How bureaucracy is taking over our workday

“No matter what you studied, your job will always consist of sending e-mails and filling out Excel spreadsheets.” This maxim, read in a tweet, summarizes the current state of affairs. We are all assistants, auditors and accountants, devoting a good part of the day to these tasks — and to struggle with the software and apps that are supposed to assist us in our unexpected administrative role.

A recent Financial Times article wondered: “Where did all the secretaries and support staff go?” Perhaps they fell victims of automation, it continued. However, the British newspaper explained, their work has not disappeared; it has just been transferred to the rest of the staff, which now must manage, through inscrutable programs and applications, their own expenses, tickets, the mileage of their trips, their plane tickets and budgets. In short, the logistics of their real job, that is, the one they are actually paid to do.

With the self-service software model, one calculates and manages. It matters little that calculation and management are not part of your job description. According to the Financial Times, the companies that sell these programs claim that they save time and money and “empower” workers. They offer an illusion of independence and autonomy that no one asked for. Meanwhile, their critics believe that they are nothing but a sophisticated instrument to dump mechanical and tedious tasks on employees who were not hired to do administrative work. Furthermore, they don’t exactly run smoothly, which adds frustration and entails a huge waste of time.

In his book Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day, Craig Lambert, the editor of Harvard Magazine for more than two decades, warned about what was coming. Lambert noted how this “shadow work” had sneakily infiltrated our days, from calculating your company expenses to bagging your own purchase at the supermarket. We found ourselves doing a lot of jobs we never volunteered for. Under the term “shadow work,” Lambert includes all those unpaid tasks we do on behalf of companies and organizations. Most of us do not realize it or even notice how much we are doing; still, “we are working for nothing.” This is inconceivable for a doctor in sociology from Harvard University like Lambert, who in 2015 declared: “Shadow work has introduced a new element to the modern lifestyle: middle-class serfdom.” Life is much busier now, he reflects. It seems like we have less time. However, a day still has 24 hours. Time has not vanished; free time has.

The Financial Times article points out that while the savings from cutting support staff are easy for organizations to calculate, “the costs of lost productivity across the rest of the workforce are hard to measure.” This transfer of tasks is taking place at a moment in history that is dominated by a dogma of faith: measurements. The religion of technology has imposed the belief that everything can be measured, evaluated, self-assessed and turned into a number. Any reality, no matter how multifaceted and complex, can be reduced and trapped in an Excel spreadsheet. This belief gives prestige and multiplies the accounting tasks. There must be a numerical record of every step we take.

In her latest book, El bucle invisible [The invisible loop], Remedios Zafra delves into the unawareness and the obliviousness that digital excess brings, which immerses us, she says, in a never-ending, repetitive loop of demanded activities and requests to do and collaborate here and there. “This scenario of fragmentation and overload is usually accompanied by its corresponding bureaucratic demands, one or several procedures for each job, be it justification, follow-up report, payment order, evaluation, or self-evaluation of what has been done.”

Zafra wonders what happens when many jobs and solutions become automation processes mediated by technological applications. “Distrust gives rise to bureaucracy and control and benefits the pressure to justify, supported by protocols and procedures. As an effect, pretense is encouraged, which withers productive time […]. Work turned into bureaucratic time oriented towards the preparation, assembly, and delivery of standardized documents required by the corresponding control applications,” she reflects.

Of the 30 jobs that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will decline sharply over the next decade, 10 are some type of secretarial or administrative work. The next wave of technology is expected to take over these tasks. But it is not happening — at least, not yet. We are the generation of transition, condemned to hire a manager or become the managers of others. And our own.

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