Book review: Pseudowork. How we ended up being busy doing nothing by Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen
I read the Norwegian translation of the Danish original. This book is based on interviews with people who do very little at work. Some of them are quite busy, but not doing anything productive. The authors discuss their findings with other researchers and experts that have studied this phenomenon.
The book builds on a tradition of questioning why do we keep working long hours in spite of productivity growth. Among previous works cited by the authors are Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell’s essay, In praise of idleness and, more recently, David Graeber’s On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: a work rant. Given this precedents, I was skeptical about Nørmark and Jensen having something new to say on the topic, but I was wrong. The book is divided in three parts. Part 1, “The time that disappeared”, Part 2, “The meaning that disappeared”, and Part 3, “How to get back time and meaning”.
Keynes foresaw a 15 hour work week that has not come to pass. Or perhaps it has in a perverse way. One could argue that we spent a lot of time at work doing nothing, or at least nothing of value. For me, one of the most insightful parts of the book is a list and classification of ways to accomplish nothing, what the authors call pseudowork. This has allowed me to reflect on my own workdays and my organization. The list is as follows:
Not having anything to do. There are people whose boss does not assign any work to them. They have no defined responsibilities at work. They simply show up. Spend the day doing nothing, reading the news, chatting with colleagues and then go home.
Having a useful work to do, but being prevented by ill-thought systems from doing it. An example is doctors that have to spend more time entering data in the electronic patient journal than actually visiting their patients. The problem may not be the idea of an electronic patient journal, but a bad implementation, with compulsory fields that do not let the doctors navigate forward in the application to record what they actually want to.
Doing useless work imposed by higher up in the organization hierarchy that has nothing to do with what one is actually supposed to do at work. Like a professor at a community college that is forced to do research and measured according to how much does he publish, and not for the education that the students get.
Copying something just because it is being done in another organization. A company may decide that it needs a communication department because similar organizations have one, not because it has any special need that requires a communication department.
Being constrained by the procedures of an administrative bureaucracy. Procedures build up over time, sometimes to prevent previous errors, other times due to new laws and regulations that pile on top of each other. Some of those may be well meaning, but do not address actual problems, others are a way to avoid liability.
Leadership bullshit. Strategy, values, mission statements and so on. Meetings and reports. Grandiose projects that look god but accomplish nothing, or that may serve only the career advancement of a manager. The project may be abandoned as soon as the manager gets a new position.
The causes of pseudowork
When trying to search for the causes of pseudowork, the authors distinguish between front stage and backstage jobs. The output of front stage workers is measurable and directly correlated with the amount of time spent at work. Like an operator in a widget factory. The more hours he works, the more widgets that are produced. Backstage jobs, on the other hand, are jobs that support front stage jobs, like accounting, marketing, quality control, and so on. For these kind of occupations, the relationship between output and time spent breaks down.
According to the authors, productivity increases lead to fewer workers needed to perform front stage work, and backstage work has expanded to accommodate the excess. An example of Parkinson’s law.
A related problem is an overproduction of educated workers that need something to do. They speak up for their professions and try to force them into every organization.
Pseudowork can arise when management becomes overly focused on performance indicators, especially if employees are rewarded according to them. Indicators become targets while everything that is not being measured is ignored.
Pseudowork is a way to avoid making decisions. Reports are commissioned and conclude with the need to perform further research. Meetings get called and conclude with the need to call another meeting to discuss the issue further. Pseudowork can also be a way to diffuse responsibilities. CC-ing an email to many people is a way to absolve oneself of responsibility.
A directive position creates the need for two to four additional staff. This seems correct in my experience. Middle managers generate work to one or two assistants, while top management may easily generate work for four persons. It is not that management staff takes over and centralizes tasks that otherwise are performed at a lower level in the organization. On the contrary. They invent and farm out new tasks to lower management levels.
Management and political leadership have a tendency to introduce new things, like new procedures or new requirements without removing the old ones. This creates layers of pseudowork.
In Nordic countries there is an expectation of employee involvement in decision-making. But in line organizations, it is management that formally makes decisions. Oftentimes decisions are already made by the time employee involvement is considered. Either because the decision comes from a political process or because it falls within employers management right to do so. Employee involvement becomes then a legitimization exercise. It is just a choreography with a known finale. I have experienced this firsthand. For most of those involved, it becomes a purely formal exercise, they are aware that their opinion will not be taken into account. They understand and accept that their opinion does not matter on certain topics, but they are forced to attend all-hands meetings, workshops and consultations rounds anyway.
People don’t need to communicate all the time. There is a limited amount of gains to be derived from synergies, cooperation and breaking down silos. An excessive emphasis on communication ends up enshrining the right to disturb others and prevents real work.
Consequences of pseudowork
Having to perform pseudowork often affects the morale and self-respect of employees who are aware of it. On the other hand, there are many who like pseudowork. In a culture of positivity full of yes-men no one dears to criticize and abolish things.
Resistance to change is a topic that is often discussed in the literature about change management. The focus is always about how to overcome this resistance. The authors theorize that resistance to change is often a reaction against pseudowork. Employees can accurately asses the consequences of change, and change often means more pseudowork.
How to end pseudowork
This may be the weakest part of the book. The authors propose to pay for task, not for time, but piecemeal work has its problems too. One of the accomplishments of the labor movement was to establish pay by the hour and not by the piece. Maybe the authors imagine a workplace composed of freelancers that charge a fixed price to accomplish something, rather than charging by the hour. That may be realistic in some sectors. I have noticed that engineering consultancies in Norway tend to charge by the hour, while it is more common in Spain to charge a fixed price for a project or for a specific deliverable. This gives more flexibility tot he consultants assigned to the project. They are not under constant pressure to generate billable hours. They can deliver what is agreed with the client and may be able to manage their time better.
Be more aware that the value of something is not directly related to the amount of time used on it. You don’t need to value things because they took time to create, and things that can be accomplished fast, aren’t necessarily worthless.
The authors also suggest that the public sector may be worse than the private sector in the amount of pseudowork performed. Therefore, the public sector should learn from the private sector. They do not show data to support this. In my experience, having worked both in the public and private sector, the amount of pseudowork seems similar in both places. The public sector is under constant public scrutiny and this limits some excesses. Private companies may have very profitable businesses that can support enormous amounts of pseudowork. I once heard a manager at Statkraft, the biggest electricity producer in Norway, claim that a single smallish division of the company, comprised of roughly a dozen power plants and the 300 staff that operates them provide more than 90% of the company’s income and support the other 5700 employees of the company.
There is the notion that if somebody pays for producing a report or whatever, it must be worth something. That is not necessarily true. While I may agree with this principle, some of the examples they show, for example a board of directors that does not read reports, are not be very convincing. They frame it as the report being worthless. To me it seems that it is the board members who are not performing their duties. If they do not have time to read everything, maybe they are over-committed and probably not able to do a good job anyway. Reports usually have an executive summary. It may be that the executive summary is all the board needs to make a decision or be informed enough, but that does not mean that the work that goes into the report is wasted. The report is necessary. There must be something to summarize, and new ideas and insights may emerge in the process of researching and writing the report.
The authors criticize audit, controllers, quality control, accreditation and so on. I think this is unfair. I wouldn’t want to fly with an airline that did not have an extensive control system, with lots of audits and an external accreditation. I suspect the authors wouldn’t either. On the other hand, you may not need a quality system to run a high school. What you probably want is engaged teachers that know their topic and prepare the classes beforehand.
Another area where you want some kind of standardization and controls are public facing services, specially in the public administration. It should not be up to each individual civil servant to interpret the law and provide services according to their own criteria. It would make interacting with the administration unpredictable. Imagine that getting a building permit depended on how a particular official interpreted the building code that day.
Good systems perform better than the best individuals on their own. I once chatted with a doctor and wondered how is it possible that ER services save lives and have so very few cases of missing grave illnesses in spite of the very long shifts, sometimes 24 hours, that ER personnel worked. He suggested that I was looking at it from the wrong angle. I was focusing on how individual persons would perform being tired, while he was looking at a system, where individual persons are just a little part of it. For the system to work, procedures and checklists are necessary. Nørmark and Jensen dismiss those too lightly.
A different side of rules and procedures is when those are implemented as a way to making work legible for leadership. Especially leadership without domain expertise (that leaders without domain expertise perform worse, is a recurring find in many domains). Leaders may be focusing on the wrong parameters, or simply not understanding the context to interpret them correctly, and in any case generating pseudo-work. In those cases leadership is showing lack of trust in its subordinates. It made me thing about Google’s project Oxygen. A Google initiative to understand what makes effective managers. One of the conclusions of the project was that mangers should have a high number of reports. One of the reasons for that is that this makes it impossible for managers to micromanage their reports.
Pseudowork is a taboo because of the connection between work and identity. The authors do not offer a practical way to end pseudowork, and I can’t see one either. But as an individual, it is possible to be aware of pseudowork, to avoid generating pseudowork for others and oneself and limit the amount of pseudowork you accept from others.