The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings. – Thomas Sowell
I’m looking at David Graeber’s “Bullsh*t jobs”, and just thinking about the challenge of doing useful work in an organisation, especially a large one.
The thing about being in a large organisation is that you have a real chance of making an impact.
Large organisations often prefer to work with other large organisations, so you are exposed to problems that you just wouldn’t see elsewhere.
You start to see how people make decisions about some really quite substantial sums of money.
And you also start to see how so many organisational problem situations are caused be internal rather than external forces.
Take hiring, for example.
When the amount of work we have increases we think that we need someone else – another body to help out.
That kicks off a process – you need to spec the role, figure out what the pay level should be, get permissions, advertise, interview, and appoint someone.
And then the cycle repeats itself – you have more work and your recruit has more work and it’s time to go and get someone new to help out.
Before we go down this route, however, we should really ask a couple of questions.
First, does this work need doing at all?
You’ll be surprised at just how much work is pointless work.
It’s not designed to be pointless – someone probably thought it was a really good idea – but it ends up being pointless because it’s not worth doing at all.
Of course, everything is more complicated than that.
Let’s argue that a particular type of work is pointless – like a formal performance review.
You don’t want to do it and your manager doesn’t want to do it. Surely you can just have a chat instead and talk about what went right or wrong.
That would be efficient, right?
But the reason you have these reviews is for more than feedback.
It’s a mechanism to show you’ve been treated fairly. A tool to ensure that the company has a record of how it’s dealt with you in case things go wrong.
So, from a legal point of view, doing all this extra work is worth it to avoid being sued.
And that’s hard to argue against.
Even though in almost every case you should.
The second question is whether you really need to hire someone.
Can a script do the job instead – what can you get a computer to do rather than a person?
Not because you don’t want to hire someone but because there is no point hiring a person to do something a machine should be doing.
Far too many jobs, especially temp positions, are of this type.
The difficulty is that the majority of people don’t have the skills needed to make computers work for them – and this is something, I am told, that’s getting worse for young people who have grown up tapping tablets.
Let’s wrap up this stream of thought.
Productive teams are small, have the minimum number of people needed to collaborate and use technology effectively to get things done.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 