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!
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