Production companies spend a lot of effort, maintaining their material assets. But what to do with service companies in which employees are the main value and the most expensive asset? The study indicates that most of them are not too worried about the economical and lean attitude to this asset. On the contrary, often in such companies you can witness the most intensive operation of human resources when people have to work on the verge of their capabilities. And workers of intellectual labor, who are capable of sacrificing in critical situations in sleep and rest in favor of labor, are considered heroes.
How effective is this work “on the verge”? Should a recession deprive people of the right to rest? For a long time it became the norm to abandon the weekend and even keep a working phone with you during the vacation.
Numerous performance studies clearly indicate that after a 40-hour working week, the quality of the employee’s work is significantly reduced. He begins to make mistakes. Therefore, companies can be fatally mistaken, believing that forcing people to work 12 hours a day, they save their own time or money. Employees’ mistakes can often cost them much more. At the same time, some software developers, which, on the contrary, reduced the working week to 35 hours, get significant advantages.
The economy of knowledge, in which mind and creativity are considered great value, dictates its principles of effectiveness. The staff must be protected, and its resources should save no less than saved the resource of the work of machine tools in a production economy.
Leading companies should adopt two principles of the new economy: additional load does not make people more effective, but rather reduces their performance to an unacceptable level; Burning is what happens to people who see nothing but work.
And finally, studies “score the last nail in the coffin of multitasking” (doing several matters at the same time). It is impossible to safely drive a car, while participating in a telephone conference. And if at the meeting you check e -mail, then most likely there will be no idea what was talking about there. Therefore, another attribute of performance in the knowledge economy is the human ability to fully concentrate and remain in this state for a long time.
Researchers argue that the best way to develop mental abilities is a daily walk, but by no means an additional load on the brain. Top managers who walk on foot for only 45 minutes demonstrate much higher performance indicators than those that “do not have time” for walks.