Frank Butler  00:00
Hello busybodies, welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler, here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  00:07
Good day.

Frank Butler  00:08
And on today's episode we are going to discuss actually, Paul, what are we discussing today?

Paul Harvey  00:12
One of my favorite topics Frank. bs jobs. bs work. We all know it bs stands for so we'll try to stay polite in this episode. 

Frank Butler  00:24
Bollocks 

Paul Harvey  00:25
Of course. bologna sandwich. What did you think?

Frank Butler  00:27
Bologna sandwich? Yeah. Now I'm hungry. All right. Lunch break, actually. Hey, actually, it's time for lunch break, right? Or is it Tea Time

Paul Harvey  00:36
Depends which side of the pond you're on I suppose. 

Frank Butler  00:38
Yeah, let's stop wasting time. And let's just get to it. Or let's pretend we're actually trying to get to it 

Paul Harvey  00:44
Well you know, we look busy. That's what is important. 

Frank Butler  00:47
That's what's important. You know, that little icon on my zoom is saying read that I'm on a zoom. So I'm in an important meeting right now.

Paul Harvey  00:53
And we'll just assume some important work is getting done. which, according to this theory of BS jobs, is how a lot of the modern economy works. And this comes from a guy named Dave Graber. He was an interesting person he passed away a few months ago, back in September, he was very outspoken about a lot of stuff. And a lot of that was kind of controversial. And I don't really think we need to get into all that. But I am a big fan of his work on bs jobs. He describes a BS job as any type of job or certain aspects of a job that seem utterly pointless to the people who are doing them. In one article, he mentions a study of American office workers who said they spent four of every eight hours on the job doing what they believed to be bs tasks. He also gives us several paradoxes to work with. First, he lists off a whole bunch of statistics saying that the growth of BS jobs has far outpaced that of non bs jobs, those jobs where you're directly creating things or services of value over the past few decades. Further, he argues that these jobs, the BS jobs are often the ones that are spared when layoffs and downsizing occur. Whereas the more value producing jobs seem to be the first on the chopping block. You know, as odd as that sounds, I'm thinking back to my pre academic career. And that was definitely something I noticed. I hate to say it, but those of us up in the offices often had a lot less to worry about when layoffs happened, then the folks down on the production floor did. Maybe that part's a little more irony than paradox. 

Paul Harvey  02:30
But anyway, a second probably related paradox is that, in his opinion, although I do tend to agree, the more bs jobs a company has, the more bs work everyone else has to do, including those who have non bs jobs. Third, and maybe most depressingly, he points out that we often tend to view bs jobs as being more prestigious than jobs that are directly related to the production of valuable things. You know, Senior Vice President of administrative excess sounds a bit fancier than line cook. And this last point is why I thought this would be a good time to do a show on this topic. Shortly before he passed away, graver wrote about how this pandemic has put a lot of this out in the open. Over the last 10 months or so we've really literally had to categorize jobs as not bs or non Bs, but the opposite of that, as essential or non-essential. And he pointed out that nearly all of what he would call bs jobs fell into the category of non-essential Well, those value producing jobs that we tend to view as grunt work, have universally been deemed essential during this COVID pandemic,

Frank Butler  03:49
nurses. And that's something that to his point he brings up is how the pandemic has really helped elucidate that fact that we're now seeing that it's the nurses, it's the people who are in the food production work, you know, these real boots to the ground type workers who help keep the basic societal needs going right in there kind of that, I would say, the bottom of the pyramid for the entire economic infrastructure that we're used to, right. So you can have these are more or rather less essential type jobs like all these, he points out, for example, the endless, quote unquote, legions of administrative assistance for these strategic teams are lobbyists, blah, blah, you know, this, this whole idea of, you know, management has gotten to this point where they have these flocks of support so they can do their job. But really, at the end of the day, it is those baseline workers that are the essential ones,

Paul Harvey  04:54
Right. Yet the people work in the checkout at the grocery store, you know, you do have to apply Hate the irony seems like the more educated you are, the less essential you're considered to be. And do you need to actually go and do your job? Do you work the checkout counter at 7-11? Yes, we must get you to work at all costs. You have 12 master's degrees, you have a PhD, you can stay home you're good. 

Frank Butler  05:17
It's so funny, you say that I have a friend who he's a security guard. Right. And it's not that he's just like a security guard. He's, I think he's now maybe a shift manager or shift leader, whatever they would call that. But he actually was like, hoping he would get laid off because with that $600 extra that they were giving during the that one period of back in the spring economical board. Yeah. He's like, I would have made more money. Sure. But they kept me on because he was deemed essential. And, you know, you think about that you're like, Man, that's, that stinks. Because he's getting less than his comrades per week or fellows per week, for actually working and doing the job. And for being essential for being essential right into his company. He was essential. It just to me, it was a bit comedic. But you know that that's the case, right, is that I certainly have no qualms about the people who were laid off at the start of this pandemic, getting a little bit extra to help them make ends meet, because you could kind of see this was going to be a lingering festering issue. And, you know, especially because some of those people were downsized, it wasn't that they weren't important, it's just that these businesses had to reset a little bit because of the unknown. You know, the fear of the unknown has been so great during this time. But I think one of the things that really, we've learned about too, is the whole idea of how much, you know, we obviously I think executives, they are important, you know, their job is to help us look forward into the future help reduce uncertainty to their employees, are they doing an effective job? I think many of them probably are not super effective, despite their merits, and I'm sure there's a lot of things they're very good at. But I think in general, one of the things that we're starting to see a little bit from this, too, is that idea of, you know, are we are we really understanding what our job is? Or is it just a BS job? Right? I mean, you know, because there's this other angle, too. It's not just that we're now seeing these, at one point that we sort of didn't respect these jobs, per se urges, we just sort of ignored them in a sense, but they're now essential. But we're also talking about this whole growth of this bs job industry. And what was it something like 50% of the people thought that their jobs were Bs, and that they could have been downsized without an issue? And they would have no impact? Which, you know, I think is not true at a high level, right? I mean, I think if you're in that job, let's say you're a telemarketer, which was one of these, if your telemarketer right, I mean, I think that sometimes telemarketers are the bane of existence on occasion. Thank goodness for that whole silence, unknown phone call things on iPhones and what have you. But at the same time, they're important because they're a component of sales and marketing, helping to sell products, or services that people may need. But on top of that, they're usually helping employ tons of other people like those in the production lines, that are actually so essential to keeping the foundational level of our economy going you take away that base, the whole pyramid collapses.

Paul Harvey  08:29
And those in the upper echelons as well, those who manage the production

Frank Butler  08:32
And those in the upper echelons, right. And then, you know, of course, if we wanted to get really stickler about that, that ends the whole trickle down economics idea, too. But the reality is that we need everybody to be in their positions, right? It doesn't matter where you are, but you got to have that strong base. And that game that, you know, obviously there's a lot of arguments that you could get into political or not about, you know, do they deserve more pay, or what else blah, blah, blah. But that's not really the intent here. I think the intent here is a really focusing on the idea of sort of that shifting perspective of what jobs are important, but also, how much of our jobs have become just pure busy work. Because of this flip, where we sort of admire or idolize the C suite type folks or the upper management type people who go out and they hire a legion of quote unquote, administrative assistants, well, endless legions of administrative assistants, and so on, whereas it hasn't actually made the job of those who are essential easier. This one here that just came up is that nurses have to spend at least half of their time on paperwork, which makes no sense there. That's not their job, right? I mean, I get it, because there's a lot of compliance type factors and insurance and billing factors. But the reality is why wouldn't we spend more money hiring, maybe assistance to the nurses so they could focus on doing their job, more assistance in the doctors to systems To help with the paperwork mandated by the assistance to the managers, or something, or by the government are a big part of it too.

Paul Harvey  10:07
And as the husband of a nurse, I can attest to that 50% is probably a conservative estimate of actual nurse work to paperwork that gets done after the fact. It's absolutely stunning, the sheer volume of it, 

Frank Butler  10:23
Yeah I know, and my friends who are physicians, it's the same way. I mean, obviously, the physicians do get paid a little bit better, obviously. But I think that in both ends, because of this, you know, idea of compliance and blah, blah, blah, we've sort of also put in things in place that don't actually benefit. So I can think for a hospital system, right, the CEO is probably going to have several assistants, or vice presidents or so on that support his or her job duties. But then you look at the people who are actually there to actually deploy the actual work of the hospital, the doctors and the nurses. And they're the ones left to shoulder these administrative burdens that actually hinder them from doing their job. And particularly those jobs that actually drive the revenues of the of the hospital. I mean, if we want to get really callous or succinct about looking at it, but the reality is that if you could give those doctors and nurses is more time to focus in on the care and patient delivery, and hire the assistance to take care of the paperwork and think about probably the benefits to the patients at the end of the day, you know, readmission rates, those kinds of things that they're incentivized on by Medicare, Medicaid, and so on, and also the insurance companies. So I'm just thinking like, just how this whole perspective of the way things have been structured, really does sort of lends itself to maybe we're thinking about this administrative bloat in the wrong, the administrative bloat is going the wrong direction of the firm, right? It's going to the upper pyramid of the firm, versus those jobs that could really benefit from actually doing their economic creating and life saving or whatever else activities that they do.

Paul Harvey  12:07
Well, part of the logic of Mr. Graeber's bs job theory, is that a sizable portion of the busy work, the paperwork, the administrative work that is being put on producers of things of value, like nurses or what have you, is coming from the administrative bloat, so it's kind of feeding itself. So he talks about how what you often see as part of the recruitment package or hiring package for a high level executive, to use some of his words here says in order to ensure that he or she feels appropriately impressive and powerful, the new hire must be provided with a tiny army of flunkies, three or four positions are created. And only then did negotiations begin over what they are actually going to do. He goes on to say, many of those people don't end up doing much, some administrative staff will invariably end up sitting around playing mahjong all day, or watching cat videos. But it's generally considered good form to give all staff members at least a few hours of actual work to do each week. With some managers who have more thoroughly absorbed, the corporate spirit will insist that all of their minions come up with a way to look busy for the full eight hours every day. 

Frank Butler  13:16
So listeners to, to our show will already know about our way, dizziness and the 40 hour week. 

Paul Harvey  13:27
Hold me back, hold me back. 

Frank Butler  13:29
Goodness

Paul Harvey  13:30
If we focus instead on just the point that he's making there. And in our line of work in academia, I think there's evidence of this effect. We're, okay, so I'm not going to pretend you and I are as essential as nurses or security guards or a whole lot of other people are

Frank Butler  13:48
People who actually handle crops. Yeah, no, I agree. I would say that, especially in today's environment.

Paul Harvey  13:53
Yeah, we...Yeah, very much so. But if you look at what our job is supposed to be teaching students doing research, okay. How much of our time is being spent on stuff that's not teaching and research? Yeah, it's, it's a sizable chunk, you know, we all spend quite a bit of time filling out paperwork and in various forms of documentation, things for accreditation purposes, so on and so forth. So his argument here is that a lot of that busy work is coming from people who themselves need busy work to make themselves look like they're doing something. So they say, I know, I'm going to pilot some initiative where everybody does a quarterly self-evaluation or provides documentation on this, this that and the other thing, well, that's a good idea. Yeah, let's do that rubber stamp, suddenly, there's a new piece of bureaucracy that needs to be fulfilled. And that gets pushed on to the people who are supposed to be the producers of whatever good or service is being produced. So in that way, the busy work begets more busy work and so on and so forth. So I think he would argue way back to, to your point, that if we're hiring assistants to help nurses, Do the paperwork being given to them by the assistance of other people? We're kind of feeding the beast, perhaps, or at least we're addressing a symptom without getting at the core of the problem?

Paul Harvey  15:12
No, I think that's probably accurate, you know, thinking about it from that perspective words for giving more legions of assistance to the top. So they're creating more bureaucratic processes that then get passed down to the bottom, we hire the bottom to we hire people at the bottom to support those people to help them get that bureaucratic processing done, which means we have to expand the bureaucracy. Yeah, you can see how this is an infinite loop of sadness.

Paul Harvey  15:41
Loop of sadness, I think is right.

Frank Butler  15:43
And or infinite loop of busyness, rather 

Paul Harvey  15:45
Infinite Loop of Busyness

Frank Butler  15:47
it's the Infinite Loop of Busyness. Man, I love it when I can get an Apple reference and a busyness reference altogether in one

Paul Harvey  15:54
That's poetry.

Paul Harvey  15:58
I'm a poet. I'm an artist. No, but you know, I think, sort of building off of that, to your right. The things that he focuses in on was that notion of the American worker in a survey in 2016, four out of eight hours doing their actual jobs. The rest of the time was spent either on email, which we just had an episode about email, useless meetings, and pointless administrative tasks. And, boy, is that not so true. And I think, you know, we said we were going to sort of touch on their origins of this. And we have sort of had this theme or vein running throughout several of the episodes, thinking about how technology has made us more efficient in some of these jobs, you think about the finance job where you used to do full paper spreadsheets, and then you had to redo them, it would take a week to do or whatever. And now we're doing them in an Excel and you can make a change in a matter of seconds. And, you know, those things have changed and evolved. And so you've got all this additional time. But yet, people are trying to find ways to fill that time, with jobs that are with activities that are not essential to the success either, right. So I think there's that end of it going on as well, because of that notion of eight hours a day. 40 Hour Work Week.

Paul Harvey  17:19
And so we really, we unearth the hidden costs of the business model, the 40 hour week model, that not only do you have employees, finding ways to keep themselves busy, but in doing so they're creating work sometimes for other people. So there's this compounding effect, where every act of busyness begets more acts of busyness. And suddenly everyone's working 100 hours a week and not accomplishing anything of value. infinite loop of sadness, Infinite Loop of Busyness, sadness, or busyness. 

Frank Butler  17:50
Yeah, Infinite Loop of Busyness, my goodness, it is the Infinite Loop of Busyness. It's, it's amazing, you know, and that's not to say that some of this stuff isn't essential, you know, with government regulations, for example, you do have to create compliance jobs, you do have to do those things. It's the same thing that we see in the university, we have seen a lot more jobs or not jobs, but a lot more tasks that faculty used to once do get moved to professionals because they have to write, you got to think that you have to move something like OSHA compliance to somebody who's specialized and being able to do that, that's not something that I'm going to be something very adept at doing myself. So that's why you do get these professional jobs being added into some places. And they should be, because these are things that are well intentioned and have the right impact for the people you want to have.

Paul Harvey  18:46
I think there's kind of parallel effects there that you can have busy work bureaucracy at the government level, or at the individual company level, just one is backed by the force of Fiat and one is not. But in both cases, no one ever thinks that they're just creating busy work for somebody, they have good intentions usually think, Hey, you know, I have to do something to keep myself looking busy. And hey, this is something that you can make an argument for requiring this. So a win win. And sometimes it's true. Sometimes you are creating some extra bureaucracy for a very good reason, like your OSHA example. But sometimes you're not. So I'd like to think that you're right, that you'll see more of those valid forms of added bureaucracy coming from government regulation, that are hopefully responding to like an actual societal need. But I think the same thing can happen there as well. Have you ever thought that through though, so? I might just be 

Frank Butler  19:45
No, I think you're right now I get where you're saying I know where you're going with it. There's certainly things that might be pushed down from state legislation or federal government or legislations that probably go a little too far in The benefit to society or the or the base that the company is trying to serve, or the organizations trying to serve, and what have you, which might create some unnecessary jobs. I mean, you could almost go with that a little bit with the Sarbanes Oxley, overall, the intentions were very good. However, there are some attributes of that bill that do probably put a little too much onus on the companies for compliance, that then required additional expenses. Right. So if you want to think about that

Paul Harvey  20:31
That's a really good example actually yeah, like a lot of unintended costs in the form of bureaucratic expenses. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  20:39
Right. And I think overall, the intent of the bill is correct. It certainly, it was a necessary type of piece of governance that was passed by the federal government. But at the same time, yeah, there's that notion of unintended consequences and additional bureaucratic compliance costs that came and neither here nor there, it's their companies have to deal with that. And so there's positives and negatives to those aspects. I think, really, my bigger concern falls into the idea of this sort of expansion of administrative staff that don't necessarily...

Frank Butler  21:15
Well, let me kind of step back up a little bit. If you're student of management or strategy, you would have covered something called the value chain. And there's two parts of the value chain one is the primary activities. And the other is the supporting activities. Now, this is Michel Porter's work, who happens to be one of these gurus who sort of I think, put a pretty good foundation down in our world of strategy and strategic management. But the whole thing about the primary activities is those are the steps that create value for the customer, right, they're the ones who actually go through the value chain, at each step of the value chain, you're adding value to those products and services that you're providing to your customers, your stakeholders. The supporting activities include those things like infrastructure, and that's your top management team, your legal aspect of things, you know, finance department, those are important, but because they support the primary functions of your organization, that has to be efficient, and effective. So you got to be careful with the overly getting to I guess, let me rephrase, you have to be careful about how you start adding jobs in the infrastructure. And if you can't point to the direct benefits to the primary activity ends. So no matter what organization we talk about, we can talk about the food manufacturing, food processing, rather, food processing, those people who are the ones who are handling the food, who are prepping that that are making sure that it's going to be edible, or it's not bad, or is going to get packaged, or looks correct, or gets pinned in a different direction, whatever it might be. Those are the ones who have to execute on the money making aspects of the business. 

Frank Butler  23:02
The same is true if we look at a university, which I think we've heard plenty of times about the administrative bloat that's going on. And I don't want to get talking about the university and because I'm going to go on a huge, huge tangent, but I think it's still applicable. And what I'll do is I'll just kind of give you the too long didn't read aspect, which is saying, the biggest issue that I think a lot of businesses face is trying to take the job and tie it to or that job description and tie it to how it's providing impact to the company. Because Graeber's work, one of the things that he said was, you know, a lot of people feel like their jobs don't actually create any value, which probably isn't necessarily true, right? You think about a telemarketer, which a lot of us can love, get, they're really truly part of the economic engine. And they're part of a marketing and sales function. They're trying to get the name of the company out there. They do make sales, they wouldn't do this companies wouldn't just spend money on telemarketing, if it didn't work in some capacity. And the end of the day, I think it comes back to there just a lot of companies are just gonna hire these telemarketers, say, Hey, you know, your job is to do X amount of phone calls a day and sell some product, right, which isn't the right way of framing that job. They need to make people feel like there's value in their jobs. And I think if we start doing that better, we also might start fixing the business problem to here's why we have these jobs. I think you also said it when you were reading that one passage about, hey, we're just going to give him for people to just come around because they need to have somebody to direct Well, I mean, let's focus in on the actual reasons these people need to be there. And again, step away from the idea of Oh, it has to be eight hours a day. Let's focus in on output. What is this contribution to the organization to the organization's goals, to the importance of the future of this organization? How is it going to benefit the employees? How is it going to benefit them customers, how's it gonna benefit our profit margins.

Paul Harvey  25:03
Basically, if we focused on output on the actual things you get done at your job and why those things matter. The way we keep saying in every show this, almost by definition, this whole phenomenon of BS jobs and administrative bloat, and the script getting flipped, where the actual producers of value in revenue are getting squeezed, and the non-producers of value and revenue are proliferating at their expense would all go away. If there was a strict focus on value being produced by the work you're doing without the focus on 40 hours a week or spending more time at work, because it makes you look good. All that stuff would go away. If we would just focus more on the output and leave everything else behind.

Frank Butler  25:54
You know, it's a good question. statement. Not a question. 

Frank Butler  25:59
It's the truth! So says me.

Frank Butler  26:02
Well, yeah, no. So yeah, you're right. It's a

Paul Harvey  26:05
it's a bit of an exaggeration. 

Paul Harvey  26:06
No, yeah, it's a truth-ism. But I think at the end of the day, we would still probably see a lot of these jobs, I just think they're going to be much better harnessing the skill sets these people bring to the table. Right? To me, I think that's the thing is that we don't necessarily utilize people's skills very well. And a lot of cases, I mean, these, it's obvious these companies can afford this, you know, support area bloat, we'll call it right, not primary activity bloat, but rather support area bloat. We often focus too much on the primary activity bloat, versus the support activities. And actually, there was a statement I saw the other day about this very thing that this was related to the auto industry. And it was like 7%, of the auto manufacturing's expenses was actually in the employees in the actual production. And yet they focus most of their attention on the cost of their and that's where the layoffs happen. Right? It makes no sense. You're thinking, and, you know, those are the primary activity workers, you know, eventually that bleeds into the white collar workers or the spine workers who get downsized after that. But that's the issue, though.

Paul Harvey  27:16
Yeah.

Paul Harvey  27:17
So you got this huge administrative wing of a company that just sits around the table trying to figure out how to squeeze that 7% number down to six. And that's just one example, the auto industry. But again, we'll try not to go on a rant here. But in academia, you send your kids to school, you spend 20 3040 $50,000, a year in tuition? I don't know, on average, how much of that what percentage of that 5040, whatever, 1000, a year goes to the people doing the teaching. But it's not a large number. I don't know where it actually all goes. But I think we will see that if we looked at a lot of different industries, that the portion of the revenue being allocated to the people doing the production of whatever it is that you're producing. And selling is often a very small number. Whereas the proportion that goes to what graver would call the BS jobs is often quite large.

Paul Harvey  28:14
I think that's what's fascinating about this whole situation and why this is such an interesting topic. And I don't I, I would say that my disagreement with graver comes to calling them bs jobs. I just think they're jobs that have not been well articulated as to their impact for the company for the employees. I mean, I can see you have a telemarketer they're going out to help sell products to help the people in the rank and file get their jobs done. 

Paul Harvey  28:40
We should clarify that Keanu Reeves had not thrown a telemarketer in front of a train. That was a an error that will issue a separate apology for

Paul Harvey  28:49
Yeah, we'll have to make a correction about that. We as much as I said earlier, we may love telemarketers they actually are part of the economic engine for society and they're

Paul Harvey  29:04
Easy to pick on.

Frank Butler  29:04
If you really look at that they already think that their job is probably a BS job anyway in the world would be no different if they didn't have that job. It just shows you that there are people to just put in an unfortunate potential situation 

Paul Harvey  29:16
And we've done nothing to help their cause by repeatedly using them as examples. 

Frank Butler  29:20
Yes. 

Paul Harvey  29:20
All right. We owe you one telemarketers, we'll get you back in another episode.

Paul Harvey  29:24
Yeah. Exactly. telemarketers you guys are you guys are just as important as anybody else. It's just your company's not doing a good job of telling you that you matter, you matter. But needless to say, it does seem like there's a lot of jobs that could be just snap of the finger fan, oh snap of the finger, you wipe them off the face of the planet and you go Oh, we don't miss that. I don't think that would be true. 

Paul Harvey  29:49
Right

Frank Butler  29:50
You know, they for example, they use corporate lawyers. Well, to be honest, there's a lot of rationale to having those corporate lawyers because they're part of the check and balance system that Keeps companies from maybe being too exploitative, exploiting it,

Paul Harvey  30:05
Yeah, doing things that they're gonna get in trouble for.

Paul Harvey  30:09
Right or on the other end of it to making sure that if they do something that's not okay product liability products, safety type things, there's going to be lawyers who are going to go out and go after the company. And that's going to create new rules and processes for those companies that do not do those things again, and rightfully so right, you get a bunch of people who die from that product. probably need to make sure that never happens again, and there should be consequences. So I do think there might be some bloat in this world. But at the same time, I think it really drives the efficiency and effectiveness of a lot of businesses and keeps them from making the same mistakes time and time again.

Paul Harvey  30:50
See now, I see what you're saying here. I think you've slightly converted me from I've been kind of maintaining along with Mr. Graber, that there are some jobs that are just bs jobs, and I'm sure there are. But yeah, it's probably true to say that most jobs are not bs jobs. But they might involve a lot of BS work. So your 40 hours per week, you might have 10 really important hours of good stuff you're doing. And then the other 30 is being filled with bs stuff. So if we just trimmed off the BS part what's left is a job that's meaningful and important. I gotcha. I like it. 

Frank Butler  31:28
Yes, exactly. And to that end, you're already paying. And these companies are totally okay with paying people money to do these jobs. That means that, again, focusing on the value creation those individuals make and taking out that busy work, it might be a really good thing for companies to spend some time doing.

Paul Harvey  31:49
And you're not overpaying them because oh, now they're only working 12 hours a week instead of 40. Well, they're still doing the thing that you paid them to do. They're just not doing all the other stuff that's causing busy work for other people and the infinite, what do we call it...Infinite Loop of Busyness

Frank Butler  32:04
The Infinite Loop of Busyness. The Infinite Loop busyness, that's a new thing. You heard here, folks, this is the new discovery new tagline, we're gonna put some put that logo on some shirts. Gonna trademark that bad right now. Now, we're claiming that 

Paul Harvey  32:19
I'm hiring a corporate lawyer as we speak

Paul Harvey  32:21
Yes, 500 lawyers will pay $50. But actually, to go back to speaking of Fiverr, you know, we had that episode that we talked about the Uberization inside of the company to you know, here's your opportunity to pay somebody for doing the right job and not giving them all this extraneous work, you're perfectly happy paying them that amount of money at the 12 hours, or 16 hours or 20 hours they might actually be doing toward their job. And then that 20 hours of miscellaneous crap, we take that away. And then you can have that whole internal organization which might take your company to the next level, even

Paul Harvey  32:58
Which in some... going back to that Politico article, to some extent that has kind of happened with the pandemic taking away all the though, not face time, but all the filler stuff. Yeah. So we've already kind of seen that this can be done without breaking the economy. So let's take the next step.

Frank Butler  33:17
Yeah, the breaking the economy's really occurred when we had to stop deduction of activities, right? I mean, these people who are in these white collar jobs, and I don't really like blue collar, typically. But

Paul Harvey  33:29
There's like nothing else to replace it with, we've got to come up with something.

Paul Harvey  33:35
I would say this way, office workers versus the production folks, the manufacturing employees, those production employees, those who have to work the ground, the Yeoman, think about all of these Amazon employees who really are trying to keep the packages going, and all these UPS and FedEx and USPS employees who have to keep that basic economic level going. But that all has to be back ended by people who are actually producing these goods and services that we are getting through that process. So that's something that we have to be I think, maybe we have a newfound appreciation of all of that right now. And I want to make sure that we don't leave that behind. Get that and forget about that in the future. That's not to say that a lawyer isn't an important job or what is a CEOs not important job. These jobs are all important.

Paul Harvey  34:31
So is the telemarketer. So is the production line employee, so is the janitor. 

Frank Butler  34:37
Right. Everybody plays a role in the economic cycle of our society to make it what it is to make it successful like it has been to keep us pushing forward. There's no shame in doing a job that produces value. Right? I hope we can be better about praising that end of the work and not forgetting about it. I think what's really Interesting to this sort of makes me think of this as a slight aside, there used to be a show it was called, it might still be on, there's a show that was called Undercover Boss. And in the first couple seasons, they used to take the CEO or CEO or CFO, put them undercover and send them down to the rank and file to really see how a decision that the top management team made had an impact on the rank and file employees. Or, you know, maybe the succession at the top. Now, I used to love this show, it got a little bit too much into this story sort of Formula situation. Yeah, and I get it, I understand that gives you sort of that feel good. Like we're helping the people out. But the reality is that, for me, being somebody who loves to study organizations, I was much more interested in the broader sort of implications of these changes. I think things more things like that could be seriously beneficial to organizations. Yeah.

Paul Harvey  35:54
And you do sometimes hear about companies having a policy that everyone has to do like, one week, a year or something on the front lines, whatever the front lines might be working the cash register, if you're a store chain, or a restaurant chain, or something or, or working on the production floor, where everyone at or above a certain level of management is required to take some portion of their time each year and do those production level jobs, whatever they are for that company. I don't know how common that is I sure it's not very common at all, actually. But I think that would be a probably not enough. Not enough, that's for sure. Yeah, I think that should be something universal. So much of this could be prevented if we were in touch with how our managerial decisions directly affect the people doing the value creation in your company.

Paul Harvey  36:45
You know, when thinking off that too, you've got to also think about how do we do it in a way that makes it so the employee is not faking their way, just simply because there's an executive with them, right? I think one of the things that that would really indicate to us the type of culture of people are faking, things being all fine and dandy, when there's a policy that clearly had an implication, I remember one of these Undercover Boss episodes with, they had made a rule about the lunch break, 30 minutes, whatever. And the managers that implemented it had sort of, maybe taking it a little too aggressive, and people were like flying to go, clock in and time before they lost an entire, like 15 minutes of pay, even though it was like maybe a minute and you're like, come on, you can't give people a minute. But that that's sort of that notion of you don't want those people to be faking, that everything's okay. You wanna you want them to be feel like they're in an organization that they can open up to you. Obviously, as an executive, you'd have to sort of walk that line of what's legitimate and what's just sort of human nature grind to write. But I think if you spend enough time around different people, you will be able to triangulate at least that the policies that might have been more negative in nature that are the ramifications of the policies that are more negative in nature. And that's a good point, that might be something useful.

Paul Harvey  38:12
Part of the reason that it's difficult for managers to tell what employee griping is legitimate and what's just human nature is that they're so out of touch with those frontline employees, that they don't know what gripes are legitimate. And what are

Frank Butler  38:26
No, I think that's definitely a big chunk of it. Overall, I think what it comes down to is, I think, what we've sort of been trying to get people to realize here on the Busyness Paradox, we don't like people having to be busy for the sake of being busy. We believe that companies clearly are functioning very well, even though there's a lot of busyness in there. But there's something that we need to do to actually take these organizations to the next level, I think you and I came across something about joy the other day, and how 90% of people expected or 93% of people expect to have joy in their work, but only like 37% really do. And you think about all the reasons why the joy gets sucked out of their jobs kind of thing, you know, and I think part of that is the whole idea of emails, when you don't need to be dealing with those emails are useless meetings or these administrative tasks that don't contribute to the value creation activities or their jobs. I think that's sort of what we try to harp on is that you're obviously okay with people paying people this kind of money. These companies are still profitable, they're still executing fine. You would think that maybe if your people are experiencing quote unquote, joy or better job satisfaction, or better morale or any of these other sort of attributes that are going to make your workers more productive, you're going to get more value out of that. So it's sort of in my mind, something that executives need to focus in on the implications of their decisions. The idea of maybe let's make sure that job descriptions have a clear identification of the contribution of that job to the organization's success. And focusing in on, are we putting too many roadblocks in the way of our employees that are the primary value creating part of our business? Yeah. And I think if we start looking at those things, and not be so Oh, 7% of our expenses are based off of, you know, just the production workers 7%! Out of 93 other percent not being those people

Paul Harvey  40:36
20% is in one room together, trying to figure out how to squeeze that 7%.

Frank Butler  40:42
Yeah. You know, I mean, what sense does that make, you know, so this is sort of, I think the idea is that we're trying to prevent the Infinite Loop of Busyness. Let's focus in on doing things the right way, let's make people's jobs better. It's not like you're gonna downsize those people, they're actually contributing something. It's just that they don't want to spend 40 hours doing things that are, let's say, rather, they want to spend 20 hours of their job, doing things that really don't contribute to the value creating aspects of the company. 

Paul Harvey  41:21
And guess what if you're really bent on squeezing that 7% down? Well, at least going forward? If you've got people allowed to do their work in 20 hours a week? Maybe you don't need twice as many of them? I don't know, that doesn't work, actually scratch that. My math is off Strike that from the record. 

Frank Butler  41:40
Yeah, we'll just cut that. So yeah, I think overall, the idea is, we would get rid of a lot of BS jobs by not actually getting rid of jobs, but taking the time and care and attention to help detail their importance, and the focus less on the time or on the output and their contribution. 

Paul Harvey  41:58
That's kind of where I was trying to get at before. That 7% if you're bent on keeping it at 7%, you can probably be doing something more efficient than making the productive 7% of your company, fill out silly forms or, you know, do administrative busy work for so many hours a week. 

Frank Butler  42:14
And on a different episode, I think Paul and I will eventually talk about  university bloat, and I don't think the bloat is necessarily bad. I think the way that universities run, 

Paul Harvey  42:29
It'll be seven hours of Frank screaming. 

Frank Butler  42:35
Yeah. Everybody, we appreciate you listening to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. As always, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We love your feedback. And with that, we wish you some downtime.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai