...and also there are (were?) mountains of people employed to produce the procedure and policy manuals which will never be read, or acted upon, except under audit, inspection, or trying to figure out how best to "win" in a conflict between parties in or connected to the company...
For a few years, I was one of those people, employed "defensively" by a small food producing company increasingly subject to audit and inspection - especially by its corporate clients' "Quality Depts". I was terribly aware of how little value I produced for the company's bottom line compared to the people on the floor and in the transport departments. My role was simply to make sure an auditor or inspector would not find an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i" in any of the dusty tomes that I myself had mainly to produce, and with everyone - auditor and auditee - conspiring to pretend that the paper trail is an adequate proxy for what actually happens in practice during production.
It struck me that my presence, at first filling a brand new job title for a small company that had never before hired a whole "quality control officer", and later, having to train in three different people to replace me when I left, was surely part of the "bureaucracy" stage in Stages of Chaos, which is highly destabilising (ie the multiplication of non-productive employees at the expense of the productive ones), and must surely be followed by a fascinating "aftermath"...
Which, I suppose, we are all witnessing, and participating in, round about now...
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branchandroot
Re: On the subject of rules
Date: 2023-06-11 11:53 am (UTC)For a few years, I was one of those people, employed "defensively" by a small food producing company increasingly subject to audit and inspection - especially by its corporate clients' "Quality Depts". I was terribly aware of how little value I produced for the company's bottom line compared to the people on the floor and in the transport departments. My role was simply to make sure an auditor or inspector would not find an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i" in any of the dusty tomes that I myself had mainly to produce, and with everyone - auditor and auditee - conspiring to pretend that the paper trail is an adequate proxy for what actually happens in practice during production.
It struck me that my presence, at first filling a brand new job title for a small company that had never before hired a whole "quality control officer", and later, having to train in three different people to replace me when I left, was surely part of the "bureaucracy" stage in Stages of Chaos, which is highly destabilising (ie the multiplication of non-productive employees at the expense of the productive ones), and must surely be followed by a fascinating "aftermath"...
Which, I suppose, we are all witnessing, and participating in, round about now...