> Cal Newport: But this had a huge impact on the ability of those frontline workers to produce the work that actually was measured, the work that actually brings profit into the organization, because now they had to wrangle with word processors and they had to wrangle with email and they had to wrangle, later on, <i>with these intranet forums where they’re trying to enter in their travel reimbursement, and they’re trying to do their conflict of interest declaration in some sort of weird format that makes life really easy for the HR department, but takes up the whole afternoon.</i> And you ended up having to hire more of the frontline workers to get the same amount of work done. Their salaries were more expensive than the support staff. You actually ended up worse off. [emphasis added]<p>This is one of the big ones. My previous office took a 10-year break from having real support staff. They tallied the numbers (because time entry was detailed enough) and realized that with 1200 or so engineers and scientists each having to do their own training reports, HR paperwork, travel planning and financial reporting, they were costing themselves a huge amount of money. They ended up hiring small support teams for some of this work at a fraction of the previous cost (numbers not coming to mind so I'm not including them, but the support teams totaled to under 20 people, I just can't remember if it was closer to 10 or 20). The savings showed up within the first couple of months as the new staff quickly become experts (from doing it constantly) in the work and people handed off the non-core work to them.<p>Specialists in mundane "administrivia" (essential but not necessarily interesting) work don't cost a lot, but can save a company a ton of time and money in the end.<p>> I actually think, and this is a provocative claim, a lot of economists don’t agree with me here, but I think actually in the non-industrial sector, so in knowledge work, productivity has actually been going down. The only reason why it looks stagnant is that we have added a lot of off-the-book hours in the early morning and the evening.<p>My present team is definitely guilty of this. I, personally, refuse. At 1630, my work day is done. The most I'll respond to (because we support multiple sites) is a text asking if I can be at some specific location the next day. I will not write up a report (official on my work computer or unofficial as an answer to a question over text, if it's actually important I'll have already sent an email during the work day). The rest of the team is not as effective at quitting at the end of the day (as evidenced by the 50 messages I just saw on that muted text thread they have going). They aren't getting paid for this time spent thinking and communicating about work, they're all salaried (by my contract I'm paid by the hour, I'll accept the 1 minute or so every week for the "where can you be" question, but nothing more).