I am piggybacking on my previous post, “Why Does Everything Require So Much Follow-Up?” Researching this topic gave me language for experiences I have witnessed in my own life and in the lives of friends and family.
I already knew it was a thing, but I did not realize these experiences had been studied and recognized as legitimate organizational problems.
Administrative Burden
One term that was new to me was administrative burden. Researchers use this term to describe the learning, compliance, and psychological costs people experience while trying to access services or complete official processes.1
Have you ever called a company with a simple question about a bill, insurance account, or another service, only to be sent on a merry-go-round of automated responses?
Press 1 for your account balance.
Press 2 for billing questions.
Press 3 for technical support.
Press 4 to return to the main menu.
You select an option and are given another series of commands. You continue pressing numbers and navigating menus until, after exhausting nearly every option, you are finally connected to an actual person, assuming the system has not disconnected the call first.
I once encountered an automated system that was so difficult to navigate that I searched online and found a Reddit thread explaining exactly what to say to bypass it and reach a human being.
Things should not be that complicated.
A customer should not have to research secret commands simply to speak with someone about a service they are already paying for.
Shadow Work
Another term I had never heard before was shadow work. Social critic Ivan Illich used the term to describe unpaid activities that support the formal economy. Today, it is also used to describe labor shifted from organizations to customers through self-service systems, automated technology, and digital platforms.2
Have you ever felt as though you were doing someone else’s job?
Customers are increasingly expected to troubleshoot their own accounts, upload and organize documents, scan their own purchases, track requests, navigate complicated portals, and correct administrative errors.
Work that was once handled by a trained employee now requires the customer to become an unpaid administrative assistant.
Technology was supposed to make life easier, and in many ways it has. However, convenience for an organization can create additional work for the customer.
A company may save time and money by replacing employees with automated systems, but the administrative labor does not disappear. It is simply transferred to the person attempting to use the service.
Footnotes
Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey, “Administrative Burden: Learning, Psychological, and Compliance Costs in Citizen-State Interactions,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. ↩
Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, which examines unpaid labor that supports and complements the formal economy. ↩
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