Saturday, August 27, 2022

Task-Based

One of the ways to end a lot of bureaucratic foolishness is to change to a task-based work place, rather than what most of us have- where we are stuck with time and some type of position description that bureaucrats can ignore or aggravate you with, depending on their inclination.

There are, of course, tasks that are very time sensitive- if you are going to open at 9am, you have to be there at 9am, opening the doors.  Often this requires being there even earlier for preparations prior to opening.

In other cases, the time is determined by deliveries or couriers who will pick up whatever it is you are working on.  It is usually relatively easy to determine what tasks to do first, based on what is going out first.  And, if you are good- you are good, and you don't necessarily need to be there for 40hrs to get the stuff done.  

What tends to happen now is that if you are good, you may well find yourself doing 3 peoples jobs for some idiotic bureaucracy that refuses to fill positions or handle sick/unable employees' situations properly.  And that same bureaucracy may be punishing you, telling you you are racist, etc- while not paying you the three paychecks they ought to be paying you.

But with a task-based focus, the workplace would look a lot different.  Who did what is easier to figure out, since you have to log in to this or that system in order to get the stuff done.  

I would anticipate certain bureaucrats would try to game the system- by trying to get certain 'tasks' identified as really important and/or more lucrative than normal tasks.  First, I hope any institution that attempts a task-based focus would have already addressed the evils of bureaucracy and kicked bad actors out.  Second, you'll find these 'tasks' not directly germane to the purpose of the institution.

This is one of the reasons HR is so rife with nonsensical people- they pretend this is somehow outside the ken of normal people- yet it is painfully obvious you could get a better outcome by getting your engineers to interview engineers, your doctors to interview other doctors, and your library people to interview prospective library people.  Why?  They tend to have their own culture/language in a sense.  You can have two engineers from very different ethnic, religious, and even socio-economic backgrounds, but when they come together (assuming they both know their stuff) they can talk to each other about the stuff that they can't talk about to their loved ones, their fellow ethnics, their fellow religious believers.

And what two engineers from different backgrounds would talk about is very likely to be relevant to the reason you are hiring an engineer in the first place.  So, many of the duties of HR are tasks that could easily be done (better than HR) by other staff.  In a workplace focused on tasks, staff would want to do interviews (and other HR stuff) because that would likely increase their pay.  Do more tasks=higher pay.  

Another arena, related to HR, is training.  Training in a bureaucratic organization is currently abysmal.  Most of it is an insult to one's intelligence- some of it is an insult to morality.  First, Clarence Thomas should sue everyone who uses his name in vain in any of these sexual harassment trainings. Second, there's no standard of behavior- everything has gotten to the point where nothing you did or didn't do matters- what matters is whatever the accusers says.  Third, even with something really mundane, like how to use the fire extinguishers- there's a brief explanation about how to use them (easily forgotten) and then the insanity of today's world, in which they basically tell you you are better off from a liability standpoint to never pick up a fire extinguisher and extinguish a fire.  

Seriously- they were basically telling me I should leave the building (and potentially co-workers) to burn rather than incur the risk of being sued.

And anyone who drives a vehicle for one of these organizations runs a risk too- the second anything happens, go pee in a cup.  In theory these things apply to everyone, but in practice the bureaucrat could very easily spend all his days high as a kite, while the average worker is at risk from accidental exposure to somebody's CBD lotion.

But if the work-place is task-based, the training is demand driven.  You want to know how to do the tasks so you can do them if they come up, or if there's time to do them.  In fact, the training itself would likely be dissociated from an 'expert' trainer, and instead the institution would be paying that one guy they've been depending on for the last twenty years to do 'that one thing' how to do 'that one thing'.

This would solve yet another issue in these large institutions- the loss of knowledge.  Oh, boy does this happen.  Too often you end up with one old fart who still remembers how to do X, but you piss of old fart because, I don't know, HR seems hell bent on pissing off old farts- like they get extra perks for upsetting the old man who is just toddling around the place still because he doesn't want to retire and die suddenly.  I don't want to say it's just the old folks either; you often end up with stuff nearly everyone can do, but a decade or two later, you find there's one guy who is doing it, and nobody else knows how, even though it would make sense from the institutional perspective if at least twenty people (in different places) knew it.

Anyway, the old fart finally gets sick of the place and quits, or the not so old doer of that one task keels over from a heart attack because he is afraid of his own shadow- and suddenly nobody knows anything.  They currently solve this by hiring more people- none of whom know how to do anything.  And then they find some way of outsourcing the problem, which almost never works out as well as keeping the original old fart around.

But in a task-based workplace, learning that institutional knowledge would be extremely important to the newer employees, because it would be how you learn to complete more tasks, and consequently, get more compensation.


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