Will AI reduce the bureaucratic burde

Over the last several decades society - and work - have become more complex, more complicated - with vast increases in rules, regulations and associated bureaucracy.

This has created entire layers of employment focused on managing this complexity. In both the public and private sectors, millions are primarily engaged in navigating rules sand ensuring compliance.  These workers are not focused on creating output or value.

There has also been a major shift in the nature of our politicians which now are more likely to be lawyers - and their key role, as part of government, is seen as creating more laws.  As they do so, companies have to pay for more expertise and/or employ more people to enact the rules and ensure compliance.

We find ourselves caught in a vicious cycle: Governments enact laws and regulations and then hire people to enforce and control them. Consequently, businesses are compelled to expand their staff to meet these excessive compliance requirements.   Companies become less competitive - perhaps not in the domestic marker where rivals face the same burden - but in international markets where competition may come from less-regulated economies and companies

So, look around at the people you know. How many of them are employed making rules and regulations, enforcing them, ensuring compliance with them or implementing them.  

Even those in productive jobs suffer by paying additional taxes to pay for these non-productive sectors of society.

Will AI help remove this burden on productivity?  It could … but I am not that hopeful.  A government of lawyers and rule makers will want to build a regulatory framework around the use of AI which might add to, rather than reduce, this burden.

What Are Your Employees Doing?

 This question is easy to answer if you manage a factory or other work involving physical effort. You see items coming off the production line, being modified in some way. beingg painted or whatever.  But in an office environment where there is no significant physical output, observation of performance is harder.

You can look out from your office over your domain and see people beavering away at their desks and computers- but what are they actually doing.  You see people holding meetings - but what are they actually achieving.

In recent years, since COVID and the great WFH revolution, many staff have become adept at performative behaviours - looking as if they are working hard, but actually making little positive contribution.

You may have some simple measures in place which attempt to show levels of performance but often these are too simple to be effective.  The most simple - and the most ineffective - is time. Time spent at work - or on specific tasks - is not a good measure of effort or contribution.  I can be at work playing solitaire, or some other more engaging game - but that hardly makes me a star employee.  And of course you may have two members of staff working on broadly the same types of work but one is doing so with talent, skills and commitment whilst the other coasts along making errors.  The time they spend on the same tasks can have very different 'value created' figures.

This common problem - of measuring what is both obvious and easy to measure - leads to a loss of control and poor decision-making. 

Establishing metics is not always simple - but it is always important - to help establish and maintain control.  However it needs a focus on output or achievement rather than on input factors. 

So think carefully about the out come factors of administrative and clerical functions and relate measurement and appraisal to these outcomes - directly if possible, but if not then by using linked or proxy measures.  So, think and then create a basket of measures which balances all the key output factors.  If this is difficult, hire someone with measurement expertise and experience to help.  It is is so important, you can't afford to get it wrong.

AI enhances productivity - or Does It?

 There seems to be two major views about the impact of the increasing use of AI on the productivity of organisations.

One school of thought suggests that AI can streamline processes and systems, enhance knowledge and skills and generally have a positive impact on productivity.

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The other ays that AI will simply reduce costs by reducing headcount.

Of course this is not a dichotomy or a conundrum.  Both can be right at the same time.

Signifiant technological change can often change the nature of an organisation - even an entire sector - in terms of size and shape.  The problem is that the actual changes are not always predictable and foreseeable.  There are almost always unintended consequences of major change. There are changes to culture, to employee engagement, to employees well-being that happen alongside the intended, major change.

If we can't predict these consequential changes, we can't plan for them. But we can observe them as they happen and address them in whatever way is appropriate - without hindering progress on the major change.  We can ensure that the organisation is flexible and adaptive.  We can have processes and procedures in place to communicate details of changes to the workforce  and additional processes and procedures to swiftly address potential conflicts. We can ensure our recruitment and onboarding processes help us create diverse, inclusive, flexible, high performing teams. We can let employees know why the use of AI should improve their work - and their lives.

If we are really clever, we can use AI to monitor what is happening and help us identify any problem areas, any specific successes and any areas of issue.  It does this by analysing data from all points of measurement and providing summaries and insights to improve decision-making and future planning.

Now using AI to help solve the problems of AI introduction - we are starting to get smart!!

What Are We Missing?

We all know that productivity growth has slowed over the last decade. There have been numerous shocks to the global economy and trading system - the biggest being the financial crisis and the COVID epidemic - and catalysts such as advancing technology have lost their impetus as dramatic change (in the technology) has slowed.  Of course some predict AI will spur a new growth phase but simply waiting for this to happen is too passive an action for these troubled times.

So, what are we missing In our search for solutions?

Well, we do seem to have forgotten the human factor.  The global challenges mentioned above have significantly changed the attitude of many employees to their work.  Work is now simply seen as a transactional process of earning enough to live on and provide the next holiday.  The number of those seeking to  pursue longer-term, meaningful careers  has declined.  We need to re-motivate and re-excite those dulled by COViD, by working from home, by the continuing fear of redundancy.

Secondly, the reliance on technology to provide productivity growth means we have forgotten to concentrate on the basics- on the regular, ongoing, consistent search for improvements to products and processes. 

If we can get our employees involved in the search, we 'kill two birds with one stone'.  We get increased engagement of the workforce and we get more incremental improvement.

This takes real involvement of the senior team - and it needs people versed in productivity principles and improvement tools and techniques to work with the workforce to help them bring about improvement.  (Productivity initiatives are always more successful and more sustainable when they are something done WITH the workforce, rather than TO the workforce.)

It is not 'rocket science' but nor is it easy.

So, I suggest you commit now - and start immediately. 

Stop Typing

It always seemed odd to me when many managers lost their secretaries and took over their own typing - simply because word processing had been invented.  Most also organised their own diaries, scheduled their own meetings and did much of their own financial planning and budgeting using the new wonder - the spreadsheet.

Now things look as if they are about to change.

This does not mean new opportunities for secretaries and personal assistants.   It means that the latest wonder software - in the form of AI systems and services - will revolutionise these basic tasks.  In particular, the latest AI:

• Uses speech as its primary input - and for most people speech is much faster and less error-prone
• Is 'agentic' - it uses software agents to carry out tasks by interacting with your apps and your data

This will make the creation of appointments, tasks, reminders and documents far easier.  They will operate in the background, doing what they need to do when certain triggers are activated or when they are told to do so.

The productivity of administrators and managers should rise - but only, of course, if they are doing the right things - and can make the AI do the right things.

Those of you who have worked with AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and so on, will know that the important thing is the 'art' of creating the right prompt - making sure you ask the right question or issue the right instruction.

A lot of people are going to need instruction in 'expressing intent' - efficiently setting the forward activities of their new, AI assistants.

In time these 'assistants' will become more sophisticated - not simply listening to your commands and acting on them - but observing your environment, listening to what others say to you - and what you say to others.  This is known as 'ambient AI' - staying in the background observing and listening and using what its sees and hears instead of formal prompts to decide on its actions - or its suggestions and recommendations.

Eventually - and in the no-so -distant future - we should have tools that respond to how we work, rather than expecting us to meet their requirements.

Its a Mess

 Politicians in the UK have been groin g on asb out 'growth' for some time now.  All major political parties  have 'growth on their agenda and claim that they are the pretty that can deliver this growth.

Now you and I know that growth - in this context - is really a shorthand for productivity' since any growth must be via productivity gains if it is to be sustainable - especially if, as in the UK the population (and especially the working age population) is declining. Worse still, an increasing portion of the working age population is on benefits wityha rapid growth in those claiming benefit - and not working - due to mental health problems

I believe that this is due to societal change which increasingly medicalises natural parts of the human condition such and anxiety and  worry, People who are worrying about just about anything now 'cannot cope' and must be taken out of to work situations.  

The blame is often laid at the door of the COVID pandemic as if this changed the mental condition off millions of people.  

My own theory ids that we should 'blame' the practice of 'working from home' (WFH).  Many people got used to WFH during the pandemic,.  This. changed working routines completely and gave people lots of little chances for mini-breaks and  distractions  - meaning that those people got used to diverting their attention sway from the actual work often and occasionally for long periods while they did some other non-work related task.  When they returned to work - or sometimes only thought about returning to work - they realised they were returning to a disciplined, supervised situation where they would not have the ability for these distractions and diversions.

The UK government has announced a plan to get young people back to work by creating training opportunities and apprenticeships.  I approve.  This means that those young people that DO want to work may get an opportunity to do so,  Any action that provides opportunities for otherwise excluded individuals is a positive move. However the government has to address the growing welfare bill alongside this.  The productivity problem is a large one and needs tacking from all angles.

Inspiring Others

Leadership is a difficult concept to 'bottle'.  I have studied leadership theory and even contributed a little to it.  Yet I would have trouble boiling the concept down to a couple of sentences - to go in a dictionary, for example.  

This is partly because there are different kinds of leadership - for different types of organisation, for different situations and for different tasks.  This is why transferring leaders from one sector to another does not always work.

However some of the 'softer' elements of leadership are more transferrable.  Take the notion of inspiring others to better contributions and higher performance.  This is something that most leaders, and many of their followers, think is important.

We need people to share the mission and vision, to understand the priorities, to want to maximise  their contribution. We want them to ask themselves everything morning, "What can I do today to help 'move the needle'?; "How can I best help my team?"  They will only do this if they do share the overall mission and they trust the leaders of the organisation to make decisions on the basis of shared values.  If these factors are in play, they will accept that the organisation sometimes has to take difficult decisions

It is the job of the leadership not only to communicate and espouse these values and the mission and vision but to live them - to act in accordance with them in everything they do and to keep employees informed of what is happening - and why.  This creates unifying factors that 'glue' disparate parts of the organisation together with mutual trust and respect

There is a possibly apocryphal, story of JFK being shown round the NASA Cape Canaveral space facility. He came across a janitor sweeping the floor and asked him, "What do you do here?"  The janitor replied, "I help get our astronauts to the moon".

Now that's the attitude you beed to try and create?