The All-Too-Common Derp Staffing Model

It applies in both white- and blue-collar, sadly.

Here’s what I mean by this, and I’ve now seen it happen in white-, blue-, and service-industry sectors. The bouncing ball is as follows:

1. People feel slammed and overwhelmed and overworked. Admittedly most of this is task work that’s meaningless and eventually will be done by a machine or algorithm, but people cling to it like a raft in an ocean because it’s their path to relevance and sustained income to keep the bill-collectors at bay.
2. People managers feel nervous about balls being dropped, because they don’t want to get yelled at by their bosses.
3. If they have the ability (I.e. “lean times”), the people managers then over-hire to avoid balls being dropped.
4. In white-collar, this leads to clogged pipes, meaningless meetings, and overlapping roles.
5. In service industry, this leads to servers/bartenders/bar backs not being able to get enough shifts to make their own ends meet.

You see this all the time in higher education. I worked at TCU in the summer of 2022. I sat in an area with 16 people, and you could clearly identify what maybe three of them did. All the roles overlapped and were hired at a point where someone felt slammed, and tuition had…