Let’s Be Frank: Who Does What Now?

Sometimes synchronicity happens. I am not currently in a hiring/firing type position, so I am not dealing a lot with new hires at this point in my career. However, I work with lots of managers at multiple facilities. I heard this story last month from someone overseeing many new hires who are also very junior/new to industry engineers:

“This kid comes to me yesterday; says he needs a mental health afternoon. I asked him what he meant, and he told me he did not think he was going to be productive in the afternoon and needed a nap. Said he wasn’t sick and didn’t have any personal issues he was trying to cope with, he just didn’t want to work the afternoon.”

I was not sure how to respond to that story. The manager I was working for said he had a hard time not blowing his top…

Then, shortly after (and I mean 2 days after) that conversation, my wife sent me an interesting article. It had a line from a 1988 study of employees’ output rates, or how much work they did over their lives. It also referenced previous studies from the 1950s and earlier.

It stated, “A small percentage of the workers in any given domain is responsible for the bulk of the work. Generally, the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with around 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of the least productive workers can claim only 15% of the total work, and the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least.” [1]

Well, needless to say, that caught my attention and got me thinking. It also made me want to find out more data. I have thought about this topic before but had never gone digging deep before. I also realized that most studies talking about productivity look more at predicting the effects of unemployment versus overall gross domestic product. Studies that look at individual productivity are much fewer and farther between as gathering that data becomes much more difficult and potentially more subjective.

As I tried to find out more information about this topic, I realized it was referenced many times as a concept for discussion, but hard data was “hard” to find, and many studies used old data sets, limited data, or were outright just more anecdotal than factual.

Even the statement above from a 1988 study used data collected during a WW2 study on American women and their associated production of entering the industrial workforce. I would prefer some more modern information, but it looks like there are very limited options for studies that may capture data relevant to individual worker outputs.

But does it make sense? Does it make sense even in terms of the limited “data” I have around my working career? Yes, it does, or at least the concept seems to be proven out to a certain extent by my own observations.

Let’s just start with my own work nowadays in consulting and contracting. Arguably, there are many sites I work for that do not have the in-house expertise or depth to their operations, so I am brought in to deal with integrity concerns that are not much different than if I were directly the owner/user’s integrity manager. However, on other sites, I find large and robust integrity departments, sometimes with a lot of corporate depth and/or support from other sites. In those cases, sometimes I am brought in for some particular expertise, but often I find I am brought in to do the job, or assist with the job, that they already have employees doing (in theory).

Now, if it is some kind of new project development, I get that it can stretch a department and require outside resources, especially if running lean. But what if I am brought in to really do the job of someone who is already on the payroll? I can tell you it happens a lot. I don’t always know the reasons behind it, and, once in a while, there is a valid reason. Other times, the reason is that the guy is super slow, and they just need someone to come in and catch it up. I always find that interesting. In fact, I find trying to figure out the reasons behind a contractor backfilling an existing position’s workload an interesting exercise, mainly because it can offer me some insights into how that organization functions.

My father-in-law worked for the federal government as a contractor for many years. He was an IT system engineer who specialized in making different computer systems talk to each other. He is retired now, but he explained to me how many jobs that there were often two, or sometimes more, people who were supposed to be doing some (or all) the work that he would assist in, but that most of the time they all just became project managers and “managed” his time. I sometimes see similar things happening in the integrity world. This always makes me start to wonder about productivity. And good management practices.

It can also raise the age-old argument that private companies will always be more efficient than the government. But keep reading because, in this case, it is not proven true. I see the same types of issues in the work I do for non-state entities.

If a contractor is being hired to any role, and the client company already has people on the payroll doing the job, unless it is for some new program development, catch-up, or to be used in a mentoring capacity, then it is likely you are covering for poor management of some kind that should be overseeing that position.

Let me explain. If you hire me to review and update RBI programs using the data from the corrosion monitoring system, then I will come do that. If you already have a person in that role, then maybe I am assisting them or helping play catch-up on a fairly menial and repetitive task, but one that requires a certain background knowledge to do properly. Maybe they are junior, and my expertise is being used to keep the work moving while they are still learning, and maybe I am even helping to mentor them into their role.

But what if they are senior? It does not take me long to figure out if that senior person is competent, overworked, or has been tasked with other duties that were given priority. It also does not take me long to figure out if that person is doing nothing at all and that I was just hired to do the work in the next month they did not do in the past year. Why leave that person in that role, then? Why not fire them or put them on an improvement plan and, on follow-up, figure out if they are capable of doing the job they were hired to do?

I think you all know the answer to “why not” because that requires effort, knowledge, and skill to execute as a manager. If we are going to talk productivity, I have seen many managers in a position that, to paraphrase my wife’s ancestors, “The hat is worth more than the head it is on.” Or put another way, the title he holds at that company is worth more than the effort he puts in. Obviously, I went looking to see if there was any decent data on that, and again, not really. In the articles and studies I have read, very seldom do they touch on the effect that managers not doing their jobs have on those working for them. I could not find an original study beyond some university-level papers that were more anecdotal than anything.

But how much poor productivity at lower levels can be directly attributed to poor performance at the management level? I have seen it cause a lot of productivity issues, based on my experiences, but I have no hard data to back that up. I really wish there were more studies on this, to say the least. Maybe it’s time to go back to school and take some social studies/psychology training, then I can come back as a management consultant. Maybe I would finally quit bad-mouthing them at that point. “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

Regardless, I seem to always come back to management issues, and in many of the companies I work for, that is the real issue. The tone that gets set by management, and the way they manage, will always have large effects on productivity, both positively and negatively. I have stated this before; we usually remember the good bosses because they seem so few and far between sometimes.

In the end, I am not sure if it is true that 10% of the top performers in a business are responsible for 50% of the work. But I am sure that bad management can mean most of your employees are not contributing to the levels they could be.

Maybe that young engineer was the most honest of us when he admitted he just did not feel like he was going to get any work done that afternoon.

References

1. Simonton, D. K., 1988, "Age and outstanding achievement: What do we know after a century of research?" Psychological Bulletin 104(2), pp. 251-267.