If you’ve ever seen 1999’s Office Space, you know that the main character is disillusioned by a job filled with seemingly worthless tasks. Paraphrasing, he once says that in a given week, he only does about 15 minutes of real, actual work. Of course, it’s exaggeration for the sake of a comedic film, but have you ever felt similarly? Have you ever been assigned a task and thought “is this even worth the time it will take to do this?” or “is this just busywork?” or “why can’t I be given something more productive?” If you have, you may have been assigned Fake Work.
On the surface, Fake Work seems harmless. People feel secure in their jobs because their schedules are filled with Fake Work tasks and unnecessarily long meetings and managers look good because there is never a time when their employees aren’t busy (or, rather, don’t look busy). Smaller companies are better at flushing out Fake Work because fewer employees mean higher visibility internally. So Fake Work is more likely found in larger companies where employees or even whole departments can fly under the radar, performing jobs that don’t need to be done. In case you hadn’t picked up on it by now, Fake Work is bad. Companies that suffer from it obviously suffer from inefficiency in general and a lack of understanding about how their own business operates internally. If they can find the fat, they can trim it off, saving time and resources for the real work that moves the business ahead and increases its margins.
So how do you combat Fake Work? An internal process review or audit would work. It would generate questions and force work flows to be drawn out, revealing where the inefficiencies lie. It will likely take some time to change some processes and maybe even longer to change the company or department culture, but once those are tightened up, it could only lead to good things.
