Has the Contractor worked hard enough?

As part of Friday.

There is an important question that always worries many employers not only in our beloved CIS, but also in general around the world: has the hired employee worked enough during the working day?

To answer this question, legal, methodological, administrative, automated and software mechanisms and tools are being developed that show with enviable consistency: no, the employee has not worked enough. Judging by the scandals in the media, the employees of the Amazon company work closest to a sufficient level in the developed world, and only the robots of the automated production line work quite sufficiently.

Opinions about how to live with this, deal with it, and whether this is normal in principle, are very different and invariably cause heated discussions among some employers, experts and those who work enough on the one hand – and all others on the other hand. But this is not the subject of this article.

Sometimes the employer becomes the Customer of works (services, projects) (this happens in the amazing world of unbridled commerce). Sometimes he transfers this approach from labor relations to commercial ones.

And then he has the question asked in the title. “Has the Executor worked hard enough?” — the Customer asks himself, and immediately knows the answer to this question.

No.

Not enough.

If this question arises, the answer is always the same – no one ever works enough, unless it is an automated line where robots work (but they could be more perfect).

The reasons for this question to arise from the Customer's side are again simple – the Customer does not know how to control the ordered work; is not sure that he has chosen the best offer on the market; the Customer's manager has a chief executive who determines the efficiency of spending funds by the amount of work produced and visible to him, and the volume in hours or tasks is the only measure of the amount of work available with insufficient expertise (and with sufficient expertise, he sometimes gets the feeling that a home office for project development will be more profitable, because they can also hang a headlight on their forehead).

Such a Customer is never satisfied with the volume of work performed, and many of his demands within the order are caused precisely by this.

In web development, this is especially true for design and UI – the mysterious world of the backend is incomprehensible, the magic on which it works requires a clear description of the desired result, and asking to move pictures, suggesting a different design concept and implementing a slightly different animation in the background can be done easily and stress-free . But the same thing exists within, for example, apartment renovation; industrial equipment settings; conducting some kind of research (only marketers are quite good at justifying their work, but in relation to a civilian programmer researching harsh legacy, for example, I heard “Well, why are you digging around there for the third day, the developer of this system did everything in half an hour, it’s a pity that he died”) and so on.

If the Contractor’s manager does not know how to somehow handle such expectations (extinguish them on approach, refute them with reason, fill them with imitation of hectic activity and endless meetings with real decision-makers on the project on the part of the Customer – there are many ways), then the project will be complex, jerky and will almost inevitably fail beyond the time budget and allocated resources.

But, besides the Customer, there are also the best friends of the production department, without whom there would be no orders. Sales department. And some sales departments are very fond of the argument “we will work quite a lot, you will see it, so the amount will be exactly this.”

And even if the Customer was ready to pay for a result that suited him, and not for the amount of work that satisfied him, the Contractor's sales manager can, in the course of processing objections, change his expectations from “we will provide you with what you need for this amount” to “you will pay us enough, and we will work enough on what you need.” And he will even go and teach other sales managers this argumentation and this formation of expectations in the Customer.

And as a result, in some cases, the decision maker and his managers will sit on the Customer’s side and monitor the sufficiency of the performers’ work on the project; and on the Contractor’s side, the project manager will sit and demonstrate the diligence of the entire team in achieving the goals and developing the required result. At the same time, the Customer will look at the cost of a working hour of working specialists and be amazed at it; and the Contractor’s manager will look at the rapidly melting time budget in the ritual dances and think about heart drops and a pile of unfulfilled tasks.

And the Customers who spread bad labor practices into commerce; and individual sales managers who support their aspirations will, in principle, be satisfied. The first will receive a portion of labor rituals in their honor from those who are not their subordinates; the latter will take their honestly earned bonus from the sale, and everyone will move on, carrying an understanding of commercial activity as “a sufficient amount of work for sufficient money from the employees of an external legal entity-Executor.”

The market is large and will not deteriorate immediately.