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from the more-or-less-getting-more-done-with-less-people dept.
Having underemployed workers can lead to two outcomes that benefit an organization—creativity and commitment to the organization—according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Statistics have shown that a significant proportion of workers worldwide are underemployed or working at jobs that are below their capacity. Researchers have estimated that underemployment ranges from 17 percent to two-thirds of the workforce in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the study.
"Our results have important implications for managers," said study co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Managers should not assume that employees will always respond negatively to their perception of being underemployed. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant in detecting perceptions of underemployment among employees.
"When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees' efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks," she said. "Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations."
Not getting enough hours to qualify for benefits is a good thing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 21 2016, @09:35PM
I can see how "spreading the hours around" may improve income equality, but conservatives will balk loudly.
Perhaps overtime hours can be restructured to encourage shorter work weeks without outright banning long hours. For example, gradually ramp up the over-time pay after 30 hours:
Hour 31: 1.05x
Hour 32: 1.10x
Hour 33: 1.15x
Hour 34: 1.20x
Hour 35: 1.25x
Hour 36: 1.30x
Hour 37: 1.35x
Hour 38: 1.40x
Hour 39: 1.45x
Hour 40: 1.50x
But some may find this too complicated such that staggering may be in order:
31 to 35: 1.20x
36 to 39: 1.35x
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 21 2016, @09:51PM
In Colorado (at one time at least) in order to combat under-staffing that was leading to deaths, they worked it like this:
Anything over 12 hours in a single shift was overtime. Anything over 40 hours a week was double time.
If you really wanted to "spread it around," just make all businesses 24 hours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22 2016, @12:56AM
TIP: it's probably counterproductive to create laws and regulations that force businesses to hire someone (or more likely, outside consultants) who's job is to become expert on these laws and optimize staffing based on those constraints. And chances are they'll end up with a solution that's different from what the authors of the new laws intended.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:14AM
I can see how "spreading the hours around" may improve income equality
The obvious rebuttal here is that wealth can be based on many things such as labor, capital, opportunity, etc. When you "spread the hours around", you make it harder to gain wealth via labor, because there's less gain of wealth from the lesser hours you can work. That means contrary to your hope, that labor-based wealth is going to be diminished and income inequality exaggerated.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 24 2016, @02:29PM
We already have this marvelous invention called "overtime", albeit starting at 40 hours. 40-48 hours 1.5x, 48+ 2x.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.