The One-Hour Employee

Imagine you’re a manager. You’re hiring.

You have an intriguing candidate. Let’s call this candidate Barry.

In one hour, Barry can produce 10 times what a good employee in this position can produce in a week. Code, doorknobs, sales leads—whatever it is your team produces. It’s at least as high-quality as what everyone else on the team produces.

So if Barry shows up at 8AM on Monday, at 9AM he’s produced 10x the weekly output of a solid employee.

Here’s the catch. If Barry works two hours, his net productivity is down to the normal weekly output of a solid employee.

So by 10AM on Monday, that stack of 10 doorknobs Barry made is down to one doorknob. 1/10 of the size of the stack at 9AM.

Every hour past two hours, Barry will destroy 1x the weekly productivity of a normal employee. It’s not malicious. It’s just what happens when he works extra, even though he’s doing all the right things.¹

So at 11AM on Monday, that stack of doorknobs is completely gone. Zero. At noon, he’s somehow destroyed an additional week’s worth of doorknobs.

Yeah, this is unrealistic, but it’s a thought experiment. Stick with me.

Assume that you somehow know for certain that Barry truly can produce this output. Also assume that magically, in that single hour, his 10x productivity can happen and stuff from meetings can also be handled.²

To be clear, this doesn’t apply to roles that are truly time-based, like a security guard³, waiter⁴, or emergency room doctor⁵.

The Questions

Three questions for you:

1. Do you hire Barry?
2. How much do you offer him?
3. How much time do you expect Barry to work?

Think about it for a minute, and have some reasoning for your answers.

Okay. Now that you’ve taken a minute to think⁶, I have a couple of follow-up questions.

What do your answers say about your understanding of the relationships between time worked, value produced, and pay?

What do your answers say about your understanding of the time-related obligation of an employee to an employer?

If you chose not to hire Barry, how much of your answer had to do with “fairness” of some sort (e.g., to other employees)?

A Parallel Situation

Let’s change the scenario a bit. You own a factory, and you need a new widget making machine. You currently use the WidgetOne.⁷

A vendor offers you an intriguing new machine. Let’s call this machine the X-5000.

In one hour, X-5000 can produce 10 times what a WidgetOne can produce in a week.

So if you start up the X-5000 at 8AM on Monday, at 9AM it’ll have produced 10x the weekly output of a WidgetOne.

Here’s the catch. If an X-5000 runs for two hours without a maintenance cycle, its net productivity goes down to the weekly output of a WidgetOne. The maintenance cycle takes the remainder of the week.

So if you leave the X-5000 running until 10AM, between defective widgets, wasted raw materials, and additional maintenance costs, you’re netting out to a WidgetOne’s weekly output.

Every hour past two hours, an X-5000 will destroy 1x the weekly productivity of a WidgetOne.⁸

So if you have one X-5000 and one WidgetOne, and the WidgetOne runs all week, and the X-5000 runs for four hours, your factory’s weekly output is zero.

If you run the X-5000 for one hour, and the WidgetOne all week, you get a total of 11 times the output of a single WidgetOne.

To take labor costs out of the equation, assume that a week-long maintenance cycle on an X-5000 takes exactly the same personnel that running a WidgetOne all week takes. Samesies.

Even More Questions

Three questions for you about the parallel situation:

1. Do you buy an X-5000?
2. How much do you pay for one?
3. How much time do you plan to run the X-5000?

Think about it for a minute, and have some reasoning for your answers.

Okay. Now that you’ve taken a minute to think⁹, I have a couple of follow-up questions.

Are your answers different for the X-5000 than for Barry?

If you have higher time-related expectations of Barry than the X-5000, what does that say about the relative value you place on the time an employee invests, versus the output an employee produces?

If your reasoning for why you’d not hire Barry (or expect Barry to put in more than an hour) included the word “should”, does that indicate you put a higher value on “should” than “is”?

Do you feel at all like any of this was unfair or a trick?

My Answers (and Someone Else’s)

Here’s how I’d answer the questions, assuming time-in-seat was truly irrelevant to the position.¹⁰

1. I would hire Barry / buy the X-5000.
2. I would pay Barry 2-3x what I’d pay a normal employee / depending on TCO, I’d pay up to 9X for the X-5000.
3. I would expect Barry to work for 1 hour a week / run the X-5000 for one hour a week.

The second answer is interesting to me, in how they differ. Depending on the situation, I might pay Barry up to 9X. But it’s often true that in knowledge work, an individual’s output has to be combined with output from other individuals in a way that can dilute the value of an exceptional performer. In the factory, a similar situation would be if I only had the ability to ship the output of two WidgetOnes per week—the additional output of the X-5000 would be waste in the form of overproduction—so I’d be willing to pay only ~1.5x for the X-5000. In either case, I’d be willing to pay more than for the standard output level, but I would not pay more than the expected overall productivity gain across the entire system.

For Barry’s pay, I’d also want to build in incentives to work exactly an hour. Maybe I’d pay him 1.5x, with a bonus of 1.5x if he keeps his time to 1 hour a week. Or pay him 2.5x, but dock his pay if he worked more than an hour.¹¹ I’d want to be darn sure I wasn’t paying extra to destroy productivity.

I shared this thought experiment with an executive some years ago. Their answers:

1. If he’s not willing to work 40, I wouldn’t hire him.
2. 1x-1.2x what a normal employee would get paid.
3. Make him work 40 hours.

I bring this up, not to dunk on that executive, but to illustrate the weird knots our brains get tied in when it comes to hours, especially when we’re not able to be clear about value we produce.

One of¹² the objections this executive raised was that he would not be able to justify to his boss having an employee that worked only an hour a week. Productivity didn’t come into it. In their mind, pay was compensation for hours, not for outcomes, output, or value.

And that objection led to very confident answers that would lead to paying a full-time salary for someone to produce negative 37 times the output of a normal employee. In other words, they’d pay Barry $100,000 a year to neutralize the positive output of 37 colleagues making a collective $3,700,000 per year.

That is not a trade-off I’m willing to make.¹³

Wrapping Up

Like any thought experiment, this one has some contrived assumptions.

Those assumptions are designed to explicitly separate output from time worked. The X-5000 portion of the thought experiment shifts the question away from humans, to help identify if our answers are based on logic—or on something else.

There’s not necessarily a right or a wrong answer. There are certainly going to be a lot of factors involved in any answer you give.

But the answers you give—and any gap between your answers for Barry¹⁴ and the X-5000—can help you challenge your own assumptions as a manager. It may turn out you really value having someone “butt in seat”. That might be a valid thing to value, or it might be unhelpful in your situation.

If you resist answering, or feel irritated by someone else’s answers, that’s worth examining. It might indicate you have biases that you don’t want to admit to. For example, maybe you pride yourself on being coldly logical, but you realize your answers would give you a suboptimal result. Spending a bit of time thinking about it or exploring it with a trusted friend¹⁵ can help you know yourself better.

This thought experiment can apply to overtime, by the way. The numbers are a bit different, but it’s clear that productivity declines and becomes negative at some point. Also worth considering!

Want your assumptions challenged to be able to maximize what you and your team can produce, even if it’s counterintuitive? I offer coaching for managers that can help you (yes, you!) make productivity improvements so everyone feels less stressed, and nobody destroys a stack of doorknobs.

1. It’s magic. Or a glitch in the matrix. Or the monkey’s paw. Or something. [↩]
2. Obviously, Barry must be in a role that allows contribution outside of meetings. He’s not a meeting facilitator or a therapist. [↩]
3. “It’s okay, boss. The place was super-secure for an hour! No more need to watch it!” [↩]
4. “Serving breakfast all day. Wait, no, from 6-7AM only. And, uh, only on Tuesdays.” [↩]
5. “Looks like nobody had any emergencies for this one hour. Sweet! Good luck for the next 167 hours. See you all next week, everyone!” [↩]
6. We both know you haven’t taken that minute to think. [↩]
7. Solid machine. Great track record. [↩]
8. In my head, this involves the X-5000 actually seeking out and destroying the output of the WidgetOnes on the floor. I’ve not decided if it’s done via lasers, nanobots, or evil-AI takeovers of other factory machines. [↩]
9. Okay, this time I’m 50/50 on whether you stopped to think. [↩]
10. In practice, time isn’t going to be truly irrelevant. Relationships, mentoring, picking up bits of information here and there… But for the sake of this thought experiment, I’m willing to make that assumption. [↩]
11. Getting that contract written up could be interesting! [↩]
12. but certainly not the only [↩]
13. This isn’t the focus of the thought experiment, but it’s true that some (many?) organizations pay people good salaries, and those people neutralize or impede the work of multiple others. This is often well-intentioned and sometimes celebrated. And no, I’m not picking on any particular function or role. I’ve seen this with engineers, PMs, managers, quality, sales… [↩]
14. I chose Barry’s name deliberately. The first to correctly guess why was Ope Ajibola, who made reference to “Barry Allen-level output”. Barry Allen, of course, is better known as The Flash. Ope wins seeing his name in a footnote! [↩]
15. Or a coach! [↩]