
Japanese Company Charges Its Staff $100 an Hour to Use Conference Rooms - drieddust
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-20/charging-employees-for-conference-rooms-helps-disco-boost-profit
======
lordleft
This was not as dystopian an idea I thought it would be from the title. I'm
all for innovative ways of cutting down on unnecessary meetings - creating an
internal currency to meter/limit them is a clever idea.

~~~
fzeroracer
To be honest, reading the article made it sound even worse than the title.
Having everything at your company priced for individual workers (from PCs to
desks to smaller things) is a lot of nonsensical stress placed on workers. I
already do enough econ bullshit outside of work, the last thing I want to do
is start keeping spreadsheets for things that my workplace should provide me.

~~~
rtpg
Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just
_make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats
right up

Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid
meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously.

You start charging them for the meeting rooms

Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without
meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.

~~~
dmix
These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's
hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all
about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized
managerial approach.

It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is
hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses.

The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to
perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while
freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work.
Which together is an amazing concept by itself.

Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial
processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed
off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy
google docs, etc at high hourly rates.

I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers)
was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless
meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something.

Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet
umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really
well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it
onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software).

The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they
need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management
to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models.

This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very
well with certain types of people.

Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from
hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company
structure.

So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather
strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units.
Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid
performance based compensation.

TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks
_(avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto
everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche
flourishes in these types of environments)._

------
ekianjo
> Or sometimes it’s just about pride: One project that attracted funding was
> to buy ad space at a professional baseball stadium in Hiroshima, home to
> Disco’s main factory, for marketing purposes. About 400 workers pooled
> $140,000 of their own bonus money—or about $350 each—for the privilege to
> see their company’s logo after work, even though the impact on the company’s
> bottom line seems doubtful at best

That somewhat conflicts with the prior narrative that everyone is super
conscious about measuring everything - then people are throwing (their own)
money away in a stupid ad campaign which is pretty much guaranteed to be
garbage in ROI.

~~~
WalterSear
The ROI improves if your manager would really like you to contribute to the
cause.

~~~
rocqua
Supposedly, you're free to switch managers at any point. Then again, switching
teams helps to get out of a bad manager relationship, but it doesn't help
build a good one.

------
gamblor956
...out of a company budget that they use to requisition company resources.

They don't pay out of pocket, which would generally be illegal in most First
World nations...

~~~
gpm
It sounds like they get the money in a bonus otherwise, so it is basically out
of pocket.

~~~
sneak
That’s not how bonuses work. I think it is entirely reasonable to give
employees extra, unexpected and non-compulsory payments of some large fraction
of whatever real money they demonstrably saved the company.

~~~
esoterica
That is how this particular set of incentive bonuses work. If every marginal
dollar you spend on a meeting reduces the amount you get on your bonus, then
by definition you are spending money on the meeting out of pocket.

~~~
sneak
Nobody can reasonably expect an optional payment. If you think that’s “out of
pocket”, you are counting your chickens before they have hatched.

~~~
esoterica
Your “expectations” are irrelevant. Either d(bonus)/d(meetings) = 0 or > 0.

------
kenneth
A way to apply this to a startup today is to have a budget for each team (or
even individual) that they can spend on fun activities (office beer, team
bonding night out, or whatever other activity, something people look forward
to) and have each meeting or conference room use cost money from that budget.

I think very quickly unnecessary meetings will start to disappear.

~~~
xxxpupugo
What will actually happen is that everyone will be dragged into lengthy video
conference that doesn't require a meeting room in the first place.

The incentive to eliminate unproductive meeting should be something else.

~~~
whereistimbo
According to the article, you need to pay the person too if you want a meeting
with him.

> “For example, today I paid Will for this meeting room and also for Naito to
> come in and spend his time to talk to you,” Sumio Masuchi, head of Disco’s
> press team, tells Bloomberg reporters

------
anonu
I feel like there could be negative externalities (unintended consequences)
from this. For example, meetings should take place, but nobody wants to deal
with the cost - so people avoid the meeting altogether - to the detriment of
the company . Or, people end up approaching individuals at their desk - and
the collaborative nature of meeting in a conference room is avoided - not to
mention increased back-channeling and untimely interruptions.

~~~
caminante
Except the chosen system seeks to avoid your "wasteful" scenarios. What you're
describing is already in the status quo for a "normal" company.

From wikipedia, the company had a profit margin of ~15-20% in FY16 on 1.2 BUSD
in revenues with ~4k employees. That's ~0.29 MUSD/employee in revenues, giving
decent headroom to book rooms at $100/hr (Remember that these are quasi-
dollars.)

~~~
rightbyte
Yes, but why would I want to save the company 10 000 USD by spending 100 USD
of my "quasi dollar" bonus? Do I file a reimbursement? It would be really
interesting to read the actual rules for this place.

A lot of costs and benefits are not easily measurable, and e.g. someone else
might get the benefit of it rather than me just paving some part of the ground
for him.

In general this system seems to be really sensitive for toxic players. How do
they keep back-stabbing in check?

I would guess that some industry position is giving the company their edge,
like Valve can have flat do-what-you-want organization because they are at the
top of the pyramid eating a bite of every game makers lunch of the platform.

~~~
brianpgordon
Hah, wow, you basically communicated the same things as my rambling comment
above, written in parallel at the same time.

~~~
rightbyte
Brevity is the soul of wit, et cetera.

I mean, the idea is interesting, but I have hard time believing it's good. It
sounds insane, but maybe other company de facto rules are more insane? Without
trying it out I have a hard time judging the feasibility, even though I
believe it is destructive.

------
droithomme
A lot of developers in open space offices will grab an unused conference room
when they need some quiet to focus on tricky code.

Probably would want to pass on that with this policy. Assuming it's even true,
given it's on Bloomberg which with its various pronouncements this last year
has proven as reliable as The Sun. Maybe they just made it all up.

~~~
tehlike
Ideally we bring offices back for swes. When i had a room with 3 more engs few
years ago, my productivity was much higger. Less interruptions, more focus.

~~~
citruspi
Ideally being the operative word. I absolutely loved having an office, but
unfortunately, I don't think it's likely to happen, especially at the majority
of places which have switched to open floor plans.

My current employer has gone even further and gone from open floor plans where
people don't have offices, but do have their own desks, to a system where
people don't even have their own desks and they keep their stuff in lockers.
(So yeah, desktops are being phased out).

I just work remotely now - I'm significantly happier and more productive than
if I needed to deal with lockers and open floor plans and all the other office
bullshit on a daily basis.

~~~
tehlike
That does sound terrible to not have desks. We used to joke around about pms
and their navigation from meeting to meeting without sitting at their desks.

Little did i know, it could be a future i may have to find myself in :)

~~~
jimmaswell
I don't have any permanent seating location at work. I just sit wherever I
want, including in the gym or outside, if nobody's immediately asking for
collaboration on something or to discuss something. I like it a lot this way.

~~~
saagarjha
I’m curious how economical this is: at a desk you can customize out door
yourself, but if you’re sitting anywhere you might frequently end up in less-
than-optimal situations…

~~~
tehlike
Almost all engineers i work with prefer desktop, and as long as it is a
desktop, i am ok working anywhere.

The problem is though i am a bit of a messy person, it would be unfair to the
next person.

~~~
saagarjha
Carrying around a desktop might be a bit hard, no?

~~~
tehlike
I was more thinking of a shared workstation setting, which i am sure doesnt
rrally exists

Laptops are not ideal work machines for most swes. At the very least they need
a large screen, and more functional keyboard, and at that point you might as
well give them a full workstation.

~~~
dagw
At the office I worked at that did this, there was a docking station with two
monitors a keyboard and a mouse permanently at each desk. So you could, in
theory, just plug your laptop into the docking station at any desk and start
working.

------
kazinator
> _People really cut back on useless meetings_

That's only good if they didn't also cut down on useful meetings.

Also, maybe people are just having meetings where it's cheaper: outside of the
$100/hr conference rooms, or somewhere outside of the premises entirely.
(Izakaya, ramen place, ...). Or in virtual space: by using video conferencing
from their desks?

You can't reduce meetings by jacking up the cost of meeting places, if you
have not cornered the meeting place market.

I think this idea works only to the extent that people hate meetings; it will
certainly cut down on meetings which people don't want to attend in the first
place. Problem is, sometimes you have to drag people into meetings in order to
get information from them or other cooperation.

~~~
tehlike
Escalation. Right dose of escalation is healthy. Our vp at the time complained
about things not getting escalated enough (and he is very blunt person, so i
believe it).

If someone is not cooperative, escalate.

Edited: expanded on what i mean.

------
agency
Obligatory Matt Levine take

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-21/slack-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-21/slack-
s-non-ipo-went-pretty-well#everything-is-seating-charts)

> Good lord have they never read Coase[1]? The point of working at a company
> is that, like, there are pens, and desks, and a place for your umbrella, and
> the ability to commit to continuous work on a project for a sustained period
> rather than constantly shaking things up with never-ending auctions for
> resources and people. If it’s just a bunch of by-the-day freelancers at
> rented desks, why have the company at all? (In fact, it's a mixed bag:
> “Disco’s operating margin has risen to 26% from 16% since the experiment was
> implemented eight years ago,” but “engineers have quit, complaining the
> approach detracts from their ability to focus purely on research,” and “the
> relentless focus on quarterly profits can encourage short-term thinking.”)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)

------
momokoko
All of the negatives of running your own business without any of the upside.

~~~
1123581321
The article mentions that the upside is a quarterly bonus that can approach
the value of the annual salary.

~~~
jodrellblank
So, if they get five times salary each year, are they all retiring after a
fifth of a normal working lifetime?

~~~
1123581321
I don’t believe they all achieve equally, and I don’t know what they do with
the money other than the article mentions that some people who do well there
buy nice cars. It sounds like their lifestyles might inflate to match their
income, which would delay retirement, but I can’t think of a way to determine
the extent.

------
thisisit
I have personally seen some companies divide the total facility across teams
to try and focus on each team's ROI. Even non-core business activities like HR
is spread across different teams so that the company has better view. I have
found such optimisations to be an overkill. Because in larger scheme of things
these costs are peanuts.

The same case appears to be with this company too. While it does sound great
to have people not use meeting rooms for unnecessary meetings the bottom line
effect is going to be negligible. The negative effect might be that either
people will try to include as many as possible people to spread the cost or
they might actively use their desk spaces for all meetings to avoid paying the
costs.

~~~
cardimart
Wouldn't including as many people as possible increase the cost of the meeting
since you're buying more people's time?

------
cbdumas
I wish more places would do this not for meetings but for meeting _rooms_.
Meeting rooms in some orgs are a huge pain to get, which actually leads to a
negative feedback cycle of people booking them far in advance "just in case"
and then not using them.

------
pimmen
In Sweden we prize consensus very highly. To the extent that's possible, we
try to debate things and do what everyone in the organization agrees to do
rather than having a manager decide by him or herself and then execute. Our
ministers don't even have executive power, their powers are very limited and
they must seek approval from our parliament for everything they want to do,
they can not really order anyone to do anything.

This has resulted in a culture where we have mind boggling amounts of meetings
to offer plenty of time for debate and really make an effort to form
consensus. If we can't form consensus, a decision is made anyway by the
manager of course, but we want to make absolutely sure it was not because of
lack of trying. Some places are worse than others. I had a colleague who
worked as a developer at a government agency and by his account 4 hours a day
to code was a good day, the rest of the time he was stuck in meetings and
checking his emails.

And, for some reason, I sort of like it. I believe in the power of the crowd
to make good decisions. The price is the fact that we spend staggering amounts
of time discussing and debating things before we make a decision. Introducing
something like this system would probably be met with huge protests by
management and the workforce.

~~~
rightbyte
As long as the meetings are not a cermonial part of some process they
acctually are very useful.

In a big company communication is one of the biggest obstacles and alot of
time need to be used for communicating.

Superficcially decreasing the amount of meetings seems like a bad idea
generally. What will happen is just that key people will get the info and
others being left in the dark.

------
nzealand
I would love a micro charge to be applied to every person cc'd on an email.

~~~
nurettin
Brilliant. That would hopefully contain situations where the CEO knows about
all the spelling error in every document and software.

------
mrnobody_67
There's a really cool app I saw a while back that did calendar audits...
typical for 20-40% of employee time at tech startups being spent in meetings,
most of it useless and poorly run and managed.

~~~
bwb
Free self run app here:
[https://app.execution.com/report/2c2754f](https://app.execution.com/report/2c2754f)

------
KirinDave
This environment sounds like hell. The company is pushing the entire _process
and overhead_ of management into every facet of employee life but not
distributing commensurate _benefits_ to employees except a handful of lotto
winner that serve more as performance set pieces than an actual compensation
model.

Because most of those things they're cutting: meetings, reports, OKRs,
forecasting, planning? Those things exist to keep the company _legible and
transparent_ to its owners. These activities often feel pointless because
other than feeding information upwards, they don't always serve a purpose.

These toxic activities tend to cast a pall on the genuine hard work that line
workers experience making a business actually function on a day-to-day basis.
Those meetings, often critical for drawing out consensus, now are perceived as
from the same pointless, poisonous well as the other activities. The net
result is that only the most overwhelming personalities and cliques of
employees can succeed, and that limited success becomes a 0 sum game.
Cooperation gets branded as overhead.

And it seems like now the company is so utterly devoid of leadership but so
intensely addicted to a tall hierarchy that they're "crowdsourcing" their
business plans to folks for the privilege of competing for those fixed-size
bonuses more effectively? Other than play-pretend they're on Shark Tank and
make sure beans stay counted, what do the executives and upper management
there even do?

You'd have to be pretty desperate or pretty close to a sociopath to enjoy that
environment. It's a synthesis of the worst qualities of most corporate excess:
overwhelming personal responsibility, arbitrary numeric axis of evaluation,
constant performance justification, ruthless peer competition. But it's got no
real benefits over a normal job other than a small handful of people getting
performative payout. You can put in the effort to your utmost and circumstance
can still deny you that payout even if the company succeeds.

------
unityByFreedom
Sounds like a company that doesn't want its employees to collaborate without
approval from higher ups.

------
goombastic
The atomisation of the workforce. It's easier to manage individuals than a
group that negotiates. The loss of tribes is probably the biggest change since
the advent of modern manufacturing. The ideal end state would be robots that
cooperate for goals and don't negotiate?

------
vincent-toups
This workplace sounds super un-chill.

------
Kinnard
_Meetings Are Legalized Robbery_ ~
[https://www.yegor256.com/2015/07/13/meetings-are-
legalized-r...](https://www.yegor256.com/2015/07/13/meetings-are-legalized-
robbery.html)

------
TheOperator
Applying the price mechanism to direct employees use of resources does have
all sorts of compelling advantages even if it does introduce some overhead and
certain weird pressures. I think the article makes a compelling case.

------
rightbyte
They seem to vote with there own money on decisions. The winning side get the
losing sides money.

This will be terrible for raising concerns, right? People will vote for the
side they think will win, not what they believe in.

------
jimnotgym
This is an interesting article, but it is hard yo know how much they are just
focusing on the good points. I would love to read a detailed critique from an
external agent.

------
blfr
Crazy mix of the theory of the firm and prediction markets.

------
blue_devil
The title doesn't give enough credit. This company is the paragon of
experimentation.

------
cryptica
The headline makes it sound negative but actually the arricle makes a very
strong case.

------
spacesarebetter
Really interesting article. This actually seems like a really smart move but
only in short term. In the long term, they will definitely suffer because the
employees will take poor decisions in order to complete in the cut throat
environment and high turn over. Perfect example of this approach is GE. They
started implementing something like this in 90s and in 2000 it was one of the
most valued companies. By late 2000s GE was completely ruined. It is not even
a Fortune 500 anymore.

~~~
mrfredward
Do you mean not in the Dow anymore? It's 21st in the Fortune 500.

