Senior executives claim they work a lot. How much? On average, they report working 62 hours per week. If we expand to studies including middle management, we come up with average work weeks up to a whopping 72 hours. Talk about work!
Well, yes. As we’ll see, that’s the idea. Are senior executives and other managers some new proletariat, as they want us to believe? Do they toil away at work all day like real life hero-leaders from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Would the world fall apart if they quit doing what they do – if the people working under them took over their roles?
Not exactly.
Executives Talk About Work
The studies showing senior executives (and other managers) working so many hours also go into detail on what they’re doing with all that time. The short answer: they have meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. In other words, they talk about work. A lot.
Some executives admit these meetings aren’t needed. Many admit they could cut the meetings in half without losing much of value. And so, the problem centers on a managerial meeting culture run amok. Beyond the meeting culture, they also spend tons of time meeting with rivals, setting strategic priorities, and doling out attention and political favors.
And so, as I said, they talk about work.
They Don’t Work, At Least Not Exactly
All these things amount more to talking about work than working. At least, it does according to most people. For most people, work is when you do things, not talk about doing things. And so, managers spends 50-60+ hours talking about work without – on most peoples’ view – actually working. Work is when you create things, build things, provide services, and so on.
Teachers teach people. Social workers or nurses help people. Carpenters build houses.
Managers…discuss business goals? Make key decisions? Attract brand loyalty? Grab coffee with the boys? For many people, that’s not work.
Senior executives – and often middle managers – don’t really do anything like what teachers, social workers, nurses, and carpenters do. And so, from the perspective of most people, they hardly work at all. Instead they spend 60+ hours per week schmoozing buddies, chewing the fat, and making decisions that should be made democratically by the people with the largest stake in those decisions (i.e., workers, not managers).
Silicon Valley – especially Elon Musk – loves this sleight of hand. Musk says he works 80+ hour weeks. But we all know he spends 75-79 of those hours bullshitting. Especially on Twitter. People like Musk are basically the Silicon Valley take on Donald Trump’s senior executive style.
Bullshit Jobs?
Here’s an issue all this raises for me: the tendency of senior executives to talk about work and call it ‘work’ goes nicely with the corporate trend of expanding management ideology to include rank-and-file corporate employees. This all happens as inequality in the business world spikes.
Managerial culture – one based on excessive meetings and other ways to talk about work rather than do work – expanded long ago to include middle management. Now it increasingly includes lower management and even rank-and-file workers. We’ve seen this in the last decade+ through the use of Lean production in the white-collar world. More recently, Agile – and its many methods of implementation – has taken the place of Lean and even more firmly entrenched managerial culture. It’s done this so well that some people in the business world even argue it’s the solution to these problems rather than a cause.
It’s worth recalling David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. Graeber included many senior executive and middle manager occupations among his examples. But even Graeber failed to anticipate how the ideology behind these occupations grows and envelopes entire organizations and industries. He didn’t lay out how, e.g., Scrum teams holding unproductive meetings, serve to expand the tendency to treat ‘talk about work’ as ‘work.’
These forces blur the line between ‘bullshit jobs’ and ‘productive work.’ And they do so in the service of convincing rank-and-file white-collar workers to identify with management rather than the growing contingent, part-time staff at their own firms.
It seems we have space to do research into how all this impacts workers.
Meetings and Democracy: Who Needs Managers to Talk About Work?
The trouble with managerial meeting culture is that it’s somehow both frivolous and anti-democratic. When we kick the tires, it doesn’t benefit companies in any obvious way. If anything, it wastes money. But it also places barriers between workers and control over their work. This is probably its ultimate function.
As Graeber pointed out in his book, to talk about work rather than work will always be draining and unfulfilling. It either saps your brain – by tricking you into believing it’s worthwhile – or it saps your soul – by filling you with the kind of ennui that comes with being put to ‘work’ doing nothing important.
Properly done, however, meetings are essential to a socialist democracy. It’s where we can go to share ideas, make decisions, and solve problems. And so, if anyone needs yet another reason to dislike senior leader and middle manager culture, it’s that it turns people off from something they very much need to learn how to do.
