Where did all the secretaries and support staff go? They fell victim to automation, you might say. What was left of their jobs was outsourced, you could add. You would be right, of course — but only half right. Because something else happened to their work too. It was redistributed to all of you.
More and more organisations have shifted to a “self-service” software model in which individual employees must sort things like travel, HR, expenses and procurement themselves. The companies that sell these systems say they save money and “empower” workers.
Critics complain they pile more tasks on to people whose time would be better spent on the work they were hired to do. The author Craig Lambert calls it an example of “shadow work” in the workplace, which “just gets grafted on to people’s duties without their consent or sometimes even their awareness”.