When Rewards Outweigh the Risks
by Mike Neundorfer
A
s I drove in our Sprinter motorhome from Cleveland to Florida in January 2022, I kept thinking about how I would manage shifting Advanced RV from a five day to a four day work week. Marcia and I would be in Florida for three weeks of business meetings, a friend’s wedding and, in between, camping in the Keys, but my mind kept turning to the commitment I had recently made for ARV to join an international trial of a four day, 8 hour per day work week at full pay. The trial was to start in three months and run for six. While driving south, I kept returning to the question of what we could do in the short trial that would make a big difference. We were already a strong, effective engineering and production team. Could we do the same or better in four days rather than five? How could I lead this? Success meant achieving our current 40 hour week production rate in a 32 hour week. This meant we had to increase productivity by 20%, 19
while maintaining the same or better production quality and attention to clients. Although we would make some adjustments to paid time off and staff compensation, raises and profit share would stay the same. We had to create better measures of productivity, quality, and client attention. Our productivity measures have always been a challenge because each of our motorhomes is custom made and takes varying amounts of time to design and build. Production had been measured simply in months to completion, so we had to add more refined measures. We also had to add a detailed set of metrics to score our quality process. We decided we’d continue to anecdotally assess our level of client attention. If I could make the trial work and make it permanent, it would likely be my most important business contribution in over 50 years of creating and operating businesses. The potential benefits were huge, but I estimated our chance of success at about 50%. The risk
