Peter Drucker once quipped that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” Recent research from the Boston Consulting Group confirms that employees can do better work when they’re liberated from much of the bureaucratic cruft that passes for daily management.
According to BCG’s analysis, productivity at companies that have shifted to remote work has increased between 15% and 40%. As they put it, “the lockdown has unlocked real work” by reducing or eliminating the complicatedness of the traditional work environment. Long commutes? Four-hour meetings? Low-value travel? Elaborately defined, documented, and monitored processes and procedures? Gone, gone, gone, and gone. Thrust into crisis mode, employees (and managers), responded as you’d expect: getting rid of the administrative garbage that pollute their days and sharpening their focus on taking care of their customers and critical business functions.
With too little structure, you have chaos—no one knows what needs to be done, who’s responsible for doing it, or even what the goals are. At a $500M footwear company I once worked with, the founder and CEO—long removed from his role product development—decided that he didn’t like a particular style his product team had designed, developed, and purchased. He diverted a container that was en route to the US with $400,000 worth of shoes to Africa, where he unloaded everything at a loss. The sales, marketing, product, and customer service teams were stuck at the 11th hour (well, the 12th hour, actually) adjusting for the CEO’s violation of structure.
Too much structure creates inefficiency, and eventually bureaucratic paralysis—typically manifested as excessive (and often low-value) meetings, the necessity of obtaining approvals from multiple tiers of management, an overload of initiatives and KPIs, and a nearly suffocating volume of email. By now it’s practically a business fable, but when Alan Mulally took the reins at Ford in 2006, senior management actually had “meetings week”—five days each month in which executives held non-stop meetings. The preparation for that week, combined with the burden of having the leadership team unavailable for such a long period of time, hamstrung Ford’s ability to react to operational issues in a timely manner.
Obviously, working from home presents a different set of challenges. Coordination among groups can be more difficult, spontaneous interactions disappear almost completely, and interpersonal connection vertically within the organization can fray. But as I’ve written about before, just as the Covid pandemic provides an opportunity to assess and redesign work processes, it also provides an opportunity to lighten the administrative and managerial burden on our workers.