Disguised office saboteurs

During the early stage of industrialization, the workplace was often the site of irrational violence from anti-industrial "Luddites," named after the English textile workers who first attacked the machines that were replacing them. These displaced artisans openly sabotaged the new machines which they had irrationally identified as the source of all their problems. In the post-industrial workplace, where computers have replaced mills, we find sabotage just as irrational and destructive--if less conscious, open, and passionate. As threats to their employers, these post-industrial office saboteurs are just as dangerous as the anti-industrial Luddites they resemble.

Of course, our office saboteurs have no secret societies. They hold no clandestine meetings. They do not riot or wear masks. They do not bash their computers with a hammer as the Luddites did the power looms--at least not very often. They usually do not even admit their destructive ways--even to themselves. Indeed, they usually think of themselves as conscientious, exemplary employees. Nevertheless, they are a threat to the functioning of our offices. They sabotage office productivity.

I am sure you will recognize some of the following:

* One-Track Manager: Transforming the virtue of prioritization into a vice, this person consistently allocates all resources towards one goal. He refuses to focus on several objectives at the same time or to deal with multiple priorities. If only one thing were important, he would be a tremendous success. Unfortunately, since it is not, he is not, and the organization suffers from his failure.

* Planning Fool: As his name implies, he loves long-range planning--the longer, the better. He thinks in terms of quarters rather than weeks and months. His description of the Utopian future is quite comprehensive, while his explanation of how to get there is sketchy. To be sure, strategic planning is necessary, but this saboteur mistakes it for the goal. For, although he would not admit it, he is devoted to plans for their own sake. The notion that a plan's value is measured by its results has not occurred to him. We wonder how much more the organization would achieve if at least some of the resources he expends detailing distant futures were redirected into tangible goals realizable before his retirement date.

* Extracurricular Experts: We all remember these from school; they were fantastic in sports, parties, and clubs--but barely made it through finals. At the office, they spend all their time organizing office parties, talent shows, and picnics, while participating in every special interest club. They add to the office's social life, but probably subtract from its production potential.

* PC Whiz: He loves flashy automation whether or not it is really required. When not "relieving stress" with computer games, he invents PC busy-work (magnificently colorful logs, charts, and graphics) that track or depict work rather than do it.

* The Fixer: He concentrates on remedying problems rather than preventing them. He chooses to put more resources into quality review than in quality creation. If only the ingenuity he saved for jerry-built emergency bandages had been applied to the original project, how much more impressive the results would be!

The question that comes to mind when we think about all of these menaces to effectiveness is how could such laudable intentions produce results so contrary to real office needs. In hopes of deciphering this enigma, let us consider three more of these saboteurs in more detail: the Complexity Artist, the Crisis Creator, and the Office Know-It-All.

COMPLEXITY ARTIST

The inefficiencies fostered by this well-meaning pillar of every office are familiar. He strives to render complex those few elements in modern business that are still relatively simple. Most famous--or infamous--are his elaborate approval patterns that hamper any work--whether it be the purchase of a wastebasket or the initiation of a billion-dollar project. He is often a frustrated form designer, taking pride in his ability to squeeze in yet another signature line. Exactly why all of these signatures are necessary is often unclear. For instance, where I work it is common to require three or four levels of signatures for a single purchase or work order. Since the authority to expend funds or resources rests with the highest required level, it is unclear why the other signatures must be solicited. Of course, it might be argued that the lower-level signatures provide higher level management with confidence that the action makes sense--or perhaps with an alibi when the decision turns out to have been a mistake. After all, they can always argue that "I just sign what people I trust put in front of me." But, if that is true, why are not the signatures of the "people I trust" sufficient? Certainly, matching the signature levels with the people who are actually making the decision would reduce a great deal of office inefficiency: Consider the amount of time lost in hunting down an executive just to obtain a signature that is given without any real consideration of what is being approved.

The absurdity of many of these signature chases has been highlighted for me by a manager I have known for the past five years. He takes a genuine, if mischievous, pleasure in occasionally signing as George Washington or whoever else enters his fancy at the time. Thus far, these signatures have never been rejected, no matter how many thousands of dollars they encumbered. The reason they are never questioned is a matter of debate: maybe no one really notices; maybe the signatures are so familiar that someone in procurement just assumes they are on the "approved signature list"; maybe it is reasoned that George Washington's signature is on every dollar bill and so deserves to be trusted. Of course, there is still the problem that George's signature authority only reaches the $1 level.

The stories of excessive approvals and redundant signature routes are especially rampant in public agencies. In such organizations, a profit/loss bottom line is not available to control extravagances. Consequently, extra approval practices can be justified as necessary "to keep the bureaucrats responsible to the people." The irony is that many times such inordinate approval requirements result in inefficiencies that cost the taxpayers more money than they were designed to save. Thus, the public must pay for the government labor wasted in filling out unnecessary forms, in waiting outside an executive office for redundant signatures, and in short-circuiting the procurement system with "emergency check requests" when there is no time for the bureaucratic approval parade. In terms of responsibility, we also wonder if any of us bureaucrats really feel personally responsible for a given action when all of us collectively affix our signatures to it.

Less noticeable and seemingly more reasonable are the elaborate, well-intentioned systems that "think of everything." Yet they may be even more threatening to office efficiency. Creators of the most elegant among these are systems analysts who are dedicated to the theory that even the most simple office process hides a maze of intricately complex relationships which touch upon everything in the organization. There are, of course, two sound principles inspiring their creations. First, many of the routine office functions seem simple just because we have become accustomed to them. Second, a well-functioning organization must be integrated so that what is happening in one domain is coordinated with what happens in another. But even allowing for the validity of these principles, it is questionable whether it is worthwhile to develop procedures that provide for every possible interdependency and chase integration to absurdum.

Everyone probably has a favorite example of overdoing the axiom that everything in an organization must be tightly integrated. Mine is a "linking' field in a computer assisted retrieval (CAR) system designed to manage correspondence. Because our organization has many other automated systems, we designed our correspondence system with an undefined "hook," a field we could use to link it with one or more of the other applications. We carefully considered linking it with a system for managing submittals from contractors. Then, after thorough (and expensive) investigation, we determined that almost none of the correspondence in the CAR system dealt with submittals. Next, we considered linking it to one or more of several action-tracking systems. Although we developed two pilots, they did not prove profitable because the personnel indexing the correspondence were in no position to assign appropriate "action" codes. After several more dead ends, we finally just left the field as an "empty hook to nowhere." There had been, of course, no great cost in adding the hook in the first place. However, we had spent a great deal of time attempting to marry incompatible systems. Just like many people, some systems live far happier lives as singles. In both spheres, matchmakers are well advised to exercise restraint.

Similar testimony to the principle that attempting perfection may be detrimental to your organization's health are many of the intricately designed security systems. The resulting matrices often customize computer access not only to an application, but to every field in the data base and even to the type of access possible to each field. Defensible though security systems may be, too much concentration on esoteric scenarios that might--but probably will not--happen, can sometimes leave us vulnerable to much more likely security problems. Thus, I can remember our having foolishly delayed implementing the obvious assignment of simple entry password protection at the system level, because we were too busy spending our time and resources developing the ultimate protection. Moreover, extremely complicated security systems are often more vulnerable to the unexpected. For example, when the persons with access to a certain function are unavailable, the urgency for immediate access to that function, coupled with the difficulty of training someone new on the system's intricacies, can result in indiscriminately bypassing the security measures altogether. When this situation occurs frequently enough, few are restricted from doing anything. Even more often, the effort to maintain a security system (which seemed minimal to the programmer who designed it) requires too much time and concentration for the end user with other priorities on her mind. Consequently, the security system is frequently neglected.

But let us be fair: The systems analysts are not the only ones guilty of "over-designing" office processes. Records managers, including me, also get carried away with the sheer joy of developing a complex procedure. In particular, those records managers with some library background can create elaborate indexing schema that make the system analysts' convoluted security matrices appear rudimentary. Justifying their use of abstract subject codes as the only means to permit adequate precision in searches, they spend countless hours developing and maintaining impressive information thesauri. Yet the number of times these creations are really useful rarely justifies the time lavished upon them. Indeed, many of us would have to admit that, because we very often seek subjects first appearing after our thesauri were constructed, our searches must often rely upon uncontrolled, free-text keywords.

I have earlier confessed my profligate (if thoroughly enjoyable) experiences in developing such coding systems not only for subjects, but for document types, originators, and recipients as well. Recently, I have come upon even more reason to question the exorbitant expenditure of time on such indexing projects. Like many other organizations, we have embarked upon the decentralization of document indexing and searching to the level of functional departments. The expense of training large numbers of people, whose priority at work is neither indexing nor searching, is already considerable. To insist that they become familiar with complex thesauri and use them consistently is probably more than can be reasonably expected. Indeed, at times it is almost a full-time job to protect the indices from adulteration by users who are eager to invent their own codes, to use existing codes with new meanings, and simply to ignore the assignment of codes.

Finally, records managers are often guilty of imposing excessive procedural complications on the publics they serve. I find this to be especially true among government records managers like myself. For example, I drafted a procedure for responding to public records requests that made requestors do work that had no genuine legal or administrative purpose. My procedure--in accordance with what the law permitted, to be sure--required any public records request to be made in writing, even if it was only for a copy of a document that we had easily accessible behind the counter. If the request were being made in person, we furnished the requestor with a letter-size, two-part form filled with blanks. To be honest, my selection of information to be collected on the form represented "everything possible I could think to ask," rather than information really required. The form was, of course, entirely legal, so our lawyers were satisfied, and the requestors just assumed that lengthy forms were the price of dealing with government.

However, one day someone from a different agency asked me what was the purpose of making the public fill out all of this paperwork for information to which they had a right. "Why do you have to collect information about the requestor just to hand him a publication from your shelf? I thought we were supposed to be serving the public." Sheepishly, I had to admit she was right. Moreover, as I reflected upon the form, I realized that the extra information was not just an imposition on the public but also on the office workers who had to spend time processing it. Grudgingly, I had to recognize that, even though the supply of these forms had just been replenished, they would do more good in the recycling bin than in the office.

CRISIS CREATOR

One hears a great deal about the costs (to individuals, companies, and the public) of "substance abuse" and addictions. However, as is frequently--if somewhat timidly--remarked, not all dangerous drugs are being targeted. Most obviously missing is alcohol, arguably the root of as much social evil as any other drug. Not so obvious, yet dangerously prevalent, is the addiction to adrenalin. When released into the bloodstream, adrenalin definitely produces a "high," and for some of us it has become a genuine addiction. To be sure, this dependency on adrenalin is not really the result of our depraved willfulness. Its use evolved among humans and other animals to give them a sudden burst of energy for an effective "fight or flight" response when they were confronted by an imminent peril. Not surprisingly, this response is usually more appropriate in the wilderness than in the modern urban world of business, where there are few predators or enemies threatening physical harm. Yet, although the need for the "fight/flight" response has dissipated, our need to relive the adrenalin experience has remained, as is evidenced in the popularity of horror movies, roller coasters, and Universal Studios tours.

The adrenalin experience is also still temptingly available in the form of convenient, easy-to-swallow, non-prescription pseudo crises in everyone's office. These crises successfully lure many of us office workers who seek to escape from the mundane tedium of careful planning and cautious implementation into the kind of excitement and sense of importance that Universal Studios provides for our children. When these crisis episodes become a regular regimen, adrenalin poisons the body; increases the likelihood of stress, heart attack, and other fatal illnesses; and is destructive to orderly, effective business processes.

Hopefully there is no need to expand upon the disadvantages of poison, heart attack, fatal illnesses, and stress inherent in the adrenalin addiction. However, its effects on office production may require some explanation. After all, is not all that extra adrenalin flowing towards more production? Not when it is focused in non-productive directions. One of the most common of those nonproductive directions is the premature identification of a relatively minor problem as a "crisis," one of the button words that opens the spigot of the adrenal glands. I experienced the resulting flow one Saturday morning when I was employed in a university registrar's office. A telephone call from my boss interrupted my plans for a family bike. She told me that she had come across some registration transactions that had not been processed and that she suspected there were many others. This may not sound like an impending, life-threatening disaster, but for me on that Saturday morning, it awakened the same sort of terrifying excitement as the make-believe disasters of a Universal Studio tour--only it was "real."

Bidding my family and friends a pleasant hike, I bravely drove to the office. My boss had managed to persuade four of us to arrive at the deserted office to search for the "missing registration transactions" that were imperiling both the university's fiscal well-being and the students' academic records (for us an item somewhat more valuable than the Holy Grail). We were high on adrenalin and so were able to concentrate a great deal of energy on the search. Unfortunately, we did not really know what we were looking for, since none of us were directly involved in registration processing. By the end of the day, we had discovered no other missing transactions, but did find a recent computer report. It indicated that even some of the original "missing transactions" had been processed after the printing of the report which my boss had seen. Since we did not know how to correct the few errors that had been discovered, we set them aside until Monday. The adrenalin had worn off, leaving only a hangover of frustration at having wasted a beautiful Saturday responding to a crisis generated by an overactive imagination.

To dispel any suspicion that this event is really unusual, we need only remember the last time that we scurried to meet the legal department's request regarding a "really important" lawsuit or that we directed everyone in the office to plow feverishly through notebooks, file drawers, and microfilm for hours to locate a statement that never really existed. Then, of course, we remember all the times we searched in vain for a letter and then found out that the requestor was only wishing to confirm that it had never been sent. Similarly, we recall how we gave special emergency treatment to finding something, proudly reported our success, only to learn that several other offices had been commissioned with the same task--and had already reported the same results.

Like any other drug, adrenalin is very valuable--when used appropriately and in moderation. Unlike other drugs, adrenalin cannot be controlled by the police, the FDA, or the FBI, since it is not purchased either at the drug store or in the street. Yet just because its distribution cannot be combatted by law enforcement agencies does not mean there is nothing we can do to control its release by our bodies' nervous systems. There is. The answer is to view adrenalin addiction as another "safety hazard." Once viewed in this perspective, we can use the same type of approaches (seminars, safety meetings, posters, brochures) used for other "on-the-job safety training" programs. To some extent, this approach has been used with the seminars on stress provided by many companies. We should expand upon this model and target the fabrication of pseudo crises as preventable hazards as serious as a file cabinet with two open drawers. In preparing this training program, we should remember to emphasize that, not only the individual employees, but also the organization, will suffer from adrenalin abuse. We must demonstrate how silly "heroically sacrificing myself to save my company in a crisis" really is.

OFFICE KNOW-IT-ALL

We are all familiar with the Know-It-All. Many Know-It-Alls restrict their self-righteous proclamations to "I told you so," which is irksome but not extremely harmful. The danger comes from those who have converted the grumbling "I told you so" into an activist pride in their infallible discernment of "the right way" and are dedicated to doing it no matter what. Such fanaticism has made several periodic, major appearances in modern history, including the seventeenth-century religious wars, the wars of the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon, and the twentieth-century fascist, communist, and anti-communist movements. Although participants in all of these crusades were willing to die--and even more ready to kill--for what they believed in, none produced a world that operated according to the principles they touted. What they did produce was a great deal of suffering, devastation, and death.

Always lined up against such ideological fanatics have been economically rationalist businessmen: Fanaticism does not make good business sense; it is not cost effective. Since fanaticism makes no sense in modern business, we would not expect to find it in the office, and in fact we find nothing in the business world as extreme as any of the above crusading ideologues. Yet just as we found a residue of the "fight or flight" adrenalin reaction of the hunter/fighter reappearing in the office as the "Crisis Creator," now we find another obsolete behavioral residue with the fanatic office "Know-It-All."

It is, of course, important to differentiate this fanaticism from adherence to the principles of business ethics (a respected subset of human morality). The principles of business ethics are absolute necessities from both a business and a humanistic perspective, as is exemplified in the adage "Honesty is the best policy." To his credit, the fanatic office Know-It-All is often an advocate of these basic principles of business ethics. The problem arises when he, with the air of a Puritan preacher, expounds his opinions about procedures and organizational structures as "self-evident truths" on a par with the universally accepted principles of business ethics.

Frequently, such pronouncements are used in arguing that a task should be performed by one department rather than another, either as a means to pawn off disagreeable work on someone else or as a way to latch onto a responsibility that increases one's prestige or empire. For example, someone explained to me in pious tones that mail services personnel are "obviously the appropriate people" to stuff marketing and other materials into envelopes and affix labels for a mass mailing, since these tasks are a part of the "mailing function." I was tempted to ask facetiously where he had found a post office that affixed his stamps, typed his addresses, and inserted his letters. I resisted that temptation, but I did ask about the possibility of giving at least some of the work to the departmental receptionist, who spent a good portion of time manicuring her nails. After receiving a lecture on shirking my responsibilities and on the importance of having someone attractive at the front desk, I gave in. In fact, in this instance, the volume of our mass mailings dictated a larger-scale solution than either mail carriers on overtime or a well-manicured receptionist between calls. Our solution involved the purchase of some automated mailing equipment and the use of handicapped labor. With a small volume, I'm still convinced that an underworked receptionist--who does her nails at home--is not a bad way to fulfill the need. The point is that the determination of who does the undesirable tasks is not a matter of absolute principle, but of pragmatic effectiveness.

The same argument is valid for those assignments that are considered "prestige." Recently in my agency we had a modest "struggle" over who would be the "Custodian of Records." The question came up because the two earlier organizations that merged into the current one had made Custodian of Records a part of the duties of the Records Manager and the Secretary of the Board respectively. Once the issue surfaced, the legal departments of the two former organizations strove to prove their cases by citing one statute after another--none of which clearly specified who should be the Custodian of Records. Finally, once the counsellors had retreated in a draw, the representatives of the Secretary and Records Management offices negotiated a solution based on what made the most practical sense. In our situation, that meant that the Secretary took the title and the responsibility for logging Custodian of Records correspondence, while Records Management became responsible for the research and retrieval required to answer this correspondence. In another agency, another solution might work better. The rule should be that, except where the law requires otherwise, the assignment of tasks to positions should be based upon what works best.

The office Know-It-All can become fanatical not just about which function should do which task, but also about the "right way" to do the task. The "right way" is, of course, the way he does things. Often, when the Know-It-All is questioned, the right way is "the way we have always done it." Sometimes it is the way "every successful company in the country does it," but specific examples are conveniently neglected. The Know-It-All is likely to fill his argumentation with non-sequiturs: "You want imaging? Look at XYZ; they put in an imaging system last year, and now they have gone bankrupt." But the logic that enraged me most was the statement of the critic of my microfilming program who failed to identify any shortcomings he had found in the system, but simply repeated over and over: "Microfilm is a dinosaur." All such comments must be immediately met with an insistence that procedures and technologies have to be judged pragmatically. We must ask what is the most cost-effective way to achieve the desired business objective in the particular situation under discussion. In business, such pragmatism must supersede unthinking, prejudiced fanaticism.

Not to muddy the waters, but there are times when it is not pragmatic to defend the "pragmatic" solution. These are those times when senior management has firmly determined to do something a certain way, whether it makes sense or not. For example, why must the executive floor have a separate mail stop for every two or three people, when all other floors have only one mail stop per department? Why is it insisted that board members receive their meeting agenda packets by special couriers, when the U.S. mail would get there in plenty of time? Why are certain departments permitted to store valuable, uncopied, original documents in relatively flimsy desk files rather than have them stored in the company's fire-proof cabinets or off-site facilities? These questions--and hundreds of others like them--are understandable queries that any self-respecting pragmatist must raise. However, once it has been ascertained that, for whatever reasons, no change will be made, the true pragmatist does not become fanatical over his pragmatism. For perhaps the first rule of pragmatic rationalism is "Do not waste psychic energy fretting about what you cannot change."

CONCLUSION

We have just begun to consider the saboteurs that threaten our offices. However, it becomes evident that they share certain common traits. They are well-intentioned. They really do wish the company to succeed, and they believe that they are working in precisely that direction. Moreover, many of their ideas are--in the proper context--very good. Security systems, prioritization, planning, improving the office's social atmosphere, encouraging responsibility in procurement, resolving crises, and standing up for principles are all very positive things. Yet, if they are not pursued in a moderate, rational manner, they may well have a very negative impact. For the person who pursues isolated elements of excellence to an immoderate degree sabotages the very excellence he is seeking.

What should we do about all of these immoderate, irrational trouble-makers? Identify them and give them pink slips? Not so fast, please. I am sure that all of us can recognize in ourselves at least one--probably several--of these saboteurs. It is not that we are all bad employees or irrational either--at least not all of the time. It is just that sometimes we get confused. I suggest the following remedy, which--like any pragmatic solution--is guaranteed to work only for some people some of the time.

1. Several times a day ask yourself a simple question: "Is what I am doing (or contemplating) the most effective way to help the organization?"

2. In answering the question, even if you are no critical rationalist, at least make believe you have common sense.

3. If the answer is "Yes," do it.

4. If the answer is "No," don't.

Copyright Association of Records Managers and Administrators Inc. Jan 1995
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved