Business/Sociology of work: is there a term of art for this distinction of types of job?

Factual Questions
1

The other day I sat in a two hour meeting (hearing the work on my desk desperately calling for me), and considered the work/roles of several coworkers and me it occurred to me that jobs seem to come in two distinct groups:

(A) Jobs where, when you are not there, the work either gets done by someone else, or does not get done for good (Theoretical example: should a fire department collectively go on vacation for a month they won’t come back to a backlog of burning houses).

(B) Jobs where, when you are not there, the work piles up.

The difference being that legitimate absences from work (vacations, sickness, other assignments), with salary continuing to be paid, are not stressful (even relaxing depending on the cause) for type (A), but very stressful for the type (B) job. In my case, a three weeks’ vacation means a very stressful three weeks before (preparing all tasks that could conceivably come up) and a very stressful three weeks after (clearing the backlog).

The distinction between these types (A) and (B) is not along an axis of high/low importance, and neither along an axis of high/low qualifications needed.

Whether some job is in one of the two categories depends mainly on organization (one or multiple persons do a job, employee vs. self-employed, etc.) and only occasionally on the task.

For example, my job is in the (B) group because I am the only one doing it, the customer often requires work to be finished two or even one weeks after order, and it would take months to train a colleague to do the work half as fast as I do. If the volume of orders increased a hundredfold, i.e. I were one of a hundred, the same job would be in group (A).

So, is there a term of art for that distinction in types of jobs?

2

Mission critical?

3

The example you give is not a difference in category, but of poor Management. My first (real) Boss on my first day of work told me: “Write everything down as instruction how-to, and make notes on every customer account, so that in case a truck drives over you tomorrow, a co-worker can take over”.

You are entitled to vacation, even in the US, right? And nobody can rule out illness or accidents. So it doesn’t matter that it might take more than 1 day to Train a coworker, there should be both a) a detailed written-down instruction on how to fill your shoes and b) at least one co-worker you have once shown how to do it. That Person will fill in for your planned vacation as well as unplanned emergencies. (Presumably you will fill in for another coworker during their absences). Obviously, somebody taking over will take some time to get fully used to it, or might make some Details a bit different. They might not do extra work or super-complicated things. But the Routine stuff shouldn’t pile up.

If nobody is available because everybody is overworked, your Company/ department lacks employees (= bad Management). It also lacks foresight. Aside from accidents, what if you decide to up and leave? How can they fire you? (Quote from a crime novel “The cemeteries are full of indispensable People”)

To answer the General question, not your example: I would call that distinction tentativly the difference between creative Jobs and repetetive Jobs.

Any trained baker can bake a dozen different breads, any trained Cook can cook dozens of meals. It takes a Special talented Chef to invent a good new meal.

Any dozen of People can fill in a form on a Computer, or write a Standard Office letter. One Person in 50 can write a good Story. (Let’s leave aside the question of how well it sells, because bad novels sell too well).

Off-Hand, I can’t think of a non-creative = repetive Job where work would pile up during absences if not for bad Management.

4

I wonder if that works 100% (it’s better than anything I got, though)? The OP says that this job doesn’t have to be important; mission-critical suggests importance. (Also, a mission-critical job could be covered by multiple trained employees, moving it into category A.)

This is an interesting answer! Two things:

  1. Some management theorist may still have come up with a term of art to describe type B jobs
  2. I suppose the buck always stops with management, but as an addendum, having lazy coworkers can easily kick you into being a type B employee; I think of the food service jobs I’ve had where only So-and-so ever cleaned out the such-and-such, because nobody else cared.
5

To me, that’s still poor Management: A good Boss doesn’t micromange, or encourage snitches. But they should know enough about the Job to notice whether it gets done well or not, they should have enough People skills to notice those who put their burden on others; and communication should be open enough that Problems can be discussed and get Solutions, not new Problems. (Yes, happens rarely in real life: but that’s because there are very few good Managers in real life, and lots of People with the Position of Manager).

6

All of my jobs in corporate America have fallen into the OP’s “B” category. Not because I’m mission critical but because of what you’ve described here. All of my coworkers have such a heavy workload that trying to help each other causes our own work to fall behind and pile up. I agree with the bad management comment and would go one step further to say it’s a bad management philosophy. If you’ve read media reports in the last decade or two of companies bragging about how they run very lean and efficient, this is how they do it. They are definitely lean but I argue that they’re not as efficient as they think they are. All it takes is one employee to get hit by a bus and things go downhill.

It actually happened very vividly in my current company. One guy left suddenly one day (we don’t know if he was fired or quit). Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knew all of the little things he did and several teams have been struggling to figure it out so that we continue business as usual without him. His work was external customer facing, too. Maintaining our customer-facing website. Only he knew how to combine our (stupid) many Word docs into one PDF and how/where to link them on the site. We’ve been in a world of hurt since he left but it’s not politically correct to comment on how or why management let such a thing happen.

7

I don’t think so. At least not how the OP defined the problem. Fubaya may be closer in that it’s really more about criticality, how “hands on” you need to be and whether the “work” continues with or without you.
In consulting, work is often defined in terms of “Finders”, “Minders” and “Grinders”. Finders are executives, salespeople, entrepreneurs and strategists who determine what the work should be and look for clients to provide services to and provide general direction.

Minders are your middle management types, supervisors, projects managers, accountants, compliance people, safety inspectors and so on who manage the process, oversee the work and make sure it gets done.

Grinders are people who physically do the work. Analysts, factory workers and so on.
I think a main distinction is that if Grinders stop working, work stops immediately. If Minders stop working, flaws and errors get introduced into the system (including Grinders leaving their job without being replaced) and it eventually breaks down. If Finders stop working, the system will continue as is until it either runs out of clients or market conditions make it no longer viable.

8

And how much Money has been lost through unhappy customers since then, compared to the cost of hiring a few more employees? That’s why it’s short-sighted. In the most extreme cases, if nobody can figure it out, and unhappy customers leave in droves, a Company can go under. That’s the leanest Company: 0 employees!

9

First, about Consulting … Canoe Race - a modern management parable :slight_smile:

Second, in those types of Business where it’s important - whether army or emergency or IT - to never stop, everybody knows the importance of having backups who can take over if anybody along the chain is not available. It doesn’t matter whether the captain of a ship gets Food poisioning from eating the fish, or whether the third luggage handler is stuck in a traffic jam - somebody will act as replacement, because otherwise the System stops.

Funny how businesses don’t think it’s important to prepare to Keep making Money. I wonder: do they also neglect backup copies for IT, and Generators? Or is it just employees that are neglected?

10

As to the OP’s narrow issue, the Finder, Minder, Grinder split is essentially the time until the output shortfall is potentially noticeable. And regardless of which role someone has, the smaller their crew of interchangeable people, the quicker the output shortfall manifests.

The rest of the issue is whether management, or the worker, actually notices or actually cares that a shortfall is building up.

11

There’s also: (C) Jobs where, when you are not there, the work is on hold and will get done when you return, but it doesn’t pile up. That is, the “in box” needn’t be externally governed as it is in the case of firefighting or customer requests.

I agree with the comments that good management should ideally keep pile-up from happening even in (B) by folding vacations and sick time into planning, but there are innumerable reasons why that may not be easy to do in a given situation (e.g., at a company with the capacity to have only a few employees vs. 5,000 employees, or for people with highly specialized jobs).

But I’m talking about something else, and the example that I have in mind is research and development. This can be open-ended enough such that a single person’s project can simply halt for two weeks and be re-started when they return. The work still happens, but no one else does it in the meantime. It also doesn’t pile up unless they are trying to hit a delivery deadline, in which case it’s in the (B) category and it’s a management question as to whether the deadline was set with HR considerations in mind and thus whether things actually do pile-up.

12

Compounding this, I’ve noticed in my last few jobs that management has been unable or unwilling to do any “resource” planning, i.e. they don’t plan for projects ahead of time. Everybody I know has been frantically working on 4 - 8 projects simultaneously and that’s become the norm. You can’t focus on getting one thing done really well, so you do half a dozen projects sloppily. And that seems to be acceptable to management. They gleefully talk about how the workers collaborate so well. In truth, we struggle to collaborate because we can’t afford to give each other the time of day. Sometimes we fight back against “too many meetings” by collaborating by email and then that just causes miscommunication or arguments whereupon someone calls a meeting to clear it all up again. It goes back to the Mythical Man Month: you can’t have 9 pregnant women give birth to a baby in one month. Corporate America sure as hell tries, though.

13

I’m not at all sure that you can define jobs as “A” or “B.” I think instead you can define tasks as A or B, and jobs as having predominantly A or B tasks – that is, tasks that will either get done by someone else or no longer need to be done, and tasks that will wait for the job-holder to return to work. For example, attending the meeting where the OP had these ruminations was a task assigned to his/her job, but was a type A task in a job that’s mostly type B duties.

It’s certainly not a perfect deliminator, but the term Time-Sensitive does seem to distinguish between many type A and type B tasks.

14

“Time-sensitive” doesn’t seem to get at the distinction the OP is attempting to make. A person assembling Big Macs has a very time-sensitive job – they’d better have that Big Mac ready in under a minute. However, if they are out sick for a few days they don’t return to a request for a thousand Big Macs. (Or, see OP’s firefighter example. A house on fire is rather time-sensitive.)

15

Agree with Pasta. As I said up-thread, it’s a two-fold test:
A) Must it always be completed eventually*?
B) Is anyone else picking up my slack?

The problem case is (A=true, B=false). The other three cases [ (T, T), (F, T), (F, F) ] are not problematic. That’s the OP’s split: between the one problematic case and the three others which aren’t for various reason(s).

OBE or “overcome by events” was the DoD term for something you were supposed to have done but which had became irrelevant by the time you got around to it.

16

Sorry for being so late in getting back to this.

I see I didn’t state my point very well. Assembling a Big Mac is a time-sensitive task – if the worker isn’t there to do it, someone else will have to do it.

Time-sensitive tasks will get done by someone, or the need to do them will go away. or, as the OP said:

The house on fire is time-sensitive, but if no firefighter is available, the need will go away.

Most tasks are somewhat time-sensitive, but many will keep for several days. Thus, they will wait for the worker until she returns from her vacation. But still, most of them need to be done by a certain point in time or one has to question the need for such a task. Example: I once worked for an organization where the process for approving a leave of absence was so convoluted that often the employee would return from leave before the leave was actually approved. Since in such circumstances the leave was always approved (the employee’s supervisor having given the OK), the need for the 4 or 5 other people in the chain was superfluous.

So maybe the term should be “Time-urgent.” A time-urgent task is one that must be done within a short period or cannot be done at all.

17

Sounds like consulting to me. The consultant gave their corporate client some sensible, mostly intuitive advice and then they go and do something completely stupid with it.

Sure! The IT systems and generators are important! They can always replace the inanimate carbon blobs sitting around pretending to do meaningful work.