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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

That would be the state whose true educational concerns are political in nature.

Government’s approach to solving problems is to create more laws and requirements, and this in turn creates more clerical work that is needed to document the fact that all these laws and requirements are being met. This shows voters that the government is indeed “doing something about education”. Ironically, this process never ends so, in the end, all the documentation and clerical work is not only exhausting for the teachers but time consuming as well.

22

A few years ago we laid off all the administrative assistants at my company except for the executive assistants. They were laid off because we no longer needed their services, because the admin work they had been doing was streamlined. If I need more paperclips or schedule a meeting, I can just do it myself quite easily.

23

The issue with the old school way of doing invoices and expense reports was that they could be scammed quite easily. There was a story (meme?) going around in the early 80’s of a guy who purchased all of the things needed to build his house by ordering all of the material and taking it home with him or delivered offsite. Story goes that he was caught and the company had to take possession of the house and sell it (at a profit) to get their money back.

I also recall when you could charm a waitress into giving you blank receipts so that you could pad your expense account. Not that I ever did that. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: I use Concur now and it much easier than any other systems I’ve used to track expenses, just as long as you have a smartphone and take pictures of your receipts as soon as you get them.

24

And here we are…

25

I’m not sure what you mean - do you disagree with me that it’s not more expensive to have the $50/hr person spend 10 minutes composing/typing/distributing the email than it is to have the $50/hr employee spend 10 minutes handwriting the memo and telling the $10/ hr clerk who to send it to and that clerk then spending 10 minutes typing and copying and distributing it? How could it possibly be less expensive for each of them to spend 10 minutes on it than for only one of them to spend ten minutes on it?

Maybe at your job the $10/hr clerk was composing the memo - but not at mine.

26

Echoing Jasmine. Teachers everywhere are laughing at the OP’s premise and saying “Hold my beer.”

Although I am quite sure that everybody everywhere feels exactly the same way. It’s just that we (teachers) are the ones who are most correct. :stuck_out_tongue:

27

My point is that a judicious evaluation of where the labor happens, from a cost/benefit, is required. What we have instead is a an all-or-nothing approach that says that self-service is the answer. Also, that automation is sometimes/often oversold.

28

Generally, it seems the incentive for this is capitalism’s specialty, short-term thinking. In the name of effeciency (saving money), the bosses (for want of a better term) want to track everything. However, the labour costs of tracking everything are somehow not considered in the same way that everything else is.

A great example of this in academia are student evaluations. Students evaluate their classes. These evaluations are known to be heavily biased in favour of men, white people, easy As, and other factors that have nothing to do with education. In their final weeks of classes, students aren’t really in a good position to provide a meaningful evaluation, anyway. But these evaluations produce metrics, so a metric shit-ton of labour goes into producing, distributing, collating, and assessing this frankly bad data.

29

Yup, the demand for numerical data that can be input into quantitative metrics whose outputs can be easily compared to produce what superficially appear to be objective assessments is ever-increasing.

What the number-crunching administrators seem very reluctant to recognize is that the end-product assessments are actually no better than the data. Garbage in, garbage out.

30

Last job I had they would pick a specific day and that would be the day of the meeting, they would hold it in a corner of the call center, just so the people that had to be on the phone could listen in. Sigh. They tended to hold it first thing in the morning so the night people could attend, and the middle [evening hours] people had to disrupt their sleep. Seemed they did it on a friday normally. While it was a bit loud for people actually on the phone, it sort of worked. [when presented a shift choice, I tend to prefer working overnight, when one commutes 50+ miles each way, it rocks to be commuting the opposite way of traffic =) I didn’t really mind the long commutes, give me my vat of coffee, my breakfast [toasted cheese sandwiches, or toast sandwiches of whatever] and good music or audiobooks, an empty bladder and a full tank of gas and off I went =)

A million times this. Were we not to go paperless back in the 80s? Instead, some of my jobs had me not only do shit in the computer, but also either print something out to hand off to management or to also print something and shove it into a file folder, or send with a package, or mail off to someone. Payroll was hell, when you work through a computer/call in timecard company, you then run into issues with 10 000 people trying to log in at once, and bogging down in the mass of people trying to time clock in. Yes, in one factory setting I worked in we would have a line of people standing by the timeclock, and when I temped and had to get the bosses signature on the time sheet, it got slowed down, but then all we had to do was turn in the card/slip at the end of the week and pay ensued.

mrAru has issues - the company he is currently working for has the timesystem on a website, and it has to be done from one specific computer - his laptop in Caledonia NY. When he visited here a few pay cycles ago he tried logging in here in CT to do it and it bounced him every try - so he just goes back to the house, fills in his timesheet then heads to CT for the weekend [he hates hauling his laptop around, he said if he had known how much of a pain it was he would have used his tablet to log in the first time when they apparently set his location ‘timeclock computer’]

31

Since I entered the world of Medicine in 1979, the paperwork burden has increased logarithmically. That process started before the implementation of the Electronic Medical Record, but only increased even faster since EMR implementation. Ironically, the EMR required physicians to frequently be data entry specialists instead of our support personnel who used to do the job for us. So now I’ve seen practitioners who command upwards of $250/hr and more doing data entry work instead of support staff.

And those are the lucky practitioners, who are contracted for an hourly rate. The rest have to do the data entry on top of the clinical work, for no additional pay.

I’m told some medical systems are working to decrease such burdens on physicians. I hope that’s true. Sadly nursing ends up shouldering far too much clerical work too, which takes them away from patient care.

I’m glad I am retired.

32

This is a big thing. Lots of bureaucracy and other stuff is put in place to solve a problem. Nobody wants to be the one to take it away, because then it is that person’s fault when the problem returns.

People are lying on their expense reports. Let’s make them scan and upload receipts. Even when it is apparent that the cost involved in handling and checking receipts against expenses exceeds the cost of any expense report fraud that was happening, nobody will take away the bad policy, because nobody wants to be responsible for the resulting increase in fraud.

For other examples, see security theater.

Which directly works into Goodhart’s law which states “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

So you want to target how many calls a customer service rep handles per day? Great, easy to measure, seems meaningful. Now the entire customer service department is incentivized towards taking the maximum number of calls per day, and nothing else. Maybe the metric should be how many cases are closed per day? Now the entire department just closes cases, instead of solving them. Hey, let’s target solved cases. Now CS reps are reminded to mark cases solved before closing them!

33

I have learned that a lot of the fault does not lie with managers as much as we want to blame them. It come from coworkers that accidently, deliberately or maliciously mess up.

34

That, or management that simply doesn’t trust the workers to work. I’ve had so many jobs where the burdensome requirements came from the presumption that I wouldn’t work if I didn’t have someone’s eyes on me at all times. While I get that some people are lazy, I suspect we’d be a lot better off if we just trained people properly and then trusted them.

35

To my point, did it come about because there were a bunch of lazy employees at one time so that the management came to not trust them?

36

Not to my knowledge.

37

Broomie nailed it. When I started at my current job 12 years ago, I has TWO staff assigned to me personally. We had 6 in office staff handling nothing but scheduling. And we had 2 staff who did the office’s timekeeping and other general administrative tasks.

Today, 6 of us share 5 staff, and there are 2 schedulers. We do our own timekeeping, etc.

I’m winding down to retirement, so I’ll just do whatever they tell me to do to keep the paychecks coming. But I’m not going to give them more and more time. So if they wish me to do ministerial crap at my pay grade, I’ll just have to reduce the time and effort I put into the tasks that most people would expect to be done by someone in my position. Fewer people doing crappier work faster! Now THERE’S a mission statement for ya!

It does not seem a general truism that each successive computerized system is more intuitive and easier to use. I wonder how much of my perception is generational… An anecdote I find amusing - we are currently in the midst of a complete shift in tracking systems. (What makes it worse is that they won’t/can’t just tear off the bandaid and let us all just get used to the new system.). At one point they sent around a survey that asked “Rate from 1-5 how useful it is that the new system uses completely different terms to perform the identical function as the old system?” :smiley:

And CM - I’m not sure where you are in your career, but ISTM that EVERY engineer I’ve known has observed that at some point in their career, if they wish to continue to advance, they end up doing less engineering and more managing. I’ve heard that so often I just internalized it as a fact of that career.

38

OP - There’s an app for that. :imp:

39

Exactly this. I’ve spent my career working in market research and advertising, so I don’t have some of the same administrative responsibilities of some other fields, like medicine.

But, when I started my career, in the late '80s, a full staff of administrative assistants was the norm; each administrative assistant at the companies for which I worked probably had three to six people with whom they worked (unless you were in senior management, and then you had your own assistant).

At that point, few of us had computers on our desks; we would hand-write or dictate (on a Dictaphone) memos and reports, and our administrative assistants would type them up for us. But, within a few years (i.e., early '90s), nearly all of us had been given computers, and increasingly, we were at least typing our own stuff. The administrative assistants still did a lot of work, however: scheduling meetings, printing and distributing reports and memos, scheduling travel, etc.

When I started working in advertising, in 2000, we still had administrative assistants, though each of them had larger groups of people for whom they were responsible. By then, the assistants weren’t doing much typing (except for those who worked with some agency vets, who still used Dictaphones), but they were invaluable for scheduling meetings, arranging travel, filing expense reports, etc. I had the same assistant for nearly all of my twelve-year tenure at that agency, and she was awesome – she’d been there for a long time, and knew how to get things done, and who to call when there was a problem.

Now, at my current agency, there are nearly no administrative assistants left (only the very top management has them). All of those tasks are now the responsibility of the individual employee, and if one needs assistance or guidance on things like booking travel, filling out your timesheet, etc., it’s a complete snipe hunt to identify how and where to get help, and is made more difficult by the fact that the agency has offshored the support functions for those systems – for instance, all of our expense reports are processed by a group in Costa Rica, and emails which they send to us when there’s an issue with an expense are usually cryptic, in an ESL sort of way.

The OP mentioned mandated training, as well. In the past, there were a couple of mandatory training sessions which we had to attend (such as a course on combating sexual harassment), which were always in-person, and actually kind of engaging and interesting. Now, all of the courses are online / e-learning, and there is a ton of them, which we are all mandated to take every year. I have to sit through 20+ hours of training courses every year (harassment, data privacy, anti-bribery, etc.); they’re clearly important, but it’s also, I am sure, a matter of CYA on the part of the corporation.

40

Back when I was the “clerk” (actually, either secretary or administrative/executive assistant) The Boss wasn’t actually composing the memo or letter. He or she would give me some particulars (X happens on Y day, tell Mr. B I said thank you, whatever) and I would be the one to put it into complete sentences, spell/grammar check it, add appropriate headers/formatting, check addresses, make copies, and make sure everything got where it needed to go. This actually did save The Boss time to do things at his/her level. There was some value-added at my level and I did save The Boss time. But now, hey, have The Boss do all that at five or ten times the cost of me doing it…

Ditto for things like travel arrangements and expense reports. I could spend the time researching different flight options, rental cars, hotels, etc. but hey, go ahead and waste an executive’s time with that. Expense reports? I was already familiar with the trip (since I did the arrangements) and I could fill out the forms instead of The Boss. Again, I was actually saving The Boss’s time for Boss Things. Or the Doctor’s or Scientist’s time for their highly specialized skills.

But our society never did value the “administrative assistant”, and never acknowledged that when properly used they really did add value. And now they’re largely gone. Which is why a lot of executive types (and doctors, and others) are now overworked and stressed out and I’m running a cash register at a glorified grocery store. At that, I might have the better end of the deal.