Donkey work

What can a story about a traditional Persian folk hero teach us about management? In this article, I look at the Mullah's experiment with improving his donkey's running costs, and the lessons we can learn from it.

Should we lengthen the school day?

I have been thinking about this recently because so many people seem to think that the solution to helping students catch up on their lost schooling is to have longer school days. Presumably these extra lessons will be taught by teachers, when they’re not marking and re-marking exam papers.

There are two related problems with longer school days. First, unless some sort of shift work is introduced for teachers, when do the advocates of longer school days think that lesson preparation and test marking will get done. If I was really cynical I’d think that one of the reasons certain organisations are pushing for a longer school day is that they know teachers won’t have time to prepare lessons properly. They’ll have to use ready-made resources approved by the Department for Education (a bad idea in itself), or perhaps scripted lessons.

My attempt at work-life balance

After I’d been teaching for several years I decide it was high time I had some sort of work-life balance, so I resolved to do as little work as possible at home. I managed to achieve that, almost, by arriving in school by 07:45 and leaving at 18:00, and even then I found myself having to work on Sunday evenings. If the DfE would like to accelerate the exodus of people from the teaching profession citing health, mental health and work-life balance issues, lengthening the school day would be a good way of trying to achieve that.

The other reason it’s a bad idea is simple: diminishing marginal returns. Just how effective will teachers be in the last couple of hours of the extended school day? Just how receptive will students be in the last couple of hours of the school day?

So what has all this have to do with a donkey?

Mullah Nasrudin and his donkey

Mullah Nasrudin decided to reduce his outgoings by reducing the amount of food his donkey ate. Sensibly, he didn't suddenly halve his donkey's food intake, but gave him a little bit less each day. After a few weeks, the donkey dropped dead from starvation.

What a shame", said Mullah Nasrudin. "If only he had lived: I was almost at the point where I'd trained him to live on nothing at all.

So what can we learn from this, from a management perspective?

• Don't keep incrementally reducing your workers' "food". I have noticed, as have others, that it was becoming more and more difficult in England for teachers to be allowed out of school to attend courses before the pandemic. I'm not sure how you can expect teachers to willingly embrace and experiment with new ideas, and learn from colleagues in other schools, if you constantly reduce the opportunities for them to do so.

And if you tell me that they can do more and more of this stuff online, then I will respond that:

(a) face-to-face is still much better than online for some things;

(b) online interactions should be seen as complimentary to face-to-face, not a substitute; and

(c) when are you expecting teachers to do it anyway? In their own time? Many do, but that's no reason to build it in as an expectation.

• Don't keep incrementally adding to to people's workload. Asking them to do more and more with the same resources is exactly the same, in effect, as reducing their food intake. It's true that many teachers willing take on more and more anyway, but eventually something will "give", such as their health.

I recall one staff meeting in which the boss said that he was really pleased with the progress being made. He said people were coming in early and staying late, and sometimes even coming in at weekends, and that as a result we were meeting all the targets in our strategic plan.

However, he was very concerned about the increase in the amount of short-term absence, with people taking two or three days off because of a migraine or a cold, and that he was therefore going to be bringing in a new sickness procedure to put a stop to it. Who said that Dilbert was just a comic strip?

• Part of our "food" is the expression "Thank you". Many people will take on all sorts of things in return for a genuine expression of thanks. I don't think you need to go over the top, like taking all your team to Barcelona for a week, even if or when that becomes possible again. But saying "thanks", supporting them if they are are having problems and, yes, having an end of term meal (if possible) -- all of those things count.

Staff are not donkeys. Managers, policy advisors and policy-makers should avoid being like Mullah Nasrudin.