I get what you're saying, but "productive hours a month" as a metric has to really be per-person, because hiring a new person should cause "reversion to the mean" in the productivity calculus, instead of magically increasing the total. Mythical Man Month logic dictates that a boss that is ~90% efficient at using their own time, that hires and delegates work to someone who is only 50% efficient, will end up getting less done (due to the quadratic communication overhead) than they would have with no subordinates.
The best "productivity hacks", given communication overhead is a thing, aren't those that increase the total number of people trying to be productive, but rather those that increase each individual employee's productivity in a reliable way—such that they can be applied successfully by a large portion of the organization, rather than just to one hypomanic dude.
Over the years, I've employed a lot of people. Unless there is a crisis, I don't want anyone working that many hours. If there is a crisis, then I still don't want anyone working that many hours, so we need to figure out how to avoid that crisis in the future.
I found that people start to lose productivity after about 36 hours per week. Just four more hours, a full 40 hours, saw a drop in production. Over 40 hours and it was very noticeable.
This mostly applied to mentally taxing jobs.
My solution was, as best as I could, to hire people to do certain jobs, not hire them to fill seats for certain hours. Employees had a job to do and I was happy so long as they got it done well and on time. If they got it done early, they still got paid the same.
I'd not much care if they just went home after their job was done. So long as they met the time constraints, it was all good. Now, they usually stuck around and worked on other stuff, helped out, or refined their work. We also had, at one office, a pool table and small bar in the back - so they could opt to just hang around.
Still, once knowledge workers go past about 36 hours, they start to really slow down - by my observations. It really wasn't worth it, most of the time, to have someone working overtime. They get sloppy, slow, and unhappy. It can be done for a crunch time, but that I found that should be a rare thing.
The Seattle Hundreds that I hear about? Yeah, if I caught an employee trying to do something like that, I'd probably have reprimanded them. If they kept it up, I'd have probably terminated their employment with us. I don't want worn out employees and I don't want others feeling pressured to work long hours.
Heh... Sometimes I kinda miss the office. Threads like these bring back fond memories.
LOL I sold and retired ten years ago. The now-parent company has pretty much completely rid themselves of the old culture.
By the way, I never took a course in management or anything. My methods are all learned in the trenches. Theoretically, I'm working on a book that is about my experiences and why I ended up managing the way I did.
In many ways, it was a bit like the Old West, with slightly less prostitution and better hygiene. Also less murder... Come to think of it, it wasn't that much like the Old West, but it was very different than what I read about today.
The most important lessons I learned were to remember that I'd hired them to do things that I could not. As such, they knew their job better than I did. If I could have done it myself, I'd not have had to hire them.
Hire people you can trust. You have to trust them to be adults. Give them clear goals and then get the hell out of the way so that they can do their job.
Give them the tools they ask for, not the tools a vendor suggested. They have a reason they asked for a proprietary compiler, get it for them.
Respect goes a long way and begins in the recruitment phase. It surely doesn't end there. To get respect, you have to give respect.
Train, train, train. If you treat your employee right, you can absolutely train them and not worry about them being poached. Salary is actually a small part of overhead. Pay them well and treat them well. Our print room cost more than a senior employee. There's no reason to pay crap wages.
At the same time, wages aren't everything. Everyone wants to make good money but when you're already assured of making good money, other things start to count. Help your employees in their goals. If you have a QA that wants to move to dev, don't offer to pay back their educational expenses, but pay their expenses outright, pay for their child care, pay for their books, and keep paying their salary while they work a reduced schedule. Really, if you're treating them right, they won't just up and go to a new company after you've trained them.
I can go on, but there's a few things I've learned.
