Idleness at work might be a recipe for mischief, but it could also reflect made-up jobs and gormless management. Photo / Robert Daly, Getty Images
In 2004 a Finnish government tax auditor was found dead at his desk where he had sat undisturbed for two days. Not one of the hundred or so colleagues on the same floor noticed, according to a BBC report at the time.
Nor had anyone noticed any disruption to the organisation’s workflow, or any loss in productivity. The poor auditor’s death is an emblem of idleness at work - and a sign of just how good we have become at hiding it.
Economists and policy wonks agonise about flat productivity growth. In the UK it rose by 2.5 per cent on average every year in the three decades to 2008, but just 0.5 per cent annually since.
Theories abound as to why this is but most overlook the obvious culprit.
“The modern economy is replete with jobs that are half made-up,” says Prof André Spicer, executive dean of the Bayes Business School and author of the book Business Bulls***.
Popular culture is full of examples of the made-up job. Entire sitcoms such as Nightingales and The IT Crowd have been set in workplaces where there is nothing to do. But across academia and in the policy world, we find something resembling a conspiracy to ignore it.
“There’s a huge denial about it,” says author David Bolchover. “A lot of very well paid people are doing very little, and nobody is talking about it.”
His book, The Living Dead, is an account of his own experience in the insurance industry. Over six years, he estimates he did about six months of proper work. He even rose to an executive position at a company where he was able to disappear completely for two years.
Last week, the think tank Onward fretted about increasing stress levels at work and how little time this leaves for civic engagement. But for every frazzled City trader, exhausted front-line nurse or Amazon warehouse packer, there are many others who discover that there is so little work to do during office hours they can successfully disengage.
Instead, they can devote much of the day to personal activities, such as online shopping or social media. Some choose to nurture a hobby, or even start a sideline business. The phenomenon is called “empty labour”, the title of a book by a maverick Swedish business professor, Roland Paulsen.
Finally, that taboo is being broken. After pandemic lockdowns, the practice of “quiet quitting” emerged, where employees reportedly worked slowly in a subtle protest at their dissatisfaction with work. The fact that people were able to do this en masse without being fired was a sign of how little work there was in the first place.
This is nothing new. They were living out Parkinson’s Law, which maintains that “work expands to fill the time available”. Before this phrase was coined, the father of modern scientific management, F Winslow Taylor, had identified the practice and called it “soldiering”. Whatever the name, it’s easier to accomplish now than ever without being discovered.
Forbes recently reported on the growth of “polyworking” - employees holding multiple jobs at once. 47 per cent of US workers now hold down three jobs, it found. While many will be working multiple low-paying jobs to make ends meet, astonishingly some employees are now doing full-time jobs concurrently, while each employer is blissfully unaware.
Meanwhile a survey for Salary.com indicates that 89 per cent of employees admitted to wasting time, with almost two-thirds wasting up to an hour a day.
When it comes to stretching out very little work to as many people as possible, the tech sector may be the masters.
In a widely circulated essay by a former software developer, Emmanuel Maggiori, the author confessed: “I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked.”
Over multiple jobs, Maggiori admitted to being handsomely rewarded for doing almost nothing. When he made the mistake of completing a job rapidly, he found that his peers were dismayed: he was letting the cat out of the bag.
“It’s hard to challenge the status quo when the productivity bar is so low all around,” Maggiori told The Daily Telegraph.
Tech companies have laid off almost 170,000 staff since January. Many of the businesses now making people redundant had gone on recruitment binges after Covid struck, which left many new hires with little to do.
Elon Musk’s Twitter stands in stark contrast to this attitude of over-hiring and has become a closely watched experiment. Musk has laid off two-thirds of Twitter’s full-time staff and contractors since taking over last October, but arguably without any apparent ill effects, such as slowing down innovation. All of this suggests Maggiori’s experience may not be that unusual.
Geoff Shullenberger, the managing editor of the online magazine Compact, said Musk’s job massacres marked “the collapse of a jobs program for surplus elites”.
“As soon as enforced lockdowns came in, a lot of people very quickly realised they could run the business with a quarter or a third of the people they had,” notes Spicer.
“We think of public sector bureaucracies as uniquely inefficient, but this is absolutely not exclusive to them: some of the worst examples are in large organisations where people can’t be seen.”
Bolchover agrees, saying: “Large corporations are the worst culprits.” Often, the CEOs don’t know what’s going on, he says. Similarly, many managers are very reluctant bosses and struggle to prevent idleness among staff.
Maggiori blames bad management in the technology sector for allowing the cult of “agile” management to proliferate.
In this cultish methodology, software developers self-identify how long a job will take - invariably over-estimating the time needed. They then have lots of meetings, which obscures their lack of real productive work.
Another smokescreen helps too. Forty years ago you could tell what someone did from their job title. Now, it’s a mystery.
“How do you manage to appropriate half of your working hours for yourself without getting caught?” Paulsen asks. “The answer can now be provided in all its simplicity: you exploit others’ ignorance of what the job entails.”
Paulsen dismayed some of his own academic peers by focusing on empty labour. Left-leaning academics, he says, assume that workers are oppressed. That position is hard to maintain when research suggests many staff do so little.
For their part, pro-business commenters laud the private company as a model of efficiency, when it is anything but.
The epidemic of idleness is an uncomfortable challenge to the idea that economies with a strong Protestant work ethic are assured of success. It is also socially divisive. If you’re self-employed and you don’t work, Bolchover notes, then you have no income.
“Why would anyone be self-employed today? There must be resentment building up,” he wonders.
“People who are self-employed and who work hard, in trades, and who are not part of this gravy train, see the middle classes having this very nice and comfortable life. They see a new leisure class that says it works, but doesn’t. What should they think?”
We’ve barely begun to examine some other consequences.
One is hard to miss. The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno once wrote: “The more superfluous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.”
He died before the rise of the human resources department, and the advent of the “woke” corporation.
-The Daily Telegraph
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