The Management Consultants' rowing team would lose every year to the ever-efficient Japanese rowing team. So the Management Consultants set up a project to work out why. Six months, and thousands of man-hours later, they discovered that the reason the Japanese kept winning was because they had 8 rowers and one cox, whereas the Management Consultants had 8 coxes and one rower. They concluded that the one rower wasn't performing 'to expectations' - and they fired him.
It looks like joke, but I've seen that in the wild. What's interesting, the company did not go bankrupt immediately. That boat has inertia proportional to the number of people. If you already have no rowers and remove coxes - you lose inertia, if you hire new cox - you also lose inertia, you need to accelerate him. But, you need to accelerate the new rower as well. So, the metric tell you that coxes contribute more than rowers in that situation. If you can't finish the task, but you can pretend you are doing something you can actually keep getting orders and earn cache. And you can do that for years. If you believe that money is a value, it's a logical thing to do. Unfortunately, in real world the money is not a value, but a tool. As my father said: "the money become mine only when I spend them".
An extension of this is that as some small trade businesses expand (plumbers , electricians, glaziers etc) they get larger discounts for their purchases, but they employ more managers and marketeers and the costs actually go up. I'm involved in the trades, and I think it pays people to find independent businesses
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.
This entirely and worse still when a company magazine is sent out so all the low paid, disgruntled, ignored staff, stuck at work doing additional hours, can read about people they've never met and see them attending a multi thousand pound, fully branded event with champagne to collect those awards because they are such great employers.
My experience with computerization is vastly different. I started in 1980s as PCs and spreadsheets were being introduced in the business world. In the field of accounting, people were still using ledgers and electric calculators aka the adding machine with a tape. I mean one function in a spreadsheet app makes the adding machine obsolete, forever. The spreadsheet app eliminated 80% of my job. I have difficulty believing computerization did not result in efficiency and in an increase productivity. If that is the case, management mishandled the implementation in technology. In my case, only a few of us tried to apply this new technology. Management had no strategy or plan in place to deploy the tech. My impression is that PCs and digital spreadsheets were the rage at the time so management just brought in the tech just because every other company was doing the same. So the tech was being wasted until individuals like myself were demonstrating the efficiency. At least, that is my impression. It is not that computerization does not work, it is management's lack of vision or understanding of the tech that is the problem. Personally, HR is a useless, unproductive dept. They are like the SS in Nazi Germany. They have special authority so they abuse that privilege just to show they are doing "work".
@@-flavz3547 I always wonder who the people are who comment on those stories? They would be the first people I'd fire, because they obviously have so little work that they've got time to read this guff. And of course after flooding your inbox with irrelevant stuff, you then get in trouble for missing the one email that was actually relevant to your job because you had to wade through a sea of crap to notice it.
This is so utterly, clearly, demonstrably not true. Computers have utterly changed the way people work. You can argue the toss about whether they changed things for the better for any given individual at any given time but, as another commenter points out, in many fields the addition of a computer could transform a business over night. You'll be telling us the telephone didn't change things next.
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.
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!
HR is worse than producing nothing. They actually reduce output by insisting that useless people are hired, and that useless people aren’t sacked, and by wasting everyone’s time producing stats for them that are of no interest to anyone except them.
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.
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.
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
When I started work as a programmer in 1985, any changes i made we're coded, tested and deployed by me. I never had a problem. When I left working life, 37 years later, any changes required to be made to a software application required a 15 person committee whose sole task seemed to be to say no. And we called this progress. I can't tell you the sense of relief I felt when I retired.
Things like CrowdStrike show why controls are necessary in software development. Just because they aren't always necessary doesn't make theem bad. Just like insurance isn't a waste of money just because you don't make a claim.
@@huwtindall7096 The Crowdstrike failure proves my point very well. An IT Security Firm circumvented any proper approval and certifications, and caused havoc as a result. No number of faceless bureaucrats could stop it, because there are no repercussions for them. In my experience IT Security departments deliver absolutely no value whatsoever. They simply hinder change. Having worked in Insurance for many years, I'm afraid many companies are extremely inefficient and moribund because of the 'pen-pushers' and their failure to solve problems properly. This is why your premiums are so high.
@@huwtindall7096 No - that fiasco doesn't. It is an excuse for more controls. Crowdstrike had all the controls in place and still f*cked up. The answer is always more control, more checks, more balances. It's never having people more dedicated to their job, and responsible for their actions. At the moment, everyone can hide behind "I did it according to the process" and so blame can't be apportioned. Blame can be good - it's also known as Root Cause Analysis. Provided a sensible remedy is applied rather than just "fire the (highly experienced) bugger (who has made just one mistake in a long time"
@@blackstter6317 I think part of the problem us that, the more controls you put in place, the more they just get treated as guide rails by workers. When you started work, you were accountable for any code you broke. Now, coders just vomit up code and leave it for others to find the bugs.
Problem is with your company, not the industry. I work in a pretty successful fintech. All that is required to push to prod is one to have your code reviewed by another developer. We trust our developers, and the developers act with professionalism. The problem comes when you build systems to protect against the weakest performer. As soon as someone starts instituting process for something like that, stop, think about the trade offs, take a different approach.
As 50 year old economist who has mainly worked in business consulting, I believe he is onto something. There are a few details that could further illustrate his points. He is for example right about the false need to collect data. You only need to collect data when it can be usefully translated into information, knowledge and new practices or habits. Otherwise you are just wasting money collecting data. Automation is another example where pen pushers, I call them bean counters, often get things wrong. Automating a bad or inefficient process is just precipitating your way into the abyss. I have seen it happen time and again.
@@ashleywebb2736 Your usage of 'bit' is likewise deeply insensitive. This horse-self feels deeply disturbed by this term, like you are trying to 'lead me on' with your bias. I, likewise, will be reporting this to HR.
"Prepared to do a desk job but regard being a plumber as weirdly beneath them". This is so crucial and a mindset that we need to break as a society and why there's a skills shortage. Why people looking down on manual labour and trade jobs is something ill never ever get my head around. They can earn fantastic salaries and they ultimately build society. When your boiler stops working or you have a leak then who are you calling? - not an admin assistant that's for sure.
is there really a skills shortage though? i make 2x what a plumber makes as a data analyst and id rather work in trades cus less females and office bs and id like to be useful. unfortunately the market isnt there yet.
@@TheLukasDirector Yes and I'd make 1/3 the amount of money I do now and have to do a bunch of BS theoretical tests to get some government license in 4 years time.
Because we suffer from a pathology, the English class system, which is chronic and enduring. How many time have we encountered a sneering linguistic pedant looking down their sniffy noses because someone has committed the heinous transgression of using a popular word or phrase? Nothing captures more the 'I'm more clever and therefore superior to you'' mentality more than this particularly English vice. It's everywhere and it's the reason we have an oversupply of graduates working in McDonalds
There is a great Yes Minister about this. A hospital with no medical staff but hundreds of admins running it. Very funny. So its not new. (It's still a great listen even now the story subjects come round and round)
these box tickers are the reason we have hot desking. It is hot desking which has destroyed office working life. You no longer get to know anybody, everyone sits alone. No wonder younger people complain they are lonely and don't have any friends. Almost all of my friends are people I met through work. (GenX here)
What a brilliant point by Mr Sutherland. Strangely, there has been a rise of snobbery about any job that involves service, sales or operations. Business schools and universities adore in teaching strategy, planning, research and analysis and very rarely teach sales, self management and the ability to build human relations. And equally as peculiar, the more communication channels and tools we have the less people feel heard or stimulated. 'In a world of absolute abundance the only thing in short supply is human attention'
You can’t teach sales. It’s a skill that is practiced. Pay attention to your customers and learn how to build trust. University cannot help you develop that. That said, there are plenty of university courses that are pretending to teach bachelor degrees in things that aren’t university level skills. Marketing is something you learn how to do by doing it. You can’t learn it from a tutorial.
The working from home issue is quite an interesting one, because it actually reveals who has a BS job and who doesn't. And that's why people who have a BS job, and have a team of people with BS jobs, are so keen to see people come back to the office, because for them, it is genuinely true that you could do nothing all day and no-one would notice for a long time. For workers that actually do something value-generating, it actually very difficult to simply sit at the computer all day doing nothing, because it would be very quickly found out when the work hadn't been done. It was hard for a teacher or a call centre worker or an IT support person to simply not do their job, because they had tasks that were very clearly done or not done at the end of the day. A middle manager, on the other hand, could struggle to fill their day without physically having a team to manage.
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.
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.
This is a leadership problem - HR and accountants are required in any modern business - if leadership understand how to direct them, then they are an asset, and if not they are a liability. You can equally say all salespeople are a waste of space - overpaid order takers, when it’s the marketing, production and logistics that are the only real value add. It’s up lo leadership to define the company needs and roles
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.
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.
Wow, we're not rewarding the workers, we're rewarding buy-to-let landlords and forcing workers to live in the most expensive real-estate in the world! Preach! Honestly, I feel like the battle for working from home is the most important battle workers have had since the industrial revolution. It really is the solution to so many of the problems that are destroying families.
Apart from the brilliant and accurate content, I love it that Rory assumes that we understand 'quis custodiet ipsos custodies' and 'corporate oncology', without explanation.
I once spend a rainy afternoon at the local library going through microfiches of The Times . There was a letter to the editor back in the 1800's where a British ruler of an area in India complained about the arrival of the telegraph wires. He complained that he and his like used to spend weeks on end out in the field getting to know everyone deciding local disputes and they were known, were trusted and could speak the local dialects. Since the arrival of the telegraph poles they now spend all day in the office answering questions from London about one trivial thing after the next. When they did this they lost the connection and trust .. and were going to lose India. Nothing new under the Sun !
Interesting. It's puzzling that manager type of people often seem to want to over-measure / micro-manage / etc. Is it insecurity, do they like control? Do they deep down know they have a bullshit job and that's how they make up for it?
@@lightworker2956 if you are asking whether a civil servant in the early 20th century thinks it is better to control everything from London… the answer is yes. I recommend watching the documentary “Yes Minister” if you want to know more.
I find the British corporate environment absolutely intolerable. The objective of the British worker as I've observed it, is just to leave the house from 9-5. That's it. They call it 'working hard.' 'I work 9-5, I work very hard.' Okay, but what do you actually do? What are you innovating, or producing, or making, or selling? If you ask that you'll hit a nerve and get some abusive word salad thrown at you. Productivity is terrible in this country because work is seen as leaving the house and fulfilling your obligation of leaving the house for 8 hours. Not because a lot of people actually genuinely go to work.
For the last three years, my company has been crippled by a lack of strategic vision - yet we employee at least three people with the job title “Senior Strategy Manager”. Unless they’re strategising the company’s downfall, I’m not quite sure what they’re up to…
Similar to my work. We have a large project with lots of people working on it, but it is floundering due to there being no one person overseeing the whole thing and being ultimately accountable. We do have someone with the title "Project Manager" however 😂
When I started working in the late 70s there was a communal joy in working. 2 weeks holiday a year, no overtime pay, but drinks at lunchtime with colleges was the norm, knowing and caring for your colleges was also the norm. We had personnel departments as opposed to human resource departments. There were people who spent their whole lives working for one organisation. My later working life wss hot desking, no-one near me worked with me, the management were clock watchers who didn't care for their staff and TBH a miserable place to work (BTW no lunchtime socialising) a sad lonely stressful work environment. Human resources sums it up, not seen as people just assets.
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.
This is how companies die. The classic example is Nokia where its market leadership position attracted hoards of parasites whose weight eventually collapsed the business. It's happening right now to Boeing. Usually the founder keeps the company focussed but when he retires the vultures move in. The long term successful businesses have a family dynasty at the top.
Rory, what can I say? You have such an incredible knowledge of the truth. Said as a person in their 50s, having built a business over 30 years and having a decent understanding of how commerce and teams can be made to function in something approaching a successful manner. This is an expose that everyone occupying a new fangled BS job will pretend they do not see or hear.
What he said mirrors what Guy Kawasaki said many years ago on how to value a company. Kawasaki said to add 250k to the valuation for every engineer hired to build and improve the product and deduct 250k for every MBA hired to manage them.
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.
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!
20 years ago I used work in a call centre. They had all sorts of managers and annoying HR protocols. I had the fastest call time in the building of 200 people and they couldn't work out why. The answer was I was one of the few people knew how to type. Talk about not being able to see the wood for the trees.
I am 22 working in an office. Me and another fella do all the ‘work’ in our department e.g stuff that needs doing to keep the company going and making money. the other two work on micro-management, over compilations and having meetings about improving things instead of just cracking on with the work. These people are both my senior and on far more money than me, It doesn’t make me work less hard but it’s hard not to get frustrated. Proof that it’s not just lazy ‘Gen Z’ plenty of people of all ages taking the piss albeit this is anecdotal evidence.
I’ll give you some advice. You and the other fella should break out and set up your own company, become sovereign individuals, don’t work with or for these people, you’re young enough and got the energy to do it. I’m being deadly serious, look at a way of working for yourself and setting up your own company, and start while you’re still young.
@ I appreciate your kind words but the company is an in house manufacturer with a lot of infrastructure so going solo would be challenging. Don’t worry though I’m going to look for other employment once I’m a bit more experienced, hopefully less than a year. I don’t plan wasting my good work ethic here!
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! :)
My experience is the same. Middle managers are judged by senior managers according to what the stats say. Managers have a saying, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." I have been in meetings where the managers effectively said: we don't care what you do but make the stats look good. They use circumlocutions like, "I'll be presenting the numbers to the CEO next week." Any proposed change to working practice that improves the stats is leapt on. For example, someone once proposed that if a customer complaint is still unresolved after 2 weeks we call it done and close the complaint. Then we open a new case to carry on the work. Management thought this was an excellent idea. The "problems fixed" stat is awesome. The middle managers know the score; the senior managers are in the dark.
I would never allow someone to tell me when I can and cannot go to the bathroom. If you do, don’t be surprised being walked over in other parts of your life.
I’ve been a project manager for 35 years. Financial department was rolling out new Projects management reporting program, said it would lead to better efficiency etc. I asked how many of them (the three people on the Teams meeting involved in the roll out) had ever managed a project, dead silence and one complaint to their manager about me.
@@TonyBongo869 I was also leading a project management team in IT before I retired. All the PM software did was automate reports that nobody read! One simple spreadsheet report did the job.
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.
Right in the bulls eye. This is so correct. People who are not actually making money, saving money, and building customer loyalty should be removed. But now after 25 years of expansion they outnumber everyone else so they outvote the plan to remove them.
“The whole point of capitalism is not actually a process of efficiency optimization (aka “cost cutting dressed in fancy language”); it’s a process of discovery.” Brilliant!
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
I'm a data analyst and I'm constantly dumbfounded by the lack of basic intuition by decision makers. You could make 90% of decisions made with some good business and human intuition, you don't even need all this data.
If you want to find the highest paid people in any large organisation, outside of the executive layer, just look at HR and Finance depts. It can't be a coincidence that those who are involved in setting pay grades and pay levels are the first to have their snouts in the trough. As for the impact these people have on operational delivery, the most polite phrase I can think of is 'questionable at best'. All the organisations I've worked in would have benefited from smaller HR and Finance depts. doing much less but doing it much better. These days it feels like the tail wagging the dog.
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!!!
Spot on. I work for one of these firms and all they say is we have no money but they have enough money for the whole of HR to do nothing for hours while they raise money for charity. It really hampers productivity across the whole firm because it's like they are on the gravy train having the time of their lives while you suffer. So many firms are like this everyone knows it but they have it easy so who cares just keep partying till the ship sinks seems to be the mentality.
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.
Came to this conclusion early on. Profit was made at two levels in the company I was in at the time - at the bargaining table, and the bottom tier workers doing the work and fulfilling contract obligations. Yet we had multiple levels of middle management, an entire administration building for our site alone, and a cross country network with a similar setup and multiple "head offices". Yet those of us at the bottom tier doing the work were constantly abused and derided by anyone who wasn't actually on the ground. Broken system where 80% of the administrative and "management" staff were nothing but a waste of money who would constantly guard their meagre responsibilities like it was some huge deal which could sink the entire company. No, writing a report to the government agency we were subcontracted on their online portal isn't difficult, and restricting that to exclusively "management" was literally undermining the point of writing reports about incidents in the first place.
Very old subject. There have been initiatives like this for years - time and motion studies, total quality management, ISO 9000, value add, and on and on. They all came out of academia, became industries in their own right, involved lucrative training and accreditation schemes and pretty much amount to busywork for otherwise unproductive middle managers. I used to work for a stablemate of the Spectator and the culture was very refreshing. If you were good and could get things done they let you get on with it your way. Like most journalists back in the day I worked for many titles and I can make extremely unflattering comparisons...
As a guy nearing retirement, there's been this awakening in the last couple of years, that whilst everyone knows what I do (achieve), no one knows how I do it and no one ever wanted to really learn. I had a converstion with a QA manager about the difference I had seen in the last 35 years at our company. Basically, the main difference is that we now have so many more levels of paperwork, spreadsheets, forms, etc than we had in 1990, but when looking at the end product of all our labours, the equipment we sell is not really any more reliable, the office/workshop is no more or less 'safe' now than it was decades ago. I work in engineering and we sell mining machines, but I am now looking forward to retiring early, as I am so over all the pieces of paper I now have to deal with, rather than thinking about engineering issues! By the way, I have David Graeber's book 'Bullshit Jobs'and he really is spot on in it, 'Box tickers', 'taskmasters', 'flunkies', etc covers it all. Highly recommended!
I knew someone that worked in Land Registry - Oh, the perks! Coffee mornings in aid of charity (in office work time!), staff rambles at weekends (organised in work time!), discounts on seasonal goods brought 'into office' (in work time!) and more.. As soon as Covid 'hit' even more 'flexible working' from home. Nice job (and pension too) so I've been told!
2:09 typifies the NHS. And from what I saw in local government, all the accountants did was process the journals that we raised.. On £50 k plus a year. No advice or responsibility taking
Every time I go to the office (I work from home mainly and travel a lot) I see new HR people it’s insane how many people they have. I keep hiring people in insane!
Pen pushers be like, “toilet breaks are inefficient” but two hour meetings to discuss why people take toilet breaks is productive. At one point in my office they even talked about adding a code for toilet breaks to the system that monitors our activity. Now that the COVID panic is over, all this non-productive nonsense is coming back - I miss the Golden Age of Lockdown when managers were safely hidden behind their couches at home and staff could run things properly.
I particularly loved the note about effectively paying landlords instead of employees with the pay you provide as a business owner. So even when you try to pay fair share of your earnings as a company to your employees for years, they end up being unsatisfied and broke even though you were really trying to pay them fairly.
I have a friend who lectured at one of the big art colleges for 15 yrs. When he started it was 70/30 teaching/admin now it’s 30/70 teaching/admin. The head of the college needs all the data at their fingertips in order to make the big decisions and justify their footballers pay.
Interesting that he identifies the change as being visible to anyone 50 and above - I’m 50 and can absolutely see it. I think a key stage was when “Human Resources” became a career path in itself rather than companies having a personnel department - that was very frequently staffed by the wives and partners of the factory floor, and treated people as humans rather than just another resource to be exploited.
I've worked in HR for over 20 years and I've seen my work increase and our resources and headcount shrink and my requirements and expectations from the company grow. So I'm not sure which HR group he's speaking too but working for at least 8 companies, I can say the headcount isn't growing. Teams were much larger when I first started working.
As an organisation grows its proportion of staff working for the goals of the business goes down, and the proportion of staff working for the business goes up.
It's challenging when a lot of those who build the product actually are outsourced to other countries - very few people at a corporate office are required to do the thing of selling the product.... but I love the idea of turning on its head and pointing back the measurement on those doing the measuring
Rory’s opinions spot on in my book. HR, Senior Management and Auditors are the invisible menace where I work. Nobody sees them, they’re only interested in metrics and don’t contribute to the companies function.
We need HR to spam our Outlook inboxes with information about menopause awareness month, happiness at work week, black history month, mental health at work day, various charity events HR participate in during working hours etc etc
Well Rory is painfully on point as usual here - I’m a doer at work, part of that 20% that carries the other 80% These people are part of that 80% and cannibalise the 20% that keeps them in their jobs. I never understood why the business people at the top encouraged them to do this and to do this more?!
No doubt this’ll breach the “challenge the argument not the person” community guidelines but it is valid to assess Rory’s credentials when deciding what level of trust to put in the assertions he makes without much corroborating evidence. It says on Wikipedia that he’s an advertising executive and, from his biography, I don’t see any experience outside this sector. What is the basis for the claims he makes about the utility of, for example, the finance department within a large organisation. I don’t work in this area myself (I’m an engineer) but I imagine an organisation with 1000s of employees on its payroll and revenue in the billions or high millions selling products in high volume to global customers might need to be fairly organised when it comes to managing cash flow, costs, long term investment, tax and the like. Ironically, marketing and advertising is probably one of the functions where it’s difficult to make a definitive causal connection between investment and positive business outcomes.
Im a data analyst and you dont seem too bright. You can''t correlate revenue before and after a $20M ad dump? With social media advertising you can track metrics down to a tee. Makes sense you disagree then, for an engineer you don't seem particularly clever.
@@stuartcraig6722 If you advertise online you can literally track purchases from ads. That is perfect causal linking. You can also do it after a $20M ad dump. I have a degree in statistics. It's very easy to establish a causal link between those two events. You work out a baseline, the level of noise or variance in the data and you can then figure out the percentage chance that something happened due to randomness or due to a specific event.
Thank you Spectator for bringing up politicians. It's strange how Rory, a very intelligent man can bring up 40% taxes and then in the same breath complain about the smaller expense of housing.
HR is simply a legal buffer that ensures companies aren't taken to court over anything at all. They are not there to protect the employee, they are there for the company shareholders/owners only.
Many people work for a decade or so doing an actual job and then realise that the only way to get paid any more than the barest minimum is to stop doing something useful and start doing a ‘bullshit job’. Some have bought into the narrative and believe in what they’re doing, some know - to a greater or lesser extent- that it’s just a game they’re having to play. But if real work actually paid then folk would be very happy to keep doing it.
Rory Sutherland makes some interesting points about how businesses have evolved but Kate Andrews comments were a bit dogmatic (blame the politicians) and not elaborated on. Maybe an issue is specialisation. If support functions are specialised they can grow but are never squeezed if the Primary Function demands increased time and attention. Another key thing is a company at some point will be good at their primary function, but it may not be good a being a company and may fail. A company however may become bad at its primary function but succeed because it is good at being a company.
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.
As a pencil pushing spreadsheet maker, another big issue is that my job is actually important, but the people who receive my data seem incapable of actually understanding it. I spend hours talking to management about what my numbers mean and what should be done to improve, but it goes in one ear and out the other. They listen, nod their heads, and then implement policies that they FEEL like they need, rather than what my data SHOWS that they need.
Couldn't agree more. Obsessive reporting without any goal combined with incrrased regulatory compliance protocols have made my job significantly less enjoyable over the last 20 years. I am an economist with PhD in working finance (consulting)
I'd be careful, he'd throw you out in a heartbeat. When people talk about bullshit jobs, they mean consultants. Your job is valuable, don't let idiots like this try to rail against what you do.
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.
Part of it is that people are terrified of making a decision based on judgement. There has to be a 'process'. We are drowning in process. And those process need people, spreadsheets and ENDLESS meetings.
Our client wants 100% traceability and approval of all design updates, as well as fully following their internal standards. Enormous bureaucracy results!
Rory never misses an opportunity to promote WFH as a solution to all sorts of workplace and even property market ills. Be careful what you wish for. You might get it
![ARGENTINA vs. PERÚ [1-0] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xtI25ENDDSY/mqdefault.jpg)
The Management Consultants' rowing team would lose every year to the ever-efficient Japanese rowing team. So the Management Consultants set up a project to work out why. Six months, and thousands of man-hours later, they discovered that the reason the Japanese kept winning was because they had 8 rowers and one cox, whereas the Management Consultants had 8 coxes and one rower. They concluded that the one rower wasn't performing 'to expectations' - and they fired him.
It looks like joke, but I've seen that in the wild. What's interesting, the company did not go bankrupt immediately. That boat has inertia proportional to the number of people. If you already have no rowers and remove coxes - you lose inertia, if you hire new cox - you also lose inertia, you need to accelerate him. But, you need to accelerate the new rower as well. So, the metric tell you that coxes contribute more than rowers in that situation. If you can't finish the task, but you can pretend you are doing something you can actually keep getting orders and earn cache. And you can do that for years. If you believe that money is a value, it's a logical thing to do. Unfortunately, in real world the money is not a value, but a tool. As my father said: "the money become mine only when I spend them".
🤣🤣
Proving that Management Consultants are a bunch of cox.
Lol sounds like it's from a Tom Sharpe novel
An extension of this is that as some small trade businesses expand (plumbers , electricians, glaziers etc) they get larger discounts for their purchases, but they employ more managers and marketeers and the costs actually go up.
I'm involved in the trades, and I think it pays people to find independent businesses
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.
Your last sentence is spot on.
This entirely and worse still when a company magazine is sent out so all the low paid, disgruntled, ignored staff, stuck at work doing additional hours, can read about people they've never met and see them attending a multi thousand pound, fully branded event with champagne to collect those awards because they are such great employers.
My experience with computerization is vastly different. I started in 1980s as PCs and spreadsheets were being introduced in the business world. In the field of accounting, people were still using ledgers and electric calculators aka the adding machine with a tape. I mean one function in a spreadsheet app makes the adding machine obsolete, forever. The spreadsheet app eliminated 80% of my job. I have difficulty believing computerization did not result in efficiency and in an increase productivity. If that is the case, management mishandled the implementation in technology. In my case, only a few of us tried to apply this new technology. Management had no strategy or plan in place to deploy the tech. My impression is that PCs and digital spreadsheets were the rage at the time so management just brought in the tech just because every other company was doing the same. So the tech was being wasted until individuals like myself were demonstrating the efficiency. At least, that is my impression. It is not that computerization does not work, it is management's lack of vision or understanding of the tech that is the problem. Personally, HR is a useless, unproductive dept. They are like the SS in Nazi Germany. They have special authority so they abuse that privilege just to show they are doing "work".
@@-flavz3547 I always wonder who the people are who comment on those stories? They would be the first people I'd fire, because they obviously have so little work that they've got time to read this guff. And of course after flooding your inbox with irrelevant stuff, you then get in trouble for missing the one email that was actually relevant to your job because you had to wade through a sea of crap to notice it.
This is so utterly, clearly, demonstrably not true. Computers have utterly changed the way people work. You can argue the toss about whether they changed things for the better for any given individual at any given time but, as another commenter points out, in many fields the addition of a computer could transform a business over night. You'll be telling us the telephone didn't change things next.
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”.
HR is worse than producing nothing. They actually reduce output by insisting that useless people are hired, and that useless people aren’t sacked, and by wasting everyone’s time producing stats for them that are of no interest to anyone except them.
If mgmt don’t listen to your expertise I expect they dont listen to HR either.
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.
I like the old Russian saying: “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”.
@@stonemarten1400
It doesn’t grow bigger by measuring it.
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.
Sovietization of Capitalism. A brilliant description of the Britain of today.
@@shawnaweesner3759 large corporations are usually essentially planned economies. And it usually works insanely well.
It felt like he was going to elaborate more on that idea, but they seemingly edited it out.
@@adamfrisk956 Yeah, like how big tech is stealing your personal data and selling it to criminals. Very efficient...
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
About 16.4%in Australia
Clever company's take that into account with contracts and staff numbers
In my (government business) team of eight it was a rarity that all eight were at work on any particular day.
When I started work as a programmer in 1985, any changes i made we're coded, tested and deployed by me. I never had a problem. When I left working life, 37 years later, any changes required to be made to a software application required a 15 person committee whose sole task seemed to be to say no. And we called this progress. I can't tell you the sense of relief I felt when I retired.
Things like CrowdStrike show why controls are necessary in software development. Just because they aren't always necessary doesn't make theem bad. Just like insurance isn't a waste of money just because you don't make a claim.
@@huwtindall7096 The Crowdstrike failure proves my point very well. An IT Security Firm circumvented any proper approval and certifications, and caused havoc as a result. No number of faceless bureaucrats could stop it, because there are no repercussions for them. In my experience IT Security departments deliver absolutely no value whatsoever. They simply hinder change.
Having worked in Insurance for many years, I'm afraid many companies are extremely inefficient and moribund because of the 'pen-pushers' and their failure to solve problems properly. This is why your premiums are so high.
@@huwtindall7096 No - that fiasco doesn't. It is an excuse for more controls. Crowdstrike had all the controls in place and still f*cked up. The answer is always more control, more checks, more balances. It's never having people more dedicated to their job, and responsible for their actions. At the moment, everyone can hide behind "I did it according to the process" and so blame can't be apportioned. Blame can be good - it's also known as Root Cause Analysis. Provided a sensible remedy is applied rather than just "fire the (highly experienced) bugger (who has made just one mistake in a long time"
@@blackstter6317 I think part of the problem us that, the more controls you put in place, the more they just get treated as guide rails by workers. When you started work, you were accountable for any code you broke. Now, coders just vomit up code and leave it for others to find the bugs.
Problem is with your company, not the industry. I work in a pretty successful fintech. All that is required to push to prod is one to have your code reviewed by another developer. We trust our developers, and the developers act with professionalism.
The problem comes when you build systems to protect against the weakest performer. As soon as someone starts instituting process for something like that, stop, think about the trade offs, take a different approach.
As 50 year old economist who has mainly worked in business consulting, I believe he is onto something. There are a few details that could further illustrate his points. He is for example right about the false need to collect data. You only need to collect data when it can be usefully translated into information, knowledge and new practices or habits. Otherwise you are just wasting money collecting data. Automation is another example where pen pushers, I call them bean counters, often get things wrong. Automating a bad or inefficient process is just precipitating your way into the abyss. I have seen it happen time and again.
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
@@ashleywebb2736 Your usage of 'bit' is likewise deeply insensitive. This horse-self feels deeply disturbed by this term, like you are trying to 'lead me on' with your bias. I, likewise, will be reporting this to HR.
"Prepared to do a desk job but regard being a plumber as weirdly beneath them".
This is so crucial and a mindset that we need to break as a society and why there's a skills shortage. Why people looking down on manual labour and trade jobs is something ill never ever get my head around. They can earn fantastic salaries and they ultimately build society. When your boiler stops working or you have a leak then who are you calling? - not an admin assistant that's for sure.
is there really a skills shortage though? i make 2x what a plumber makes as a data analyst and id rather work in trades cus less females and office bs and id like to be useful. unfortunately the market isnt there yet.
@chickenbroski99 working at a desk, been subjugated to corporate conformity and dealing with woman all day everyday is unnatural.
@@chickenbroski99 I'm quite sure you can find work as a plumber within a week, if you like in the UK or a similar place.
@@TheLukasDirector Yes and I'd make 1/3 the amount of money I do now and have to do a bunch of BS theoretical tests to get some government license in 4 years time.
Because we suffer from a pathology, the English class system, which is chronic and enduring. How many time have we encountered a sneering linguistic pedant looking down their sniffy noses because someone has committed the heinous transgression of using a popular word or phrase? Nothing captures more the 'I'm more clever and therefore superior to you'' mentality more than this particularly English vice. It's everywhere and it's the reason we have an oversupply of graduates working in McDonalds
There is a great Yes Minister about this. A hospital with no medical staff but hundreds of admins running it. Very funny.
So its not new.
(It's still a great listen even now the story subjects come round and round)
these box tickers are the reason we have hot desking. It is hot desking which has destroyed office working life. You no longer get to know anybody, everyone sits alone. No wonder younger people complain they are lonely and don't have any friends. Almost all of my friends are people I met through work. (GenX here)
@@ktwashere5637 I'm Gen X. Just let me work from home. I have a real life, I have no need for pretend work friends.
What a brilliant point by Mr Sutherland. Strangely, there has been a rise of snobbery about any job that involves service, sales or operations. Business schools and universities adore in teaching strategy, planning, research and analysis and very rarely teach sales, self management and the ability to build human relations. And equally as peculiar, the more communication channels and tools we have the less people feel heard or stimulated. 'In a world of absolute abundance the only thing in short supply is human attention'
You can’t teach sales. It’s a skill that is practiced. Pay attention to your customers and learn how to build trust. University cannot help you develop that. That said, there are plenty of university courses that are pretending to teach bachelor degrees in things that aren’t university level skills. Marketing is something you learn how to do by doing it. You can’t learn it from a tutorial.
The working from home issue is quite an interesting one, because it actually reveals who has a BS job and who doesn't. And that's why people who have a BS job, and have a team of people with BS jobs, are so keen to see people come back to the office, because for them, it is genuinely true that you could do nothing all day and no-one would notice for a long time. For workers that actually do something value-generating, it actually very difficult to simply sit at the computer all day doing nothing, because it would be very quickly found out when the work hadn't been done. It was hard for a teacher or a call centre worker or an IT support person to simply not do their job, because they had tasks that were very clearly done or not done at the end of the day. A middle manager, on the other hand, could struggle to fill their day without physically having a team to manage.
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.
This is a leadership problem - HR and accountants are required in any modern business - if leadership understand how to direct them, then they are an asset, and if not they are a liability. You can equally say all salespeople are a waste of space - overpaid order takers, when it’s the marketing, production and logistics that are the only real value add. It’s up lo leadership to define the company needs and roles
What a fantastic ten minutes watching this!
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.
Wow, we're not rewarding the workers, we're rewarding buy-to-let landlords and forcing workers to live in the most expensive real-estate in the world! Preach!
Honestly, I feel like the battle for working from home is the most important battle workers have had since the industrial revolution.
It really is the solution to so many of the problems that are destroying families.
Apart from the brilliant and accurate content, I love it that Rory assumes that we understand 'quis custodiet ipsos custodies' and 'corporate oncology', without explanation.
I once spend a rainy afternoon at the local library going through microfiches of The Times .
There was a letter to the editor back in the 1800's where a British ruler of an area in India complained about the arrival of the telegraph wires.
He complained that he and his like used to spend weeks on end out in the field getting to know everyone deciding local disputes and they were known, were trusted and could speak the local dialects. Since the arrival of the telegraph poles they now spend all day in the office answering questions from London about one trivial thing after the next. When they did this they lost the connection and trust .. and were going to lose India. Nothing new under the Sun !
@@FaultLines-nd2nc they did lose India. So there might have been something to the argument, in a general sense of being out of touch
@@michaelwarenycia7588 yep. The telegraph poles were definitely the problem. Nothing wrong with British rule of India before that.
Interesting.
It's puzzling that manager type of people often seem to want to over-measure / micro-manage / etc. Is it insecurity, do they like control? Do they deep down know they have a bullshit job and that's how they make up for it?
@@lightworker2956 if you are asking whether a civil servant in the early 20th century thinks it is better to control everything from London… the answer is yes. I recommend watching the documentary “Yes Minister” if you want to know more.
Bullying and tyrant managers able to make the working life of staff pure hell, fully supported by archaic employment laws and corrupt tribunals.
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.
I find the British corporate environment absolutely intolerable. The objective of the British worker as I've observed it, is just to leave the house from 9-5. That's it. They call it 'working hard.'
'I work 9-5, I work very hard.' Okay, but what do you actually do? What are you innovating, or producing, or making, or selling? If you ask that you'll hit a nerve and get some abusive word salad thrown at you. Productivity is terrible in this country because work is seen as leaving the house and fulfilling your obligation of leaving the house for 8 hours. Not because a lot of people actually genuinely go to work.
For the last three years, my company has been crippled by a lack of strategic vision - yet we employee at least three people with the job title “Senior Strategy Manager”.
Unless they’re strategising the company’s downfall, I’m not quite sure what they’re up to…
Similar to my work. We have a large project with lots of people working on it, but it is floundering due to there being no one person overseeing the whole thing and being ultimately accountable. We do have someone with the title "Project Manager" however 😂
100% agree. It’s ridiculous out there particularly in large financial services companies
When I started working in the late 70s there was a communal joy in working. 2 weeks holiday a year, no overtime pay, but drinks at lunchtime with colleges was the norm, knowing and caring for your colleges was also the norm. We had personnel departments as opposed to human resource departments. There were people who spent their whole lives working for one organisation. My later working life wss hot desking, no-one near me worked with me, the management were clock watchers who didn't care for their staff and TBH a miserable place to work (BTW no lunchtime socialising) a sad lonely stressful work environment. Human resources sums it up, not seen as people just assets.
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.
This is how companies die. The classic example is Nokia where its market leadership position attracted hoards of parasites whose weight eventually collapsed the business. It's happening right now to Boeing. Usually the founder keeps the company focussed but when he retires the vultures move in. The long term successful businesses have a family dynasty at the top.
Rory, what can I say? You have such an incredible knowledge of the truth. Said as a person in their 50s, having built a business over 30 years and having a decent understanding of how commerce and teams can be made to function in something approaching a successful manner. This is an expose that everyone occupying a new fangled BS job will pretend they do not see or hear.
What he said mirrors what Guy Kawasaki said many years ago on how to value a company. Kawasaki said to add 250k to the valuation for every engineer hired to build and improve the product and deduct 250k for every MBA hired to manage them.
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.
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!
I'm self employed now and doing well. Ive worked for people makingg 5X my salary and didnt know how to do anything
20 years ago I used work in a call centre. They had all sorts of managers and annoying HR protocols. I had the fastest call time in the building of 200 people and they couldn't work out why. The answer was I was one of the few people knew how to type. Talk about not being able to see the wood for the trees.
I am 22 working in an office. Me and another fella do all the ‘work’ in our department e.g stuff that needs doing to keep the company going and making money. the other two work on micro-management, over compilations and having meetings about improving things instead of just cracking on with the work. These people are both my senior and on far more money than me, It doesn’t make me work less hard but it’s hard not to get frustrated. Proof that it’s not just lazy ‘Gen Z’ plenty of people of all ages taking the piss albeit this is anecdotal evidence.
I’ll give you some advice. You and the other fella should break out and set up your own company, become sovereign individuals, don’t work with or for these people, you’re young enough and got the energy to do it. I’m being deadly serious, look at a way of working for yourself and setting up your own company, and start while you’re still young.
@ I appreciate your kind words but the company is an in house manufacturer with a lot of infrastructure so going solo would be challenging. Don’t worry though I’m going to look for other employment once I’m a bit more experienced, hopefully less than a year. I don’t plan wasting my good work ethic here!
It’s a shame to waste Rory Sutherland on The Spectator - he should have a column in The Financial Times or a proper newspaper.
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! :)
My experience is the same. Middle managers are judged by senior managers according to what the stats say. Managers have a saying, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
I have been in meetings where the managers effectively said: we don't care what you do but make the stats look good. They use circumlocutions like, "I'll be presenting the numbers to the CEO next week."
Any proposed change to working practice that improves the stats is leapt on. For example, someone once proposed that if a customer complaint is still unresolved after 2 weeks we call it done and close the complaint. Then we open a new case to carry on the work. Management thought this was an excellent idea. The "problems fixed" stat is awesome. The middle managers know the score; the senior managers are in the dark.
I would never allow someone to tell me when I can and cannot go to the bathroom. If you do, don’t be surprised being walked over in other parts of your life.
I’ve been a project manager for 35 years. Financial department was rolling out new Projects management reporting program, said it would lead to better efficiency etc. I asked how many of them (the three people on the Teams meeting involved in the roll out) had ever managed a project, dead silence and one complaint to their manager about me.
@@TonyBongo869 I was also leading a project management team in IT before I retired. All the PM software did was automate reports that nobody read! One simple spreadsheet report did the job.
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? 😂😂😂
Right in the bulls eye. This is so correct. People who are not actually making money, saving money, and building customer loyalty should be removed. But now after 25 years of expansion they outnumber everyone else so they outvote the plan to remove them.
“The whole point of capitalism is not actually a process of efficiency optimization (aka “cost cutting dressed in fancy language”); it’s a process of discovery.”
Brilliant!
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
Man. Someone who speaks the truth. Corporate oncology.... Great English!
Rory hitting his vape in the middle of the interview is my spirit animal
I’m an American college professor, and Rory is absolutely right.
yes look at the ''health care system''' - this is the pinical of pen pusher over-reach - shameful.
I'm a data analyst and I'm constantly dumbfounded by the lack of basic intuition by decision makers. You could make 90% of decisions made with some good business and human intuition, you don't even need all this data.
10000% Spot on.
If you want to find the highest paid people in any large organisation, outside of the executive layer, just look at HR and Finance depts. It can't be a coincidence that those who are involved in setting pay grades and pay levels are the first to have their snouts in the trough.
As for the impact these people have on operational delivery, the most polite phrase I can think of is 'questionable at best'. All the organisations I've worked in would have benefited from smaller HR and Finance depts. doing much less but doing it much better. These days it feels like the tail wagging the dog.
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
By the number on black people and gays employed.
The less worthwhile stuff you do the better you are at your job.
Lots of inspeak.
Lots of views that divide people even more.
I’m a simple man, I see Rory, I click 😊
Spot on. I work for one of these firms and all they say is we have no money but they have enough money for the whole of HR to do nothing for hours while they raise money for charity. It really hampers productivity across the whole firm because it's like they are on the gravy train having the time of their lives while you suffer. So many firms are like this everyone knows it but they have it easy so who cares just keep partying till the ship sinks seems to be the mentality.
"We treasure what we measure."
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.
Came to this conclusion early on. Profit was made at two levels in the company I was in at the time - at the bargaining table, and the bottom tier workers doing the work and fulfilling contract obligations. Yet we had multiple levels of middle management, an entire administration building for our site alone, and a cross country network with a similar setup and multiple "head offices". Yet those of us at the bottom tier doing the work were constantly abused and derided by anyone who wasn't actually on the ground. Broken system where 80% of the administrative and "management" staff were nothing but a waste of money who would constantly guard their meagre responsibilities like it was some huge deal which could sink the entire company. No, writing a report to the government agency we were subcontracted on their online portal isn't difficult, and restricting that to exclusively "management" was literally undermining the point of writing reports about incidents in the first place.
Very old subject. There have been initiatives like this for years - time and motion studies, total quality management, ISO 9000, value add, and on and on. They all came out of academia, became industries in their own right, involved lucrative training and accreditation schemes and pretty much amount to busywork for otherwise unproductive middle managers.
I used to work for a stablemate of the Spectator and the culture was very refreshing. If you were good and could get things done they let you get on with it your way. Like most journalists back in the day I worked for many titles and I can make extremely unflattering comparisons...
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.
As a guy nearing retirement, there's been this awakening in the last couple of years, that whilst everyone knows what I do (achieve), no one knows how I do it and no one ever wanted to really learn. I had a converstion with a QA manager about the difference I had seen in the last 35 years at our company. Basically, the main difference is that we now have so many more levels of paperwork, spreadsheets, forms, etc than we had in 1990, but when looking at the end product of all our labours, the equipment we sell is not really any more reliable, the office/workshop is no more or less 'safe' now than it was decades ago. I work in engineering and we sell mining machines, but I am now looking forward to retiring early, as I am so over all the pieces of paper I now have to deal with, rather than thinking about engineering issues!
By the way, I have David Graeber's book 'Bullshit Jobs'and he really is spot on in it, 'Box tickers', 'taskmasters', 'flunkies', etc covers it all. Highly recommended!
I knew someone that worked in Land Registry - Oh, the perks! Coffee mornings in aid of charity (in office work time!), staff rambles at weekends (organised in work time!), discounts on seasonal goods brought 'into office' (in work time!) and more.. As soon as Covid 'hit' even more 'flexible working' from home. Nice job (and pension too) so I've been told!
2:09 typifies the NHS. And from what I saw in local government, all the accountants did was process the journals that we raised.. On £50 k plus a year. No advice or responsibility taking
In Futurama they already made a bit out of it.
Hermess did a survey of the workers and fired himself for wasting everybody's time.
Every time I go to the office (I work from home mainly and travel a lot) I see new HR people it’s insane how many people they have. I keep hiring people in insane!
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?
@@chudleyflusher7132 management?
Absolutely spot on!
Could listen to this chap all day
Pen pushers be like, “toilet breaks are inefficient” but two hour meetings to discuss why people take toilet breaks is productive. At one point in my office they even talked about adding a code for toilet breaks to the system that monitors our activity. Now that the COVID panic is over, all this non-productive nonsense is coming back - I miss the Golden Age of Lockdown when managers were safely hidden behind their couches at home and staff could run things properly.
I particularly loved the note about effectively paying landlords instead of employees with the pay you provide as a business owner. So even when you try to pay fair share of your earnings as a company to your employees for years, they end up being unsatisfied and broke even though you were really trying to pay them fairly.
Valid points. Also great to see a discussion where neither side interrupts the other the moment they disagree.
Huh? They never disagreed... She was fawning over him.
I have a friend who lectured at one of the big art colleges for 15 yrs. When he started it was 70/30 teaching/admin now it’s 30/70 teaching/admin. The head of the college needs all the data at their fingertips in order to make the big decisions and justify their footballers pay.
Start your own firm. Working in corporate America is a time suck and puts you at the mercy of the HR Karens.
Excellent analysis. IT proliferates these jobs. Computers are everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
Interesting that he identifies the change as being visible to anyone 50 and above - I’m 50 and can absolutely see it. I think a key stage was when “Human Resources” became a career path in itself rather than companies having a personnel department - that was very frequently staffed by the wives and partners of the factory floor, and treated people as humans rather than just another resource to be exploited.
Sure the good old days when you could harass your secretary and they had no one to turn to.
I've worked in HR for over 20 years and I've seen my work increase and our resources and headcount shrink and my requirements and expectations from the company grow. So I'm not sure which HR group he's speaking too but working for at least 8 companies, I can say the headcount isn't growing. Teams were much larger when I first started working.
As an organisation grows its proportion of staff working for the goals of the business goes down, and the proportion of staff working for the business goes up.
It's challenging when a lot of those who build the product actually are outsourced to other countries - very few people at a corporate office are required to do the thing of selling the product.... but I love the idea of turning on its head and pointing back the measurement on those doing the measuring
Rory’s opinions spot on in my book. HR, Senior Management and Auditors are the invisible menace where I work. Nobody sees them, they’re only interested in metrics and don’t contribute to the companies function.
We need HR to spam our Outlook inboxes with information about menopause awareness month, happiness at work week, black history month, mental health at work day, various charity events HR participate in during working hours etc etc
Well Rory is painfully on point as usual here - I’m a doer at work, part of that 20% that carries the other 80%
These people are part of that 80% and cannibalise the 20% that keeps them in their jobs. I never understood why the business people at the top encouraged them to do this and to do this more?!
I felt every minute of this.
No doubt this’ll breach the “challenge the argument not the person” community guidelines but it is valid to assess Rory’s credentials when deciding what level of trust to put in the assertions he makes without much corroborating evidence. It says on Wikipedia that he’s an advertising executive and, from his biography, I don’t see any experience outside this sector.
What is the basis for the claims he makes about the utility of, for example, the finance department within a large organisation. I don’t work in this area myself (I’m an engineer) but I imagine an organisation with 1000s of employees on its payroll and revenue in the billions or high millions selling products in high volume to global customers might need to be fairly organised when it comes to managing cash flow, costs, long term investment, tax and the like.
Ironically, marketing and advertising is probably one of the functions where it’s difficult to make a definitive causal connection between investment and positive business outcomes.
Im a data analyst and you dont seem too bright. You can''t correlate revenue before and after a $20M ad dump? With social media advertising you can track metrics down to a tee. Makes sense you disagree then, for an engineer you don't seem particularly clever.
@chickenbroski99 notice I specifically used the term “causal”.
@@stuartcraig6722 If you advertise online you can literally track purchases from ads. That is perfect causal linking.
You can also do it after a $20M ad dump. I have a degree in statistics. It's very easy to establish a causal link between those two events.
You work out a baseline, the level of noise or variance in the data and you can then figure out the percentage chance that something happened due to randomness or due to a specific event.
Thank you Spectator for bringing up politicians. It's strange how Rory, a very intelligent man can bring up 40% taxes and then in the same breath complain about the smaller expense of housing.
HR is simply a legal buffer that ensures companies aren't taken to court over anything at all. They are not there to protect the employee, they are there for the company shareholders/owners only.
Many people work for a decade or so doing an actual job and then realise that the only way to get paid any more than the barest minimum is to stop doing something useful and start doing a ‘bullshit job’. Some have bought into the narrative and believe in what they’re doing, some know - to a greater or lesser extent- that it’s just a game they’re having to play. But if real work actually paid then folk would be very happy to keep doing it.
Rory Sutherland makes some interesting points about how businesses have evolved but Kate Andrews comments were a bit dogmatic (blame the politicians) and not elaborated on. Maybe an issue is specialisation. If support functions are specialised they can grow but are never squeezed if the Primary Function demands increased time and attention. Another key thing is a company at some point will be good at their primary function, but it may not be good a being a company and may fail. A company however may become bad at its primary function but succeed because it is good at being a company.
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.
So what are the worker bees to do? The ones who should hear this won’t listen.
As a pencil pushing spreadsheet maker, another big issue is that my job is actually important, but the people who receive my data seem incapable of actually understanding it. I spend hours talking to management about what my numbers mean and what should be done to improve, but it goes in one ear and out the other. They listen, nod their heads, and then implement policies that they FEEL like they need, rather than what my data SHOWS that they need.
Couldn't agree more. Obsessive reporting without any goal combined with incrrased regulatory compliance protocols have made my job significantly less enjoyable over the last 20 years. I am an economist with PhD in working finance (consulting)
I'd be careful, he'd throw you out in a heartbeat. When people talk about bullshit jobs, they mean consultants. Your job is valuable, don't let idiots like this try to rail against what you do.
Well said. Who is watching the watchers I say.
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.
Part of it is that people are terrified of making a decision based on judgement. There has to be a 'process'. We are drowning in process. And those process need people, spreadsheets and ENDLESS meetings.
I agree w this view 100% Stat keepers do not add any value and rarely help anything get better.
Our client wants 100% traceability and approval of all design updates, as well as fully following their internal standards. Enormous bureaucracy results!
Correct and accurate observation.
The productivity of your finance department is when they are used to face the workers and the public when you run out of money !
I was a Business System Analyst for 25 years, this got worse as the years went by. By the end, 4 people watched me work, I wish I was kidding.
Rory never misses an opportunity to promote WFH as a solution to all sorts of workplace and even property market ills. Be careful what you wish for. You might get it
I don’t understand how the people in the bullsh!t jobs get any satisfaction from their work, or feel any pride
Christ sounds like the company I work for