Why is Efficiency So Undervalued in Many Workplaces?

Henry Ford is generally credited with inventing the production line, though he really introduced the moving assembly line, which is slightly different.

A production line, however, is widely regarded as an efficient way to make many different things.

It allows for a streamlined process, reducing the time and effort required for each task, and often leads to increased productivity and cost savings.

When it comes to manufacturing, most organisations embrace efficiency and are keen to continue identifying and implementing savings wherever possible.

In a competitive commercial environment, this makes good sense.

It's intriguing to me why we often take the opposite approach in many aspects of administration and management, neglecting the potential of efficiency.

Efficiency, it seems, is often at the very bottom of the priority list—if it even makes the list!

This lack of priority is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed.

There seems to be a multitude of offending practices.

Meetings and More Meetings

When did the answer to any problem become a meeting, or, better still, repeating regular meetings, whether needed or not?

However you feel about meetings, they are surely one of the most expensive ways of doing things because of the cost of the time involved.

Put half a dozen people in a meeting for a couple of hours, and the cost quickly becomes significant, even for relatively low-paid staff.

Add the higher managers, who love to spend as much time as possible in meetings, and the costs go through the roof.

Yet even without the cost of the people involved, a meeting is usually highly inefficient.

Invariably, a small subset of the attendees does most of the talking while the others listen or pretend to listen.

Papers may have been circulated in advance, but most of the attendees will not have had time to read them because they were in other meetings.

So, it becomes impossible to have anything like a helpful discussion.

A meeting also only works for people who can think and digest information on the spot.

If you are a more reflective person, you will feed in your thoughts later, once you have considered the issues.

If we started costing meetings in advance and had to meet a budget, as is often the case for travel spending, for example, things would change quickly!

Meetings are as about as inefficient as work could get, and I haven’t even mentioned the PowerPoint deck industry yet.

Why does nobody see a problem with this?

Second Level Work

There have been times in my career when I spent far more time every day completing spreadsheets and other reports about the work I was doing than actually completing the primary task.

Teams whose entire purpose is monitoring and reporting on the work being done elsewhere seem to pop up constantly.

Once established, they seem to recognise the dubious nature of their purpose and quickly try to make their role an indispensable industry.

Endless tools and analysis mechanisms are developed, requiring constant inputs and updating.

Project management techniques are often extensively deployed, even at work where there is no way that a project resembles it.

Now, of course, some management information is essential.

Many people in these teams have had no choice in being put there and are simply trying to do the best job they can.

But the test I like to use is this.

If a team or an entire function could disappear overnight and nobody would notice (apart from having fewer demands for information), then is it necessary or efficient?

The Authority and Trust Problem

Now, I could talk at length about many other areas of inefficiency in corporate life, and I may do so in future, but for now, I will make one final point.

When I started my career nearly 35 years ago, I had significant authority and made important decisions every day, even as a new entrant graduate.

I am now three levels higher in the organisation, and I can barely decide for myself what to have for lunch.

I know that my organisation is not alone in this.

Aside from the awful way it makes people feel when everything they do has to be cleared by several levels of management, it is hugely inefficient and rarely produces a better outcome.

It is true that great work is not done by committee.

What you generally end up with when a document or decision has to be cleared by several different people is something bland yet confused, risk-averse yet unclear, and far worse than the first draft but delayed by days or weeks.

If you do not trust those you manage with even the most basic tasks, that is a significant problem that needs to be addressed urgently.

Overseeing every detail on an ongoing basis is micromanagement, a form of bullying and not a long-term solution.

Things may not be done as you would have done them, but that does not mean that they have been done wrong.

All that oversight takes hours and hours of expensive time, usually for little or no improvement.

Then, just to crown it all, the requirement for endless sign-off and the meeting epidemic combine.

You need to have an important piece of work signed off urgently, but those who insist on doing so are unavailable because they are in back-to-back meetings all day, every day.

You really could not make it up.

I know that much administrative and management work is not the same as that of a production line for making cars or mouse traps.

But that surely should not mean that efficiency is no longer a concern at all.

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