Overtime vs Productivity Pt. 2

Overtime vs Productivity Pt. 1

Is it worth it working extreme hours all the time, day in day out – more importantly are you actually getting that much done during that time?

Foreword

Since the first half of this article came out, a few things happened. The article was really well received and circulated through almost every major studio in LA, London, Sydney, New York, everywhere. I received more than a hundred emails which were almost entirely positive, surprisingly not only from artists but also from studio owners, producers, supervisors and alike. The article was translated into Spanish & Japanese and distributed further and a lot of interesting stories streamed in over the coming weeks about various radical changes and new work protocols.For those who have not read the first part, please click here

Now, there were a few people who did misinterpret the meaning of the article, and I expected that. I did receive comments about “You’re right Allan, this industry sucks, we’re worked too much” which wasn’t really the point of the article. I think that that’s entirely up to you whether you want to put up with OT and bad working conditions.

But the stories that have come in about changes to studios have been really rewarding to hear about.One of my favorites was actually one I witnessed first hand which a studio I was at arranged for a lady in a pink ape suit to come in and sing her own variation of You are my sunshine to everyone in the studio to boost morale, the lyrics I’m not sure if they were specifically customized to us but basically were that we’re appreciated for our hard work and efforts and keep up the great work. Now I thought this was great, as it really takes peoples minds off of work and gets everyone to laugh for 5 minutes, and probably costs $150 to arrange.

Plenty of people have contacted me to say that there has been drastic changes in day to day work, as well as how they handle a lot of their planning and scheduling etc. How to treat their team and reward them to keep morale up etc.