The Dark Side of Continuous Improvement: Sources of Never-Ending Tasks

Imagine a machinist who was responsible for operating a mill. As part of his job, he was expected to stop what he was doing anytime someone wanted to talk to him. On top of that, others would regularly place items on his workbench for him to address with little explanation. When the machinist would complain that he could not complete the items on the mill, his manager would tell him that it was part of his development to figure this out and that this is how he could grow in the company. How would the machinist feel about this? How would the machinist complete all of the machining work?

This example is similar to what we ask of our knowledge workers.

Companies have a culture of regularly adding non-critical tasks and obligating employees to complete these tasks. Then we tell employees that it is their job to figure out how to handle the situation or we dangle a vague carrot of growth in the company if they can handle this. They are never done, there is always more to do no matter how hard they work. How does this make them feel? What if this erodes their productivity? What if this leads employees to leave your company?

How do you think Sisyphus feels?

I honestly believe that we don’t know any better. When I started my first big-boy job I thought this was how companies progressed. Maybe everybody doesn’t know better. I also believe there is an expectation of “I had to deal with it so they have to also”.

Here are some sources of the constant creation of tasks:

• Encouraging employees to implement “Continuous Improvement” ideas. In my experiment companies try and implement most of these ideas with little consideration to the impact to the critical work.
• Some people are trying to make a name for themselves in the business. It could be a new grad or a senior-level manager or anybody in between.
• Projects and deadlines are given to employees by managers. This forces employees to disrupt other employees for help and makes them take action at the pace of the deadlines with little consideration for critical work.
• Task hot potato, you have a critical task to complete but you need input from others so you give them tasks to complete.
• Meetings and emails are constantly creating actions and open loops.
• Low-friction communication tools such as email and chat allows us to shoot off ideas at the stream of thought.
• The more connections an employee needs to complete their work (work process connections) the more ideas are created. Maybe we should limit the number of people an employee interacts with to do their job.

No matter the source, all of these actions are assumed to be important and I believe that most of them can be ignored with little detriment to the company.