Rory Sutherland: How pen-pushers destroyed the office | SpectatorTV
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- Опубліковано 13 січ 2024
- Rory Sutherland, Spectator columnist, joins Kate Andrews on The Week in 60 Minutes. Pen-pushers, he says, have ruined office work. The most productive members of staff are often held back by a squad of bureaucratic busybodies. No wonder people want to work from home.
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Having worked for 37 years in both private and public sector roles including within HR, Finance and IT, I can confirm this is most definitely the case. Furthermore, I started working in 1981 when everything was done on paper and saw very little improvement after computerisation, in fact, it created more work and, without doubt, more cost. The headcount may have reduced on some tasks but it was replaced with IT and HR at much higher cost. “Personnel”, as it was called then, had just a handful of staff and the Disciplinary process was simple and extremely effective - three strikes and you’re out. I took early retirement as I couldn’t stand the silly bureaucracy any longer. The approach to everything was a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Many valuable days would be spent on obtaining and maintaining useless external accreditations such as “Investors in People”, usually for the sake of a logo on a letterhead. People just want clear instructions, fair conditions and appreciation.
Sovietization of Capitalism. A brilliant description of the Britain of today.
I like the old Russian saying: “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”.
The sheer awfulness of accountants is infinite. HR is in the same class. They are the true burden to business.
Overcorrecting in both of these would be just as bad though. If you have zero accountants and zero HR personnel your company WILL be a financial, incoherent mess and it WILL be open to way more lawsuits that could have been easily avoided. Should the number of these people be reduced by at least 50% in most places? Yes. Should they be reduced to zero? Absolutely not.
Good luck in understanding how your business is performing without a finance department
Businesses have been using accounting for hundreds of years: it is essential, and you need qualified accountants to do it. The history of HR (or even Personnel, as it used to be known), goes back only a few decades, and almost any business can do without it. They may also be more effective without it.
The mistake is believing accounting understands the business; they need to count the beans 🫘 accurately and leave the interpretations to the people that bring money 💵 into the business- the money that pays the accountants and HR are brought in by sales and service; the money that pays sales and service is brought in by sales and service. Count and fill out forms: the people who bring in the money 💵 are way too busy bringing in the money 💵 to do it. If accounting and HR are in charge we’ll have an accurate tally of layoffs and losses as the business goes bust from ignorance being placed in charge.
I would really like to know how the productivity of the DEI Director is assessed.
It’s measured by how much discrimination is committed against people based on their sexuality, race, or gender…as long as they’re straight, &/or white, &/or male: 3 strikes and you’re OUT!!!
number of white CVs rejected ? Number of qualified men passed over for promotion ?
How many people have been sacked from wrong think one would imagine
Forty years ago, when I started working in healthcare, there was a huge problem in British medicine. There were lots of poor doctors, whose poor practice led to poor outcome for patients. The more senior the doctor, and the higher status the specialisation, the harder it seemed to do anything about them. Eventually, this began to be tackled through the introduction of 'clinical risk management' measures. And I would be the first to admit that these measures did change the culture in medicine. However, it also created a huge bureaucracy of 'Clinical Risk Managers' that seem to have grown and grown. Now, as Rory says, lots of these people are just involved in collecting data for the sake of collection. Often they have neither the training or intellect to analyse these data or draw any meaningful conclusion from what they have collected. In the mean time, the poor culture of 40 years ago has been largely corrected, with the biggest difference being among the doctors themselves, who are no longer prepared to accept obvious poor practice among their peers, and are themselves much more open to peer review by their colleagues.
Possibly an identical situation in teaching 🤷♀️
Maybe use AI to look at the data. Us computers and digital technology to collect the data automatically.
Frankly for me i am tired of HR 'policing' the CVs we get to see when they don't actually understand what our department does and management not listening to my advice when i had to prove my experience to get the job in the first place. I am currently working with someone at HR who is quite simply as thick as ****. Our HR department has doubled in size over the last 4 years and is a huge drain on the company's profits. They produce nothing.
Yes, I understand the woman from Harvard recently in the press was an HR appointment!
My daughter is in. HR. I think what you hear is mostly to do with public funded organisations where money is a bottomless pit and they can’t just employ people on merit they have to satisfy the demographic percentages both in respect of equality of opportunity which is good but also equality of outcome which sadly in the UK is based on the demographic of London, hence jobs in the North are restricted for white people where they are the majority. Local Authorities are doing the same, particularly for those who sit on Committees. Universities are overrun with people who seem to have the power to determine what people eat never mind who can or cannot be employed and who must go because they are accused of bullying. Dominic Raab who walked away because he was accused of bullying some individual. I don’t blame him. You must never ask a Civil Servant to do his job my goodness no. Private companies can’t afford such luxuries and as HR doesn’t create wealth the teams really are there to provide a service not dictate. In manufacturing they talk about the 4 ‘M’s’. Money, materials, machinery, manpower. In the Service industries people are the biggest cost and maintaining efficiency, job satisfaction, pleasant working conditions and a listening but business minded ear is essential. People being off with so called mental health problems are increasing so is mobile phone use. Obsessive social media instead of just getting on with the job and if a manager says anything then they are being a bully. I have seen it all. I’m afraid the work ethic attitude has diminished. Everyone wants a cushy highly paid job with lots of holidays, car etc. My daughter came into HR in her late twenties having started at the bottom in her area of industry. She worked her way up to office manager before they suggested she went to do a post graduate degree in HR. Her role wasn’t exclusively HR and she did all sorts of jobs and is a no nonsense person. Nowadays you leave school, go to University, get a degree and a coveted job in HR which can give them a certain degree of power over their employers. We have come a long way from a 5 and a half day working week, working 9 to 5.30 with quarter of an hour coffee break in the morning and tea break in the afternoon with an hour for lunch. In between you worked. No mobile phones, loyalty to your company and smart dressing. You respected those senior to you. 2 weeks holiday a year plus statutory holidays. They might let you off early on Christmas Eve but you worked New Year’s Day. Yet I loved my job and was luckily with the people I worked for. I suppose I was fortunate. Look at the Post Office scandal. Those horrible people going into those post offices should have done a proper paper trail to ascertain the truth but I bet none of them had a clue. I remember being a go between one computer user who said an invoice had been paid and the other arguing that it wasn’t. In the end the payment cheque was found in a drawer! Not sent!
Wrong. They produce “diversity”.
Just take note of the people who can have long term absences for maternity, sickness whatever and it makes no difference. If you’re in a big company there will be an extraordinary number of people who can be off work for months with no cover and absolutely nothing changes
Yes but can that not be explained by the fact that while they are off the rest of their team cover them by taking a little extra bit of work each. There always is a small % of workers off for some reason, so as one comes back another goes away. Like that its a constant gap which is filled. Therefore ... yes, there would be no difference as there is always some ppl off work!
@@zatarawood3588 yeah there’s a certain amount of that. There’s also a good number of people doing busywork that really makes no difference and changes nothing if it isn’t done
The number of people who actually fight in the army are ever shrinking as well.
Well obviously, who in their right mind would lay their life on the line for Britain? 😂 look at the place
@peregrineslim4446: As an army brat I can assure you most soldiers are quite happy about that.
Spot on! Just retired from a very large US corporation, and this has gone mad over the last 10 years. Additionally the know how, experience has diminished to alarming levels on core activities.
Now you talk DEI, LGBT, Green initiatives, mental health drives and all other type of non core activities folks are becoming masters while the overall company value creation keeps diminishing.
As a teacher, our head went off skiing one winter during term time, and nothing changed. She was paid double a classroom teacher; she left us alone for almost two weeks, and we did better without her. Headteachers in Authority schools exist largely to deliver and manage trendy changes dropped down from some office in the Authority trying to justify its existence, little else.
My Dad was on a County Education Committee (c1968) and he told me, later, they asked each candidate what changes they would changes in their first term as headteacher.
The right answer was, (apart from an emergency), nothing, apart from seeing what happened. How else could you see what was going wrong.
15 Years in education, this becomes more and more true. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#:~:text=Another%20%22law%22%20of%20his%20is,and%20sometimes%20are%20eliminated%20entirely.
The worst of these are engaged in actively bullying out the more experienced (and coincidentally expensive!) members of their team.
Yes but perhaps good management lies in setting up frameworks and policies which last for months and years and not just a couple of weeks. Its not necesarily about generating output in the short term. So ... as an example, if Steve Jobs set up a culture & processes of innovation at Apple, even after his death, this might continue to run. As for your specific head teacher, I have no clue whether she was effective or not!
@@Romdormer To shake out The Truth, it does require, at times, 'vigorous discussion', but there needs to be a space for those specialists acquiring useful information, such as many Scientists and those teachers that prefer teaching children to political activism.
10000% Spot on.
Hence the old sayng "too many chiefs, not enough indians!"
That comments a Bit racist, will have to report you to the HR department.
@@ashleywebb2736 Hahaha
I’m a home worker. I exceed all my targets and often end up taking on the slack from other staff. I was led to believe this would result in a bonus payment, but this never happened because the team as a whole didn’t meet the annual target.
Plus - WFH means no office politics, no managers breathing down my neck, no stupid meetings, and just generally avoiding the general fake ‘community’ bs of modern office life, which I had plenty of in the pre-WFH days. I can also do a lot of household chores on my lunch break which frees up my weekends and evenings.
That said, can’t see this lasting. Can’t have the drones getting too independent can we? Hence why I’m busily working on building my side business to the point where I can do it full time. Modern British employers are a joke - expect you to devote your life and soul to the company whilst paying the bare minimum they can get away with and offering no training, promotion or other perks. I had 10 years of that so frankly F them.
I dont get the salaries in the UK ... Ive been out of the workforce for 15 years, came back to London and the salaries are the same ... about £40-50k for the average office job) Yet, many ppl seem to claim they are v successful, & seem to be buying new expensive cars and so on. So how does all this tie up?
Well said.
@@zatarawood3588 yes, I'm also puzzled by this
@@zatarawood3588 £40-50!? many office workers woul kill for that. £30k is till the average wage in UK I believe.... mnay people are on below that.
You need to better represent yourself. The first time you exceed your targets, and you don't get paid because of others, March into the bosses office and insist on an individual deal, give them 2 weeks to come back to you. Take your printouts of exceeding targets and approach competitors. You're worth it
What a fantastic ten minutes watching this!
Norway have a particularly bloated public sector estimated to now being the size for a country with 2.5 times the current population. It’s a heavenly playground for ambitious bureaucrats and politicians and people who just enjoy secure and clean jobs with nice pensions and no real personal responsibility (when billions have been wasted no one’s ever to blame - one is just shuffled around.). An epidemic of people who enjoy being in endless meetings without making decisions, going to conferences and sitting in commissions and working with something related to the environment, immigration and the EU. And their solution to all problems are always more bureaucrats and raising taxes.
Thank you so much for this video. I couldn`t agree more with everything that was said here. I thought I was the only one who noticed this problem.
Certainly describes where I work. Out of a total workforce of 3000, only about 500 of us are directly involved in creating and delivering the product to the customer. Apart from sales, the others are dubious back-office functions that add little value. In fact, they often seem to exist solely to frustrate those of us who create and deliver our products.
So very true. A man after my own heart.
Bullying and tyrant managers able to make the working life of staff pure hell, fully supported by archaic employment laws and corrupt tribunals.
Excellent.
Started work in a factory in the 80s before computers were a thing in offices. Many years later when I left every office person had at least one computer. Despite all the computers the same number of office people were required. Though they did have more time for drinking fancy coffee, gossiping and doing social media on their top of the range mobile telephones.
Funnily enough I've been thinking of this myself and have seen it happen first hand in my own job.
I work in an analytics department for a delivery company. I joined here 4 years ago at the start of a brand new team. We were a team of 3 to begin with and were very busy.
In the time since then the team has grown to 6 and is growing further yet we have found that much of what we do has matured to the point where innovation has dried up. The boss wants to keep adding though as it adds further tiers/hierarchy.
I have worked on projects where the analysis of the working day of the delivery drivers has been looked at to the finest detail and looking to cut down on overtime and people yet the teams looking at this analysis expands ever further. My job is nonsense.
Correct and accurate observation.
Having been at work for over 30 years now , always in the core dept that did everything but thought the least of . Whether its been office , hotel and now department store , looked down on , paid the least . Its makes me rather sad to be told that the big boss is not bothered about your dept, if cuts in staff need to me be made , it will be your dept ,yet they want you to be proud and invested and tow the company line. Our older employees are more disciplined , but the young couldn't give a stuff here. Nothing has changed
Excellent mind
Education is a primary example of this issue! When the number of "administrators" outnumbers the number of those adtually teaching, there is a serious issue in the establishment!
You aren't thinking about universities, are you? :)
@@NorfolkSceptic you may think this......I couldn't possibly comment!
Your right, I worked in a factory and civil service. In the factory they hired more office staff to manage redundancies. So the guy making money lost their job but not the office staff.
In the civil service you had offices with four people in producing work. Then you had an office of 12 people producing half the work. They files have to go up and down the racks.
I was an AO the AA below me would open the mail and pass in on. I would get the letter in a file. Write a minute then give it to my EO.
One day I wrote a minute on an A5 piece of paper. With me thoughts and recommendations.
It went to EO who disagreed. Then HEO then grade 7. It ended up in London. A grade 3 agreed with my first minute.
My days in that office was numbered after that.
Don’t forget the amount spent on ‘consultants’ both those from the big 4 and also those that are contracted to do a project on a day rate. The wastage is huge and so often people just end up changed fatigued and fed up
"We treasure what we measure."
CORPORATE ONCOLOGY! AHAHAHAH! Just beautiful.
Regardless of mandates and virtue signaling, there is no easy way to integrate unqualified people into a business. Where else but HR can you put them?
Marketing myself as an essential high value employee is a skill, as much as marketing products nobody needs to the populace is a skill. If companies can profit from the system, obviously so can private individuals.
In many Asian nations , subsidized housing is provided in the form of dormitories for the new and young hires. Somehow , that idea never caught on in the West. Instead, they are working in Silicon Valley , London , and other locales that are too expensive.
It was created in the West, most major UK companies had sudsidized housing and in the early days of US train travel the Pullman train company provided free housing.
@@Irishesbox11 Really ? Interesting fact.
@@eddenoy321 Look up Gilded Age Company Towns. Some of these are essentially what started unionization movements in the US as they provided subsidized housing but undercut workers' mobility by paying them with vouchers that only worked at company-owned stores (groceries, etc) instead of cash.
The people at the bottom in call centres have their productivity measured to a whole different level. Toilet breaks are limited and times. Someone calls you if you're away from your desk for more than 2 mins. What is does is make people play games with their stats, their responses to customers, and quality really suffers.
Managers really don't want to acknowledge that, and neither do they particularly care in my experience. All that matters is 'The Stats', and not quality (which is the thing that often saves the company money by effectively handling an issue in one call or email). This is happening right now in my workplace - they are slowly turning our jobs into a call centre and gaslighting us into thinking that is not tne case, but we all know it is.
Our company is apparently not generating profit right now, but it seems to continue hiring people with plum backgrounds with vague, poorly defined, nonsense job titles. I do wonder what they do all day, if anything. Instead, they are focused on micromanaging the people who do actually do the work, at the client facing end.
Micromanaging ensures those with intelligence, and increasing intuition, get frustrated, and leave, ensuring Management their cosy, but increasingly ineffective, place in the company.
@@NorfolkSceptic It has already cost them. We have have a really high turnover. They don't listen. It could be such a great place to work, where people stay for years, but they have no real interest in doing that. It's seen as old fashioned in our type of business, and the senior people have now just accepted a high turn over as norm....but that in itself in time & money to hire more people and train them. Money clearly grows on trees!
@@RedArtistx They lack intuition! :)
I worked for a very large Telecoms Co, and met someone that had worked for another very large Telecoms Co, and our stories were so similar! :)
Remember that in any organisation, the square root of the number of employees do 50% of the work - Price's Law.
Price's Law can be applied to small teams, not large organisations. The maths falls apart after a certain size.
Otherwise, you'd have 100 people in a 10,000 person company doing 50% of the work. That's simply impossible. They might be adding 50% of the value, but that's a different thing.
Jobs for the gals.
'bullshit jobs' brilliant 😅
Man. Someone who speaks the truth. Corporate oncology.... Great English!
Having worked in a call centre... yeah.
It was the same in my 50 year career as a Chartered Mechanil Engineer the company overhead grew and grew until the coal face workers could not support the financial load and the company (several) went bust.
50 years chartered ... so you worked until you were 75? 😂😂😂
Like Rory, I have always worked in advertising. (Our paths did cross but he won't remember attempting to explain the internet to me and a few others in the mid-90s). Anyway, I noted around 30 years ago that the majority of people in large ad agencies were not engaged in any activity related to the production of advertising. I have no doubt that the situation is far worse now, in advertising and every other sector.
The productivity of your finance department is when they are used to face the workers and the public when you run out of money !
the problem is if you employ a checker - then you need someone to set the policy for the checker and to manage them - then you need someone to check the person that is doing the checker, test their policy and test their management and standards - and so on and so forth until its infinite
David Graeber - BS Jobs
It doesn't help that many of the box ticker jobs only exist to deal with pointless regulatory admin. Deal with government first
It’s an office that’s what they do! (Or most accurately don’t)
The left hemisphere run rampant.
Too short!
These thoughts are not based upon factual research . All research on the effectiveness of KPI's in business shows how important the correct measures are in the performance of a business. However, there is plenty of research that states behavioural economic initiatives have no long lasting benefits. Again, research time and time again says companies go bust because of poor use of resources and not facing the truth of the numbers, not because of lack of a creative strategy. Lastly, research says it is all about having the right people on the bus, which is a key role of HR to ensure this is the case. Very misleading article.
This is why Elon Musk could fire 80% of Twitter's work force with no impact to the end user experience.
Psychopathic office box tickers have been around for decades. Haven't you noticed?
Sovietisation of capitalism, yes
Large Companies with managers instead of owners on the top lead by central planned aims and budgets and controllers...
The people who decide and the people who execute bear no intrinsic liability.
Interesting. But missed the point. Poorly controlled internal politics is the issue. It is astonishing relationship structures are ignored. Then, the last thing corrupt and inefficient managers want want is for their behaviour to be revealed. You can reveal and partly quantify the nature of relationship structures and how they combine with the authority structure (the hierarchy) to metamorphose into corporate power. No organisation can exist without power and the collective borrowed agency of those it employs.
Vaping ?
Pretty dumb take on “landlords“ better to look to the cause of the excessive London property prices … migration anyone?
Love Rory but she is so boring.
And yet Rory Sutherland has achieved exactly what at the mediocre ad agency he's been at forever? Spouts off incessantly, and it's not like he's Arden or Dave Trott, no idea what he's ever done. Is he a creative?
Someone who does not translate the roman sayings the use is not worth listening to.
You are the weakest link, goodbye.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" ? Even my goldfish knows that one, and he's only got 2 GCSEs