[more detailed: 1996; cf. pipeline processes eg. paper reformatting/grant writing, medical records] According to a series of 20 case studies on office productivity and technology in major US corporations, there is a large lack of intellectual specialization among managers and professionals. That is, managers and professionals devote a relatively small fraction of their work time to management/professional-level work, and a relatively large fraction of their time to support and nonproductive tasks. In addition, the study found large staffing imbalances throughout the cases: In nearly every office, there were more managers and professionals, and fewer support workers, than were required to perform the work cost-effectively.
An analysis of this situation suggests that a typical organization could reduce its annual office payroll costs by over 15% by calibrating its staffing mix and increasing the intellectual specialization of its office workers. Further, the apparent failure of massive corporate investments in office technology to achieve commensurate increases in white-collar productivity is likely due, in large measure, to reductions in the intellectual specialization of office workers resulting from myopic staffing decisions.
The article concludes with advice on measuring and tracking office productivity, developing a coherent office productivity strategy, and making office staffing and technology decisions.
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In the engineering department of a Fortune 50 manufacturing company, engineers often carry office typewriters home to complete reports.
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In the corporate marketing department of a Fortune 50 consumer products company, senior marketing professionals devote more than a day a week to preparing charts and graphs for presentations.
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In one of the nation’s largest commercial banks, corporate bankers devote more than 25% of their time to handling routine customer inquiries and problems.
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In one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, field office managers spend more time inputting routine data into the computer system than in managing their offices.
What is wrong with these snapshots of work in America? As most managers will attest, they demonstrate the most important, and least recognized, productivity problem in corporate offices today: the lack of intellectual specialization among managers and professionals. That is, managers and other professionals are devoting an inordinate amount of time to tasks that could be handled by lower-level employees.
[Cal Newport (NYT): “All these advances in communication, and we don’t see a big jump in nonindustrial productivity. Robert Gordon kind of gets into this. He points out that if you introduce computers to the back office, productivity as measured by this metric jumps up, because we can computerize our inventory systems. But then we put computers on the front-office worker’s desk, and we didn’t see it. A professor named Peter Sassone in the late 1980s & early 1990s took a collection of major companies that were bringing computers to the front office and followed them through this transition. These computers made certain activities easier, like typing, so they fired a bunch of support staff, because we don’t need typists, we don’t need secretaries. At first, salary expenses went down. But now that the workers who were being supported had to do all this on their own, their productivity went down. So they had to hire more workers to get the same things done, but their salaries were higher than the support staff they fired. My theory is that technology made things just easy enough so we can put more on people’s plates, and we didn’t factor in how much that would pull out of their time. Then the communication revolution, which kicked off 10 years after that, had the issue of all the context shifting, which meant that miraculous advances in computing and mobile-computing technology never moved the needle on nonindustrial productivity.” A good example: Terence Tao wastes many hours copy-pasting into spreadsheets.]
…Between 1985–6199133ya, 20 departments at 5 major US corporations were studied. Each department represented a separate case study. More than 17 hundred employees in 95 offices in eighty-nine locations throughout the United States were involved. Table 1 describes the 5 companies, whose names have been kept confidential. Table 2 describes the 20 departments that were studied.
In each case, data were obtained in the same way. First, in each department 4–8 employees in each position in the hierarchy were interviewed to identify the functions for which they were responsible, the corresponding activities and tasks that they performed while doing their jobs, and the lowest position to which the various tasks could, in principle, be delegated. This last question helped determine the intellectual content of each task or activity. Using the information gathered in the interviews, time logs were developed. All the workers in that office used the logs to record their activities for several (staggered) days over the course of the month-long study.
…The average work profile matrix for the studied offices is shown in Table 3: The major finding is the large lack of intellectual specialization among managers and professionals. It is interesting to note the clear pattern of intellectual specialization, as measured by the main diagonal of Table 3: Intellectual specialization uniformly decreases as job levels increase. That is, managers spend the least time (29.91%) in work at their position level, while at the other end of the diagonal, administrative support workers spend the most time (81.67%) in work at their level. Senior professionals, junior professionals, and technical support workers fall neatly between these extremes. This pattern is so pronounced in most of the individual cases, as well as in the aggregated data, that it might well be called the law of diminishing specialization of office work.
…These interviews show that senior managers are intellectually specialized. That is, they do not perform much work that could be delegated to lower-level workers. In most cases, the reason is clear. Senior managers, in general, have adequate staff support. They usually have more than adequate secretarial support, they have priority in marshaling technical support when needed, and their responsibilities usually do not include functional professional work. And, of course, their position enables them to delegate work more easily than subordinate managers can. Thus, the law of diminishing specialization seems to apply within functional departments, but not at the corporate management level.
…Another cause of top-heavy staffing appears to be office automation. Compared with expenditures on traditional office capital equipment (typewriters, file cabinets and desks), office computer systems are a very large budget item. Many firms decide to pay for their office information systems by reducing their support staff. The reasoning is that computer systems can absorb and eliminate some work, and they can increase the efficiency with which some of the remaining work gets done; thus, fewer support workers are needed. Unfortunately, many office computer systems have not delivered on the promise to improve overall office productivity. Thus, with a diminished support staff, the managers and professionals are forced to perform additional support work.
Paradoxically, although office computer systems can unmistakably increase productivity in a limited set of office activities (for example, typing, filing, creating and distributing forms, spreadsheet analyses, graphics), their indirect and unintended effect on staffing may cause overall organizational productivity to decline.