There's a trick to get more out of employees that's almost never discussed: Make their life easier.
Childcare for a late meeting is an issue? Why not have childcare at the office? Pay enough and the kitchen improvements are the contractor's problem and not your employee's.
> Not having childcare is not the issue, wanting to spend times with your children is the issue. You can't outsource that.
It's simple accounting really: If you want your employees to work 5 more hours a week, you need to free 5 hours from their schedules. Obviously, quality time spent with children or a spouse is the last thing employees will be willing to sacrifice. But running errands? Cleaning the house? Doctors appointments? Meals at work? Make these frictionless and you'll gain in productivity.
You'll gain hours, but not necessarily productivity. Which is a common mistake in management thinking. An extra hour of work out of an assembly line can produce an extra hour's worth of product, there's a pretty clear and measurable extra output there. In software, and a lot of other design work, this correspondence is less precise. For Cody the Coding Machine you may get a real extra hour of output from him. From many others, you'll find they extend their breaks from 15 minutes to 20 minutes, lunch goes from 30 to 45 minutes, and the extra time is taken up by meetings or answering emails.
The productivity doesn't come from extra time, it comes from alleviating stress and increasing the ability to focus. If my thoughts at 2pm are, "Wait, is it my day to pick up the kids? I've got a 3pm meeting, I've got to text the wife to let her know I can't get them today." I'm unfocused. Childcare, consequently, can relieve me of those thoughts. Same thing with bringing in food or having medical and fitness options available. They relieve some stress/unproductive time spent thinking and planning, which will hopefully improve productivity overall, but extra hours recovered from this are not necessarily more productive just by being available.
Even for actual assembly lines, that’s only true to a point. Data from WWII bomb factories (so, highly-motivated people) shows an asymptotically-smaller gains after about 48 hrs/week.
Hey, why not have a 'company store' where people can buy everything they need right at the office instead of having to spend precious minutes travelling to some questionable generic store. Think of all the time saved. While you're at it you could even extend credit to the employees for anything they might want to buy, and have their payments come directly out of their paychecks. How convenient! You could even issue company scrip instead of dealing with the costs of payment processors. There's lots of room for innovation here!
Google tried this. They set up this cadillac in-house childcare system, as you'd expect from Google, but it got out of hand as it scaled. When they switched to charging the parents more of the program cost, there was a huge backlash. Even with the higher price they couldn't meet demand, leading to waitlists and eventually a random lottery just to get a place. I bet Google management wish they'd never started the whole thing now.
If there's one thing you can count on 'disruptors' to not understand, it's grandfather clauses. You raise your rate for all new 'customers' and your overhead rate stops looking like a line going toward infinity.
Your reward for being at Google for 5 years should be that you get the rate plan from 2 years ago when your first kid was old enough for daycare.
My reward for being a Netflix customer for 6 years should have been that I still got the old rate.
Saves the extra drive to daycare as well as the stress of not meeting the pickup time (most daycare charges very high after-hours rates to discourage this; I’ve seen $50/15 minutes).
Childcare for a late meeting is an issue? Why not have childcare at the office? Pay enough and the kitchen improvements are the contractor's problem and not your employee's.