To think most jobs could be done by fewer people but no one admits it because they’d be out of work?

[PlainMintOwl]

So much of work feels like busywork. Whole roles exist to shuffle paper, attend pointless meetings or justify someone’s salary. AIBU to think most companies could cut staff by 30% and still function?

There was one person before me, who struggled to do the work, so they split the job in half and two of us were employed. My co-worker, I now realised delegated as much as they could or hid the work needed. Their replacement was useless and couldnt do the work. The third replacement was brilliant, better than me and automated a lot and when they left, we struggled to find a replacement but as time went on, I realised I was doing all the work comfortabley and now we are back to one person, me, doing the work. There are times when work is hectic but others when it totally calms down.

Not a single job I’ve been in has been like this. Are you in the public sector?

I can tell you they spend a lot more time in meetings than anything else

Im 50/50 as to whether this is a problem. On the one hand, there can be too much time spent in pointless meetings.

But on the other hand, get the right 4 or 5 people together in a room and its where all the actual decisions get made. People actually own and are accountable at senior levels and they are paid for that. That junior manager might have collated that report, but if he doesn't have the judgement and ownership to say "right, ive weighed up the pros and cons and we are going to do X", its all for nothing. The decision makers often get things to actually happen.

We describe this in my industry as people who "get shit done" or "actually make stuff happen".

In education. No not all. Most of us are working 1.5 jobs in terms of hours.

I used to be public sector and was rushed off my feet. My experience of this is private sector / big corporate only!

I was a play worker in a children’s centre I could have done double the work easily.

My boss certainly agrees with this. In teaching.. redundancies never touch the highest level.. answer to his problem increase class sizes and workload of those below!

No. I'm the only marketer in the company and I have work backed up so we're looking for an apprentice now

Private sector here. I used to have a team of 14 now it’s 8. We get by but there’s loads of stuff we used to do which we now don’t. I basically feel we do the bare minimum to get by and I have to remind the team that it was a business decision to cut heads and I’m not expected to work evenings and take in the burden… and I remind my team the same. Every opportunity I get I tell management everything I’d like to do but we don’t have time for. Everytime a client complains that we took too long to fix something or even took too long to respond to a mail or find a root cause I say it’s because the team are stretched and juggling and 99 times out of 100 we can choose to drop the least worst thing but sometimes we don’t get to choose.

it’s a risk for seniors to manage.

In one of the schools that I worked in. It used to be 1 head teacher, 4 assistant heads.
A new headteacher came in
now its 1 headteacher
I deputy head teacher
6 assistant head teachers
2 Teachers that are assistant head teachers in all but name.
All with reduced teaching time, whilst at the same time they have chased out teachers and not replaced them, reduced hours in subjects so that teachers have to teach outside of their subject areas to make up their teaching hours.

Its a mess.

@LegoMaxifigure I’m guessing you’re in upper management.
I understand the roles needed but when you have 5 people filling that role and then the 10 people underneath them with similar job titles and a stupid amount of pay it’s difficult to see how the work is distributed.

I'm public sector and in my job we have more work now than we did five years ago but with 1.5 people to do it rather than the 2.5 we had previously. It took me two months to catch up last summer after having a fortnight off on leave. Summer is not too bad and I was kind of caught up, but now I have Covid so it will be full steam ahead till my hols in a months time.

I do a full time job in part time hours and term time only, and I'm still not busy.
Predecessor did the same role full time, all year round...fuck knows what he did all day.

That's never been my experience. But even if that's the case, I'm not sure I understand the issue. If your estimated 30% of people lost their jobs, wouldn't be a huge strain on resources? As it is, they're working and paying taxes, which benefits everyone.

A friend of mine is currently in a job just like this.

She started a new role and although she likes the work, after the very first day she said that no-one seemed to stretch themselves and having a cup of tea & chat was deemed more important than actually working.*
Several months into the role she says that boredom is her biggest problem as if she tries to do more work, she is jumped on by her colleagues and told she is making them look bad!

There are rumors of cost cutting ahead (factory gossip) but she is not worried either way.
If she has to go (last in) she will find something else but if she stays (and they get rid of dead wood) she will be able to work faster.

*She has likened it to that wonderful old film "I'm All Right Jack".
Said that if she had not witnessed it with her own eyes she would not have believed that somewhere like that still existed in this day & age!

I also have a peaks and troughs job. In quiet times I could easily do the work of two of us in my 26 hours a week. However when something then happens it is busy.

There's 5 of us doing the same job as me but assigned to different areas. Most of them are full time I don't have a bloody clue what they're doing all day.

We work from home and I fit in dog walks, exercise and most of my housework in to the working day unless something exciting is going on or I happen to have a lot of meetings one day. Then one day a week in the office, sometimes I save my admin for that day so it looks like I am busy. I'm keeping my mouth shut and holding on as long as I can

I am one of these people and it’s frustrated some colleagues over the years. I used to go on holiday with friends and in a week I’d get through 5/6 books whilst one of our friend would get through 2 at most. She’s clever, focused, a very effective worker and top of her field - just processes information differently.

I’ve had to become better at having more realistic targets for my team because I assumed all people could work at my pace.

One thing I’ve noticed in some slower workers is an over reliance on notes and writing down exact steps of something when being trained, rather than trying to understand what it is one is trying to achieve. I find this leads to getting stuck as the person is expecting the same thing every time they do the task rather than understanding why small things may change from time to time.

There’s an element of not really knowing what some of your colleagues do, until they stop doing it. I’d much rather have a full-time team of four, with everyone sometimes having some spare time and kicking their heels around: we’re content, we have a good mindset, we give a lot of goodwill in return. As opposed to booting the team down to two people who work full pelt and then having the additional stress, inconvenience, and associated cost of both of trying to gap-fill when one of those two people is on leave, or off sick, or leaves the company. Particularly when those things happen at short notice, because those two people are overwhelmed and suddenly nope out. I’ve seen the figures run, and it’s rarely more long-term cost-efficient, in an effectively run and profitable company, to run a skeleton staff and backfill when you need to.

Not teaching!!

This is not a problem in clinical nursing.

Sometimes I dream about it though.

I had a leadership position in a school where my TLR was utterly useless. There were several people already doing the job whilst myself and a colleague would just make some vague movements now and then to look busy. My colleague even got a second job on the side because he had so much extra time. When I left, I did tell them to scrap the TLR to save money in the future.

I definitely agree.

My current job has zero busy work. It's flat out. However, if staff were properly trained so we're quicker, allowed to do our jobs without checking before doing everything (can't even send an outside email or make a decision on best option of what to do without asking), paid more than peanuts & tbh some long term staff replaced by motivated staff (need the money incentive), we could halve the team. One staff member, whose been there 15 years, can't do basic things & spends half her time on the phone to the manager (who works 100% remote).

My last job had 28 staff members in the team, same job. We needed maybe 10. But, it was a University so they bumbled along. Then offered redundancies & all the good ones left.....

Including the NHS...

I'm not now, but I have been, and in all roles more junior too. Not saying everywhere is maximally efficient, and 5 people with the same job does sound like overkill.

It sounds like at your place of work the comms isn't great. Nowadays employees can't be expected to just take it on trust that upper management are doing something good. There's a lot more explaining, consulting, shared decision making and power sharing, and transparency demanded. So management should be explaining to you what the 5 people do and why their work is needed!

However I do think, though, that not everything can be shared and sometimes the decisions and work of upper management is necessarily opaque. Like for example deciding on a new strategy that will mean lots of current skills in future aren't needed but new skills are required. Upper mgt should absolutely create a participatory way to explore future planning, together with the whole staff, but some people might just never get that their area of work or specialism isn't where the organisation is going, and it's a bit mean to expect them to do that planning as it might mean them exiting. They might just say no,I don't want this organisation to change, the change doesnt fit with my values and priorities. But they are understandably thinking of their front line day job, not the broader context. So management do this strategy work, and then the team is offered choices and opportunities as a result.

It’s the complete opposite for me.
I long for a bit of a rest.