Why delegate? Why not, it's free!

In the modern workplace, the concept of "delegation of work" is a double-edged sword. There are days in my own work that I have felt that being "delegated" work is a losing proposition, for a whole bunch of reasons, while being the person who "delegates" has mostly upside benefits. This leads to the next unintelligent question:

Why is being delegated work a bad thing, in the office?

To better understand this concept, let's take an example of productive "delegation" that occurs outside of the workplace.

There are times when we require a large amount of print material produced in a small amount of time, whether it be for a school or work presentation, or anything else. Sometimes, our little inkjet printer just won't cut it. Thankfully, a marketplace exists to provide this type of service, since we are able to hop in our car, drive to the nearest office supply store or print/copy centre and get the job done, for a reasonable price.

In the above example, we are participating in an economic exchange with a capitalist (ie. print/copy centre owner), who owns the print machinery, and hires the staff who know how to use it, in order to provide the necessary service for us. Both sides in this exchange are happy with the deal. We receive our quality printouts, the business receives payment for a job well done. If there is a problem in the quality of the printouts, or the delivery time of the job, we have effectively "delegated" these responsibilities to the business, and although we can't change the deadline we need it by, we have a reasonable expectation of performance from the print/copy centre, since we have delegated this work to them.

Let's now try to resolve how this interaction would occur in the workplace. At different times in our careers (possibly many times), we have been identified as the "capitalists" with skills and labor that is desired by others within our organization. Therefore, others take it upon themselves to "delegate" tasks to us when they see a benefit from the services we provide. When this occurs at the office, what is missing from this interaction? You guessed it, payment!

At this point, you might counter this argument by reasoning that an employee's salary (and bonus, if applicable) covers the total labor their organization receives from them on an annual basis. However, as was covered in my previous article, this arrangement does not address the fundamental flaw in these types of workplace interactions, which is that there is no direct connection between services provided, and consideration received for those services. Therefore, if you work as an employee in an organization, and have faced these types of situations before, it behooves you to always be the one who delegates your work, not the other way around!

Before you are tempted to believe that this is a stable and workable concept in the modern workplace, take a minute and consider what would happen if every employee were encouraged to delegate their work to others. Eventually, we would be faced with a situation where everybody was a self-acclaimed "manager", and nobody would be doing the actual work that needed to be done. So therefore, how is this situation resolved? Let's consider a few alternatives:

1) Let your boss decide what your work will be.

This may be the natural option to consider, since the classic "command and control" model in a lot of workplaces today would be compatible with the view that employees' activities should be directed primarily by their manager. After all, your manager would be in the best position to know your time constraints and availability for new work, on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, in specialist positions (such as IT work), it is often the employees themselves who have the best handle on what services they are most able to deliver, with minimal resource commitment. Managers may overlook some good, strategic projects if they do not share the same comfort level with the skill areas of their employees. Ultimately, this approach negates the decision making role of highly skilled employees, so ideally other alternatives should be considered.

2) Be self-employed

Why not *be* the capitalist? When self-employed, you not only have the ability to charge for each service provided, your clients expect it and thank you for it! Isn't that refreshing? While this may seem like a utopian way to work for some people, for others the prospect of not receiving a steady paycheck might be quite daunting. In all fairness, for a lot of us, the dream of entrepreneurship often gets clouded by the humbling realities of life, such as a mortgage, car payments and kids. Taking on this type of risk is not for everybody.

From an employer's perspective, staff are needed too! Could you imagine a day when every employee got up from their desks, walked out the front door and became their own boss? For better or worse, some form of organizational structure is still required at present.

3) Expect some other kind of "consideration" for your work. After all, employees should be capitalists, too!

Over the next 5-10 years, a trend that I expect will emerge will be the separation of "employees" into at least two categories of worker. The first category, the "9-to-5 'er", would most fit our traditional definition of an employee, and would have an expectation of steady hours for steady pay (with the very occasional late night at the office). Some people are happy with this, and in return I would expect that the types of work most suitable for these types of employees would be limited-scope, limited-complexity tasks that carry a low amount of risk, but are nonetheless necessary functions within the organization. Also remember that several mid to large-scale projects within an organization require on-going support after the design-and-build phase has completed. These types of support commitments are also ideal types of work for these employees.

The second category, which I will call the "creative resource", will have some, or most of their work arranged through some sort of marketplace-type system. Being an employee, they would still be offered a fixed rate of pay per year, however with this one variable locked down, the "consideration" offered for their services would be time away from the office. In other words, some of this employee's time at work would be variable, and every project they are offered (ie. not delegated) would be associated with a specific amount of paid days off. Therefore, anybody wishing to delegate work to this individual would have the ability to offer, in consideration, a specific number of paid days off, which they could offer subject to their own group's "time budget" allocated to them every year. These "delegation days" would be the equivalent to the monetary consideration that is offered when a consumer interacts with a business in every day life.

The above example would also carry the benefit of requiring those people who delegate work to make decisions on the priority of their requests, since their requests for work would no longer be "free", from their own perspective. The employee would also benefit greatly, since taking on more and more projects of this nature would provide them with a tangible, and measurable reward (paid time off). Managing these types of requests for work through some sort of marketplace system would also ensure that reasonable amounts of time off were being offered in exchange for reasonable amounts of work, since the employee would have the ability to accept or reject these offers for work, based on their evaluation of the reward (paid time off) being offered in exchange for performing the required services.

At a bare minimum, I hope the above idea stirs some thought about this issue, and why it is one that affects several of us in the modern workplace today. Rather than just complain about these issues, it is my hope that these ideas can be the start of some sort of constructive solution to this problem, that will ultimately be a well-spring for stress reduction and better interaction between intelligent human beings when we are working. As always, comments are welcome, I hope you have enjoyed reading this article!

The world of work

It continually amazes me how so many people settle into their daily jobs without finding a way to be truly happy and fulfilled with their work. I am no exception. The modern "workplace" is commonly revered as a one of the largest sources of stress in the daily life of millions of people.

Today, in examining this topic, I would like to present a few unintelligent questions in an attempt to get at the root of workplace stress and why it is so prevalent in our daily lives. I am not going to go over the usual suspects such as (hopeless) time management, office politics, and so forth. Instead, in this writing I am laying out a set of reasons why I think people feel that they need to participate in these types of activities, due to an underlying set of false pretenses which we choose to accept every day we arrive at our place of work.

Unintelligent Question #1: You do not walk into a barber shop and ask for a free haircut, so why do your coworkers feel it is ok to ask you to do work for free?

Our (mostly) free market economy is based on voluntary participation in the exchange of values that benefit each party involved. In layman's terms, this means that both buyer and seller of a product or service are willing to participate in the transaction, and feel that the product/service they are receiving, or the value (ie. money) they are receiving in exchange for the product/service they are delivering is sufficient to make it a worthwhile exchange.

Now, enter the workplace. Right out of the gate, when we sign our letter to accept our job offer, we are effectively making s statement that we are worth X dollars to an employer, typically without any detailed plan for what work we will exactly be doing in the coming year. Mentally, we pay a huge price for gaining the "stability" of this steady paycheck. Sure, many workplaces also offer a performance incentive system to give employees bonuses for "exceptional job performance", however this does not address the initial fallacy that was made when offering the employee the job in the first place.

What is this fallacy? It is that employees are hired under these pretenses, then are "thrown into" the workplace and asked to participate in economic exchanges every day, with neither party knowing what the other is receiving in exchange for the service they are providing. This is about as far from a free market exchange of value as you can stray, since neither party has a way to set rational limits on what they are asking for. Two "parties" could be an employee and their manager, an employee and somebody else's manager, or two co-workers. Effectively, it does not matter what job title either party holds, the underlying false pretense remains.

Imagine, for a moment, what that scenario would be like at the barber shop, if no money was exchanging hands between barber and customer. Likely, the person performing the valuable service, the barber, would complain of shortages of supplies and labor (ie. their own time), because after all, who wouldn't want a haircut (or other type of valuable service) if it was free? Does this start to sound familiar? One of the key reasons that virtually every experiment in socialism in history failed was because of supply and labor shortages, due to a failure in the central planning model. More on this later.

By now, if you're still reading this article, you might be thinking that money is not the only reason people enter the workforce, and I would agree with you. Seeking a promotion is often one of the reasons why employees will make sacrifices in their time and life outside of work, but, why? The word "promotion" implies that you are making an upwards, not lateral, move in an organization, that you are in a position above others who did not receive the promotion. Does this mean that by taking on this new job, you are bettering yourself? This forms the basis if our next unintelligent question.

Unintelligent Question #2: If our job title is so important to us, why don't we carve it on our tombstone?

When we are young, a lot of us envision ourselves in positions of authority (ie. I want to be The Boss! I want to be CEO!) without having a vision of the actual day-to-day work we will be doing in those positions of authority, or all of the positions we will need to occupy in between before reaching this goal. When we grow up, some of us will take these notions into the workplace and seek these positions of authority, and as a secondary priority, perform the work necessary to be eventually promoted to these positions. I would argue that this is the predominant attitude in most workplaces today, to the extent that it is considered "taboo" to think otherwise, so many of us will accept promotions when they are offered to us, even if we are completely satisfied with the work we are doing in our present job. In reality of course, most of us would accept an offer for more pay, which is usually accompanied with a job promotion, and this factor alone would likely be the factor that "seals the deal"and would be the biggest reason why we wouldn't turn down the promotion. However, again we enter into the conundrum where we are being offered a larger sum of money without a direct connection to the actual value we will be creating for the employer. In effect, by being offered that promotion and pay raise, your employer is placing a fixed price on the overall value of your talents, experience and potential within the organization, reinforcing the notion that as you "move up the ladder", and in effect move further away from the actual hands-on activities that were the reason you were able to be hired in the first place, that your level of seniority within the organization is directly connected to the value you create for the organization. It is precisely this fallacy that is a major source of stress for many people in the workplace.

So, back to my unintelligent question, why don't we carve our job title on our tombstones? The answer is because as human beings, we realize that it's what we do in life that has an impact on the world, not who we are. For some unknown reason, this concept does not seem to translate into our understanding of the modern workplace.

Unintelligent Question #3: Why do we get paid to use other peoples' time, and call it "leveraging"?

Given the constraints in our daily lives, including what we encounter at work, as human beings we seek ways to maximize what we get for our inputs. For some, this includes asking others to do work on our behalf. For some reason, in the workplace this seems to be an ok thing to do. In short, this means at the office, we have less-than-complete control over our ability to perform work, for whom we want and the way we want. In an economic context, the most popular type of system where individuals do not own their labor, is socialism. In case you missed it, what I am saying is that when you step into the workplace every morning, you are entering a small-scale socialist universe. Don't believe me? Let's try to draw a few parallels.

Virtually every organization exists to provide a valuable service to the economy, or to society as a whole. For some reason, these same organizations feel it equally important to indoctrinate their employees into this same shared purpose, almost as if it is a natural thing to expect employees to bypass their own reason for doing what they do every day. Having an organizational mission is a valuable asset, however, the current trend appears to be to develop a strict employee culture around this mission and these shared goals. As a net result, employees measure their performance on how well or poorly they lived up to their organization's goals, and not their own. In the modern workplace, the "me" does not matter, it is only the "we". Where in history have we seen this before?

To wrap up this article, I'd like to loop back around to the concept of central planning. Central planning, in an economic context, is a concept where the productive outputs, and the material and labor inputs needed to create them, is determined by a central planning committee. At a macro level, this model has been tried by nations. At a micro level, it is my opinion that this model is alive and well within private and public sector organizations. Don't believe me? One of the most significant symptoms of central planning, in any organization big or small, is the scarcity of resources. In a large scale economy, typically it is a material shortage, and in organizations with knowledge workers it is a time (or people) shortage. How long did your department have to wait to be granted its last request for a new employee? Why can a decision to hire temporary help rarely be made at your department's level? Why does a request need to be made in the first place, shouldn't the value created by this additional resource be evident to the team that requires this person? I hope that some of the previous sections have outlined for you the reasons why this is not true. In the modern workforce we have created for ourselves, we have lost the direct connection between our own productive outputs and the actual value that we create in the marketplace.

In closing, I hope this article can offer some insights on what we give up, both personally and economically, when we accept that steady paycheck in the hopes of building a successful, stable life for ourselves. So, what's next? Truthfully, I do not know what better alternatives are available for organizations or for employees. The only thing that is certain to me is that the "workforce of the future" will be radically different from the one that we have today. I invite you to post comments so this debate can be continued, and maybe some decent solutions to these problems can be discussed. I'd love to hear your ideas!