Are you pretending to work? The slow demise of the corporate job
Analysis: A growing segment of the corporate workforce know their jobs make no real contribution and that what they do each day is meaningless
There is an old Soviet joke that conveys the cynicism that helped sink their economy: “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”. In a recent article, Alex McCann described a new variant, which involves people getting paid very well for pretending to work while doing pointless corporate jobs.
He highlights a generation of corporate managers who go to meetings where nothing is ever decided, who write reports nobody reads and who carry out analyses nobody believes in. People who worked hard to climb the corporate ladder find themselves doing jobs they do not understand, producing presentations nobody wants to see, writing reports that are promptly filed and ignored and pretending to work while often focusing on side hustles or personal projects. If you Google “pretending to work”, you will find dozens of memes, often images of well-dressed men and women staring at computer screens, making every appearance of working hard.
Complaints about the meaninglessness of work are nothing new. In the 1950s, the novel and subsequent film The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit detailed the soul-crushing conformity of corporate life. David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs argues that up to half of all jobs are essentially pointless and meaningless. These positions are flunkies who exist to make their superiors feel important; duct tapers who apply temporary fixes to problems that could be permanently solved, or box-tickers who do little more than generate paperwork. His claim that half of all jobs are meaningless has been disputed, but there is little doubt that a substantial amount of busywork exists in most organisations.
While the idea that work is often meaningless is not new, our awareness of the pointlessness of many jobs has probably increased because of recent changes in the way we work. In particular, the widespread use of remote work during the pandemic helped many people realise that work that took eight to 12 hours in the office could often be accomplished in one-third of the time when working remotely.
Meetings that once dominated the workday were shown to be unnecessary and wasteful. Interactions with co-workers, often claimed to be essential to creativity and teamwork, often turned out to be sources of stress and discontent. A growing segment of the corporate workforce understands that their jobs make no real contribution and that much of what they do each day is meaningless.
How and why does pointless work become such a large part of corporate life? I believe that two very different forces are at work here. First, empire-building is a constant and irresistible force. A manager who expands his or her workforce is rewarded with larger budgets and more power and influence. Once you command a large staff, there is a strong incentive to keep them, even if there is nothing useful for them to do. Empire building has been a fact of life well before the modern corporation, and it is likely that many of the workers who built the pyramids had jobs that represented little more than pointless paperwork.
Second, a benign trend in modern corporate governance, the call for accountability, can have destructive effects. Holding bureaucracies accountable required reports, audits and record-keeping, which in turn require businesses to hire the staff needed to generate these reports and records. As the number of stakeholders grows (e.g., unions, government agencies, public interest groups, environmental groups), the number of reports, audits and the like must also grow, and an army of accountants, secretaries, and managers will be hired to carry out these tasks, even if the reports and presentations are rarely read.
It is tempting to blame the pointlessness of work on bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be a trial, but it is useful to remember that bureaucracy was developed as a solution to a very real set of problems. As the early sociologist Max Weber argued, bureaucracies were developed to make organisations more efficient and fairer. In particular, he believed that we could eliminate favoritism and subjectivity by enclosing important decisions in an “iron cage” of rules and procedures.
Unfortunately, locking bureaucrats in an iron cage of rules and procedures means that many who live in the corporate world will continue to grind away in jobs that do not appear to be meaningful or important. As much as we like to deride bureaucrats, I, for one, do not want to go back to the days when important decisions in organisations depended solely on the whims of feudal lords. I am back in the United States these days and we get enough of this with Trump! Drudgery is the cost of working in organisations where rules and accountability matter, and viewed in this light, it might be a cost worth paying. At least when we pretend to work, we do get paid!
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