I wouldn't say less efficient but with larger margins. I could probably do the work of 2 my colleagues if I was really pressed and was forced to work overtime. Instead, I work something like 5-6 hours a day. This sounds like inefficiency - however, when people get sick, when they go on holidays, when new products are to be released and we need to do something extra fast - it's business as usual and no extra sweat is involved. Pure comfort for everyone, including the marketing and sales teams.
When I confront it with the times I worked for a small company... You had no choice but to work hard. If you didn't do it, it wasn't done. Deadlines were pushed forward, everybody was unhappy. There was no margin for anything, so I had to work overtime very often. These two approaches are incomparable. (Of course you can easily find opposite examples, especially in big consulting firms, so take this with a grain of salt.)
> You had no choice but to work hard. If you didn't do it, it wasn't done. Deadlines were pushed forward, everybody was unhappy. There was no margin for anything, so I had to work overtime very often.
Can echo that this was my (small, well-funded, widely-used) startup experience as well. Going into a bigger organization after this was shocking in terms of how lax people worked.
for a contrasting opinion, I had a completely different experience working at various small companies, although you could put that down to a different work ethic in the UK. I've worked in small teams building large important features without having to do any overtime. When I worked at a large company, most of my time was wasted having meetings and communicating/coordinating across teams because it was impossible to build most new features without buy-in from 2-3 different areas of concern.
I worked at a few clients in SF, CA a couple years ago. As a consultant 40 hours was the minimum. It was also my maximum.
I'd get to the jobsite at 6-7am (avoiding traffic/crowded trains/buses). I'd go to lunch at 11am and leave around 3-4pm depending on how many hours I'd been there.
I'd see the employees rolling in at 9:30-10am. They'd eat their breakfast, so SCRUM at 10:30am. Then they'd take a 2 hour lunch and at 4 or so when I was leaving would have to go "pick up the kids" or "doctor's appointment" or any of 100 other excuses they had.
I had someone ask me once, "How many hours are you working?" (implying I was there a lot). I said "Forty, how many are you working?" (implying the 26 or so they were actually in the office).
I called it California Time. It wasn't at one company, it was at every medium to large company I went out to as a consultant or contractor.
I guess if they were achieving their goals, it wouldn't be a big deal, but when you've got $250+/hr consultants in there helping, you're not.
When I confront it with the times I worked for a small company... You had no choice but to work hard. If you didn't do it, it wasn't done. Deadlines were pushed forward, everybody was unhappy. There was no margin for anything, so I had to work overtime very often. These two approaches are incomparable. (Of course you can easily find opposite examples, especially in big consulting firms, so take this with a grain of salt.)