Better Equipment at Home

One particularly odd thing in era of technology is that employees seem to take work home with them fairly often because the equipment they have is more capable than the equipment their employer provides. I don't expect it is unique or unprecedented, and that there are various professions, going back centuries, where workers have brought their own tools to the workplace because what their employer furnished was not fit for the job, but it confounds reason that it should ever be so.

Yet when it comes to computers, particularly for those provided to design staff, it's common to hear someone remark that they will need to finish a job overnight or during the weekend because they have better equipment at home. Many employers do not provide adequate equipment, and most them forbid "unauthorized" equipment in the workplace - and make it very difficult to get authorization - but the latter is an entirely different problem.

I can think of only two places where I worked that the computer I had been provided by the company was better than that which I had at home for my own use. In fairness, I did freelance work in those days and needed a better system than the average "user" had - but given that I was doing the same kind of work for a smattering of small clients as I did at the office and was willing to purchase adequate equipment for the job on my own budget, perhaps that's even more damning?

The first of these companies was an Internet division stood up in a larger company during the early days of the medium (pre-1995), which threw massive amounts of capital at their green-field venture. In that place, the pendulum had swung so far in the opposite direction that UNIX systems that cost as much as a new car, and not a cheap model at all, were gathering dust in the offices of workers who didn't need that level of power. My sense is that many companies fear this will be the case if they provide high-end equipment to their workers: it won't be used, no ROI, waste of budget ... and unusual situations such as this likely provide a convenient example when making a case to set the bar very low.

The second company was a nonprofit organization where I worked in a department headed by an executive who fully embraced scientific management (per Frederick Taylor) and as such he truly believed, and was able to convince his superiors, that the quality of work depended on the quality of the equipment (among other factors - for example, he was also a proponent of training, which is an entirely separate train of thought, but it would follow the same track). Just as Taylor's coal-miners were highly efficient when they used shovels that were well-designed for the purpose and sturdy enough not to break, so is a designer or knowledge worker more efficient when he has a workstation that is well-designed for the purpose and does not crash, freeze, or lag often.

The exceptions considered, now turn to the typical situation, in which companies provide their designers the very same computers they provide to their accountants and clerical workers, albeit loaded with slightly different software. It's no more the "right tool for the job" than would be a coal-shoveler handed a garden spade with a slightly longer handle, and the effects are just as detrimental to quality and efficiency.

"Quality" of design work is much more difficult to define, even more so to convince someone else to disagree with your definition - but the frequency with which designers need to do work at home, using their own equipment, is primarily motivated by the desire to do quality work, and a plain indication that the equipment in the workplace is insufficient to do so.

Efficiency, however, is much easier to demonstrate in quantifiable terms: it deals with time, which is easily translated to money. It would likely be a conservative estimate to suggest that 30 minutes a day of each designer's time is wasted, either in waiting for a workstation to process a command (a sign of insufficient memory or processor speed) or to have to do a task "the hard way" because the company-issued software isn't capable of doing what they want conveniently. Multiply 30 minutes per day times a fully-loaded labor cost of $50 an hour (also conservative), times about 200 work days per year (ditto), and you arrive at $6,250 per year, times the three-year lifespan of a workstation, and the result is $18,750.

The argument in favor of purchasing cheap equipment is immediate cost-savings: if you have to purchase a thousand computers, the difference between a $1,500 model and a $4,000 model is $2,500, which multiplies to $2.5 million for a thousand workers. This is a significant cost-savings that the purchasing department can smugly claim is an achievement. But as a consequence, if the cheap computers waste only half an hour a day of the users' time, those costs are also multiplied by the thousand users - so the $2.5 million saved on the immediate purchase results in an $18.75 million loss in productivity. Clearly, that's nothing to be smug about.

This leads to a diversion on a favored topic of mine: the tendency of the corporate world to focus on short-term benefits to the detriment of long-term performance. I'll let it go at a mention without going into detail, as I've recently considered this very issue. I'll also avoid the side-trip to the topic of employee morale, the difficulty workers encounter on a day-to-day struggling with poor equipment and the disdainful reaction they get when they ask for anything better, but that too is a concern. And the topic of quality has already been carefully side-stepped, though the quality of the product results from the quality of the work, which results at least in part from the quality of the tools, the net effect of which is a poorer customer experience.

My sense, however, is that the topics I have avoided are even more detrimental to the long-term performance of a firm than the one topic I expect most decision-makers would understand: efficient use of funds, for the long-term impact on product quality, customer loyalty, and employee morale are likely far more detrimental than a few million dollars in savings. But I'll leave it at that.