Workplace rant: I spend a lot more time doing unnecessary "admin" work vs. 25 years ago

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m an engineer. I’m supposed to do technical work. But I also have to do “admin work,” i.e. busywork/paperwork that has nothing to do with the technical work I am supposed to be doing.

When I first started back in the mid 1990s, the amount of admin work was pretty minimal. I could complete a paper travel authorization in five minutes, and a paper travel expense report in three minutes; fill it out, staple the receipts to it, and I’m finished. It took me all of five minutes to fill out a paper purchase request. Time cards were quickly filled out by hand at the end of every pay period.

Nowadays it takes me hours to fill out a travel authorization, and even longer for me to do the expense report (which includes scanning receipts). The online timecard & expense system is extremely cumbersome and difficult to use. So much so that you need to take training on how to use it. The purchasing system is so complex that I don’t even mess with it anymore - I now ask my technician to buy stuff, and I log in to approve it. It takes him hours to fill out a purchase request, especially if the vendor is not already in the system. It’s so time consuming that it’s become his part-time job.

I also spend way too much time communicating with people via email or Teams or whatever. It’s mostly B.S., and it’s time that can be better spent doing technical work.

There is now an entire database devoted to mandatory training, and I am now required to take a lot more of it, for some reason.

We used to have four financial meetings a year. Now it’s once a month.

Lately management has been obsessed with tracking our “metrics.” More paperwork. More meetings. More communicating.

Don’t even get me started with how the performance reviews have become much more lengthy and complex.

My calendar in Outlook is full of useless meetings. I’m afraid to look at the calendar on most days. And my technical work needs to be scheduled around these ever-important meetings.

When I started in the 1990s, I estimate I spent around 5% of my time doing admin/bureaucratic stuff. Nowadays it is probably over 30%.

2

But think how many managers and administrators you are employing!

I’m in academia, and it’s the same thing. Quite a lot of truly unnecessary work, mainly to create measurable things so that the people whose job it is to track things can do so. A lot of quantitative data, and very little qualitative analysis of it.

3

Too fucking true.

4

My work had the ultimate pointless waste of time ever.

We’d have Mandatory “All Hands on Deck” meetings.

But because we all had different days off work would schedule another meeting 2 days later for anyone who wasn’t present for the first meeting so they can catch up, but then require everyone who already attended the first meeting to attend this one because “There’s no point having a meeting for just a few people so we might as well all attend”

5

I can complain about this sort of thing as much as anyone else, but I also acknowledge there’s a certain amount of admin work that is necessary. Maybe a lot, depending on the field.

Read an article about overworked nurses’ aids in the UK recently. One of the problems is the record keeping, which is time consuming and hard to do in the moment. An example was that they had to record when non-ambulatory patients had been turned in bed.

Well, that’s important to track accurately. And because it’s important, it’s probably necessary. That kind of data can also show statistical trends, and that may not be at all apparent to the person holding the clipboard (or tablet). But that’s not to say the method they use has no potential alternatives.

In my field it’s really important to keep good records. That’s how we maintain safety and accountability, and therein lies the difference between our industry with its good transparency and how things work in countries where corruption and shoddiness is the rule.

Wish I could tell you where the line is. All that comes to mind from my experience is that small to mid-sized organizations are more likely to maintain the nimbleness to make what I think of as “intelligent exceptions” to policies when they see the unintended consequences. I’ve avoided working for big companies for this reason.

6

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to automate this process so that it doesn’t require hours of employee-time to fill the damn things out.

7

Out of curiosity, are you in a more senior role now than you were in the 1990s? I find that there is often a positive correlation between seniority and how much time is spent in meetings, for instance.

8

How long does it take to write down on a clipboard “patient turned at 4:20?” It should be trivial compared to the time required to actually turn the patient. I suspect the problem is that they don’t have a clipboard and have to log into their EMR system and click through a bunch of screens to enter the data, then log out again.

9

I once had a job (late 90’ through 2007 - I’ve even ranted about some of it here) where all I did all day long was administrative work so doctors and scientists could do their medical and scientific work instead of spending hours on filling out forms.

Then someone had the bright idea they could save the company money by laying off people such as myself and having the doctors and scientists do their own paperwork.

I’m certain the result was somewhat like what the OP describes.

If you eliminate the secretaries and assistants then all that necessary paperwork/admin stuff still needs to be done. Which takes time from the technical and specialized people (because the secretaries and assistants were actually the specialists in admin, but rarely valued for their skills at getting this scutwork done). I’m sure it does save money - but I’m not sure by other metrics it’s any better.

10

Crafter_Man, I am with you on this. I’ve been framing it as the amount of time it takes to be an employee, outside of the time spent on actual work.

For years, I’ve seen this kind of tangental tasking increase because many of the things top management implements to make some change in the organization’s direction are actually specific new tasks in this category. This is especially true of implementations in response to something having gone wrong and created trouble.

Thus, there is a kind of natural force that increases this phenomenon. However, there isn’t a corresponding natural force decreasing it. I guess nobody is ambitious for the fame and power that comes from getting unhelpful policies rescinded. An especial problem is that when you examine such policies, it’s often difficult to find out what problem they were supposed to solve, and even harder to track down the various other ways people started to rely on them once they were operational.

I think the computer revolution failed us here. It became tempting to automate these processes so that people could enter their own information, but the software to automate them was generally poor and buggy, typical of software with a tiny user base that doesn’t actually want to use it. And it then gets worse because of predictably poor compliance, which erodes data quality, possibly triggering yet another policy.

11

Agree. Though I guess an argument can be made that competition will ultimately take care of it if the problem gets bad enough.

I think there’s a common belief that using a computer to perform a task is always more efficient than filling out a sheet of paper.

I think buying all these computer systems for doing management/admin stuff has made us less efficient. Not only has it made me a lot less efficient, but we had to hire more admin people to maintain these systems.

12

Which means the doctors and scientists have to spend a greater percentage of their time doing this stuff. Which means less medical & technical stuff gets done. Which means they have to hire more medical & technical personnel to do the same amount of work as they did before. And hence there’s no cost reduction.

13

I firmly believe that this is definitely a trend and that it spans numerous fields and disciplines. For example, the amount of clerical work that teachers are mandated to do is absurdly high compared to twenty years ago, and it has done nothing other than increase.

14

And who, exactly, benefits from all the additional clerical work the teachers are required to do?

15

Years ago I was the manager of a warehouse. We had a fairly efficient stock control system and losses were pretty minimal but not zero.

A management consultant who was s given the job of streamlining all the systems wanted to introduce a more complex system as well as weekly stock checks. I managed to convince the board that the extra costs of introducing the new ideas, would outweigh the losses by some margin.

16

Maybe - but I worked long enough ( in a non-medical field) to go from paper notes to a very clunky electronic record system* and the number of complaints about required documentation didn’t really change.

* I retired last year, and it was still a green type on black screen system circa 1980 something.

17

I observed this phenomenon years ago when PCs were first put on manager’s desks and email replaced memos. I pointed out that instead of having a $10/hour clerk type a memo, now you are having a $50/hour manager type an email. The principle is that any task should be pushed down to the cheapest labor possible, taking into account skill and knowledge and authority. My argument fell on deaf ears.

18

I don’t know why it takes you so long to fill out your time and expenses electronically. We use SAP Concur at my current firm and prior to that my last company used Replicon or something similar. They aren’t awesome, but it doesn’t take me more than a few minutes to enter my time for the week and any expenses I might have.

Keep in mind, it’s not just you filling out your timesheets and expense reports. Presumably they have to also be approved by someone and the entries also updated in your company’s various accounting, billing, HR, and other systems. That would be way to burdensome to do manually on slips of paper when scaled to a company of any appreciable size (unless you don’t mind waiting six months to get your expenses paid).

Maybe one of the big differences from the 90s is that you are the one entering all your time and expenses and other admin stuff. I remember when I entered management in the 2000s, we still had admins who processed a lot of this stuff for me.

Over-reliance on these systems may also be a problem. I think the expectation is that people fill out the information in these various systems (CRM, HR, T&E, etc) and then it gets processed automatically. Most of the time it probably does. But you always have these weird edge cases where the system won’t let you do it the way it needs to be done, so in addition to filling out all your admin stuff, you have to go hunt down how to do this one thing manually. Meanwhile, management or whoever, likes how all this data is in one place so they think of new metrics and KPIs and OKRs to measure, requiring people to enter more crappy data.

19

I hate the way some companies want invoices submitted. You have to set up an account which of course means another user name and password. Then when you get into the system, it’s so complicated that it’s ridiculous. Then there are the companies that make payments to us via ACH and then charge us a fee! ACH is fine but for a company to require us to accept ACH and then charge us 2-3% really bothers me.

I’m old school - mail the invoice and receive a check in the mail - how simple is that?

20

Yes, but - at my job, that $10/hr clerk was typing the memo, not composing it. So we still had the $50/hr manager composing it and then the $10/hr clerk typing and copying and distributing it and once we actually got computers , the professional staff and managers could type the email in about the same amount of time they could handwrite it, so it actually did save money since the typing , copying and distributing were almost free once the $50/hr for composing was paid.