantle your own recovery, and it will do it quietly, and the bill arrives in about five years.

Exercise 3.3 — Write the failure condition into your own side (half a day)

Ask for it, in writing, before the change: what result would mean this did not work?

Most people in your position avoid this question because it looks like inviting failure. It is the opposite. A scheme with no pre-agreed failure condition cannot fail — which means it can be declared to have failed at any moment, by anyone, on any evidence. Writing the condition down is how you stop that being someone else's discretion.

Exercise 3.4 — Fix the baseline ratchet (1 day)

If your baseline resets each period, propose one of two alternatives:

Either is defensible. A silent reset is not, and the fact that it has never been written down is usually the whole of the problem.

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Get the three lines published to the floor (1 day)

Output per hour, hours per worker, output per worker — same page, same query, every period, visible to the people being measured. This is not transparency as a value. It is quality control: the people whose bodies are the instrument are the only ones positioned to notice when the measure and the reality have parted company, and they cannot notice it if they cannot see the lines.

Exercise 4.2 — Recruit the second owner (2 weeks)

One person tracking the measure is a hobby; two is a practice. Recruit the second before you need them, and recruit them by giving them the credit for the first result. A scheme that depends on one well-informed person is one transfer away from being unread.

Exercise 4.3 — Watch the three warning signs (ongoing)

  1. The measure changes quietly. A line that was per worker is now per hour, or the denominator moved. Ask who approved it and when.
  2. The baseline moved without a schedule. The ratchet has arrived and nobody announced it.
  3. Output holds and breaks disappear. Intensification. Your numbers will look excellent for two years.

Any of the three is a conversation, not a grievance. All three at once is a scheme that has stopped being a gainshare.

Exercise 4.4 — Notice what you have actually bought (ongoing)

If this works, what you will have is not mainly money. It is the hour at the end of the day that still belongs to you, and the specific quality of judgement that comes back when a stretch of weeks has been properly slept. Anyone who has had that stretch knows the feeling: the second half of the day stops being a negotiation, and you stop being surprised by your own patience.

That is the return, and it does not appear in any of the three lines. Which is precisely why somebody has to keep saying it out loud while the lines are being argued about.

KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Work through it once. Anything you cannot answer is the finding.

THE CONVERSATION, SCRIPTED

Fifteen minutes with whoever owns the scheme. In this order.

Open with the firm's number, not yours. "I've costed the overtime line. The premium the plant pays is $672,000 a year, and the full verified saving from converting it looks like $394,020 — wage line, injuries and replacements together. I've used conservative rates and I'll show you the workings."

Name the firm's risk before it names it. "The break-even is a 4.10 percent fall in output per worker. That is the whole exposure. At a 3.00 percent fall it still nets $106,020."

Name the weakness in your own case. "The published four-day-week evidence is weaker than it sounds — self-selected, self-reported, no control arms. I am not building on it. I am building on our own overtime line."

Then the ask, in one sentence. "Two things: the injury and replacement savings enter the measure, because that is 38.6 percent of the verified saving and our people produce it — and the payout is conditional on an intensity measure holding, because otherwise we are being paid to dismantle our own recovery."

Close on the shared instrument, not the split. "I would like the failure condition written down before we start, and I would like the three lines published to the floor. If it does not work we will both be able to see it early, which is worth more to you than to me."

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

  1. When has a change to our hours or our rota clearly worked here? What made it work, and what would it take to have more of that?
  2. Which part of our week already produces well with people who are not exhausted — and what is protecting it?
  3. What do we already do that saves the firm real money and appears in nobody's measure? How would we prove it?
  4. If the three productivity lines were on the wall every month, what would we notice first?
  5. What would we all be willing to have measured about intensity, and what would we not? Why the difference?
  6. If this scheme were still running well in ten years, what would have had to be written down this year?