Being Utilized
How brazen corporate metrics make excess labor a new norm
When the clock flashes 5:00 PM in vacuous high rise offices around the country, a palpable relief fills the air. Weary office-goers channel an inner peace and exhale liberated winds into the climate controlled temples of corporate America. The day concludes with a sense of finality as if company men and women are unwitting subjects in a Groundhog Day simulation; unaware that they’ll be repeating their past eight hours again tomorrow. Yet for many people, additional job tasking doesn’t even wait for the sun to set. It is a display of under-performance to have only accomplished those professional functions that are required in an eight hour day. Now that they did the work that counts, they must begin all the other work that really counts.
In 2018 the average worker worked 7.8 hours more per week than they did a few decades earlier. With all the advancements in technology and management, shouldn’t we have to work less rather than more? Capitalism’s ever increasing efficiency is consistently flaunted, with fingers pointed at the output of competitive organizations and trillions of dollars in economic expansion over recent decades. But these strides for revenue and power, of course, come wholly at the expense of the laborer. There are socioeconomic systems of adherence that we must drill into to expose the heated core of exploitation. Within the changing requirements of labor, how have companies standardized the loading of extra work onto their staff without protest? As with most compulsions in the corporate world: gradually, and with euphemisms.
The corporate hegemon keeps a large toolbox of incentives that coerce people to work more. This is true across industries, but these tools seem to become more ubiquitous as companies grow larger. One area of business to illuminate this principle is in the consulting industry. The first management consulting firm was founded in the late 19th century, and the industry has blossomed since then into a cash cow. In the past couple of years, the consulting industry has been estimated to pull around $262 billion globally. Apparently, everyone needs to be fucking consulted. The insatiable demand for “business insights”, “change management”, and “risk mitigation” breeds masses of consulting professionals to cultivate the fertile corporate landscape. All of which need to be carefully monitored and managed.
Carrot and Stick
A consequence born out of this monolith of cubical jobs is a brutally competitive culture. A survey found that consultants average 56.6 hours per week at work, which compared with the traditional “40 hour week” may seem hard to believe as a standard. Yet the 56 hour week becomes a more palatable statistic when one examines the potency of employers’ underlying labor incentives. In the client services world, quantifications and metrics are tirelessly used by companies to keep track of the much coveted Productivity and Profitability. In the employer-employee relationship, measurement is a means of control that devours a worker’s time, effort, and output. We can examine a particularly popular metric that exemplifies this principle; that of “utilization”. Utilization is a well known corporate metric, and is ultimately a way firms squeeze more working hours out of their fully loaded employees without providing additional compensation. At a high level, this is possible through the way utilization exploits the salarized payment model and abstracts the conversion of work hours per dollar.
In the employer-employee relationship, measurement is a means of control that devours a worker’s time, effort, and output.
Anatomically, utilization is a simple principle. In order to keep track of time billed to a client (the consultant charging a fee for consulting services) verses non-client time (the consultant’s internal training, business development, etc.), you take the total hours billed to a client and divide that by the total expected number of work hours in a week, giving you a percentage that is referred to as your “utilization rate”. Even the name digs to the preeminence of the concept in the eyes of businesses. Utilization is commonly couched as “how a firm makes money”. In a less obtuse way, it represents a distillation of the efficiency at which labor is extracted from the worker. So of course, to keep employees continually hungry to raise these numbers, most firms set utilization targets that affect yearly bonuses and promotions.
If you have worked in a company that employs a utilization metric, you know that it is more than another benign corporatism you check the box on. Utilization is a glaze that entirely consumes your temporal measurements of professional conscious experience. It is a fetishized figure that everyone incorporates into their professional identity: Are you hitting your target? One might not expect this reification of something intangible and individualized like productivity to be so powerful. Talk with any employee obliged to worship this numerology and you will hear its influence for yourself.
It’s obvious that this is helpful for the company to have, theoretically: a quick and dirty valuation of productivity. Productivity can thus be derived from a single calculated percentage that can scale from individual to national levels. But “productivity” is a complex causal framework, and scaling up the way it’s measured can create some ineptitudes. The effect of these measurements on the worker is a stew of dehumanized quantifications of one’s work, shameless presumptions of overtime, and a truly deleterious crippling of work-life separation.
Getting Quantified
Measurement qua productivity was catalyzed into widespread adoption by the industrial revolution. This principle began to emerge across a multitude of industries: railroads, banking, medicine, and more. Institutional organizations for measurement and traceability were established internal to businesses and even federally, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. The new emphasis on this type of quantification grew for a couple of reasons. First, industries were developing a need to keep track of their vital functions. Organizations began to quantify the new influx of their labor and assets in order to make informed strategic decisions. Second, the idea of increased logging, tracking, auditing, and surveying was proliferating as a key component of growth. More companies and organizations were gaining the resources needed to not only execute their functions, but to review how they were carried out and glean insights from the review. If you can capture details on the processes of your company, you are ripe for investment and expansion. Inversely, if you can’t present those details when every other competing company can, then yours is poorly managed. The need for observation and visibility into large pools of human capital was a significant driver in the dehumanization of individuals in the corporate workforce.
In the mid-20th century, technological capabilities used to track metrics were becoming streamlined and accessible to many organizations. In chasing efficiency, companies and governments created large tracking apparatuses. For every completed task by the worker, the task was logged independently of the task’s output, crystalizing it in a stockpile of quantitative operational data. These data points could then be revisited internally by a firm to try and look at trends, or used by external auditors for fulfilling regulatory responsibility. The professional Abaddon had been willed to life under a banner of accountability. An inexorable meander into strange and cold constructions of professional requirements had begun.
Yet a more tempting question to ask is where the extremes of industrial compulsory labor begin and whether we’ve already crossed them ourselves.
Recently the American public’s discovery of China’s “996” working schedule (which consists of six, twelve hour days) caused a huge media uproar. The opinionated third estate shouted and tweeted at the inhumanity of such a policy. How could those hyper-industrialist, human-rights-waving communists shit on the sanctity of work/life balance? After all, the balance between work and life is a Maginot line against capitalist objectives creeping into the home. How could a state so callously steamroll over this barrier?
Yet a more tempting question to ask is where the extremes of industrial compulsory labor begin and whether we’ve already crossed them ourselves. As we work more and more, the perception of time is changing. Can you feel it? The office clock is beginning to atrophy and melt away. It’s like a fever dream where standards of labor become ephemeral and impossible to assume. It feeds a collective neurosis, perpetuating into new orders of the professional class.
How It’s Always Been
The presumption of utilization metrics is already smuggled into the standards of new hires to companies. An expectation creep is baked into company culture, molding a new norm for growing waves in the hiring pool. New hire trainings evangelize working extra without laying out tangible benefits of doing so. Internal memos remind employees to “Ensure you’re hitting your metrics!” with the often explicit repercussions of lower ratings and disciplinary action spelled out. It is required that one takes on additional tasks that fall outside the nine-to-five if they are to remain in good standing with their employer. Traditionally, the extra work hours of the person next to you amounts to their own personal decision. It is one’s prerogative to spend more time working if they enjoy doing so. It becomes a bit more complicated with metrics like utilization. It’s not only measured from individual contributions, it’s innately comparative between employees. Companies invoke comparative rankings, scatter plots, and percentile distributions in their divvying of income to employees. At best, a low performer may get a poor raise. At worst, they are entirely replaceable.
The explicit expectation of competition for more hours creates a timesheet arms race. The game theoretic of working more to be better than your coworker is traceable and always available for viewing on graphs and dashboards that compare you to peers. This paradigm fosters a perverse incentive for employees to overcharge more hours than they actually work in order to keep up with their coworkers. Heightened fraud, waste, and abuse is thus another consequence of this status quo. It’s an acceleratory compulsion of labor that operates through public visualizations rather than being hidden away in a corner office or board room. This transparency can seem beneficial or even empowering to the employee, but usually does the opposite.
Indoctrination into working long hours is a longstanding principle as companies develop, but utilization pairs it with a measurable metric. Performing the calculation for salarized employees can be jarring. Running the numbers makes quickly apparent that the extra hours worked per week, when converted to an hourly rate, is often less than minimum wage. In corporate America where inhabitants generally earn good salaries, there’s still a discrepancy between the work agreed to (presumed to approximate a 40 hour week) and the work obliged in these cases.
The corporate consulting industry represents the quintessential professional safehaven; the longstanding target of middle and lower class conatus. The white collar space has been held as a promised land with an expectation of cushy and adequately subsidized work. The fervor of capital growth, of which’s profits are funneled into checking accounts of the wealthy, makes that less often the case. Companies that employ compulsory metrics set the standard at much more than the 40 hours we’ve come to understand. This is certainly not the case in all corporations, but it’s undoubtedly a dangerous precedent as this model continues to be effective and profitable. The plight of the struggling class, still miles more difficult than most corporate positions, thus has their mobility out of laborious lives strangled by this corporate exploitation. There’s nowhere to escape the envelopment of work over life no matter what tax bracket you start or end in. The American Dream is one you have when on 4 hours of sleep, pounding RedBull at your job whether it’s roadside construction or management consulting.
Utilization and metrics at large funnel the full breadth of human sentience into bar graphs, percentages, and tallies of accrued “Paid-Time-Off” hours. The more discrete and quantifiable the outputs of work are, the more they are subject to scrutiny and control. If firms have it their way, the future of human capital is monitored to the maximum degree allowable. It is a march towards new standards of obligatory labor as the work-life balance is fully destabilized. As some organizations toy with compressing or lowering the number of hours expected in a work week, others are doubling down on the opposite strategy. It’s unclear which will prove more effective, and the working class will bare the brunt of this experimentation when they cross into their twelfth hour at a desk.
But hey, at least you can expense dinner.