Why boss and subordinate, both love to follow ‘Parkinson’s Law’ – HR message

The Human Resource function in every corporate must verify the prevalence of Parkinson's Law in their respective organization. Once the existence of Parkinson’s Law is in the organization is confirmed, they must immediately re-orient the culture of the organization and must introduce better ‘tasking and appraisal’ process to cut enormous wasteful expenses.

The Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". In other words, it states that “if you wait until the last minute to do a job, it only takes a minute to do”. The above law can be easily understood from another example. In MS word, we can justify both left and right margin by selecting the ‘justify margin’ button. The interesting point is that the number of words in each line however will not be the same. When it justifies, it only keeps both right and left margins look even and not the number of words in each line.

The organizations that have more people and less work are the one always look, busy.

The ‘small job/task, the people often stretch to the entire quarter or more to ensure that they are busy doing the job. Contrary to it, if they complete the job in one month or less, remaining period they will have to remain idle. Corporate leaders never think righteously about such people if they complete the task quickly. Instead the bosses would think that the task assigned to them was so simple and that is why the employee could complete it quickly. To avoid this possibility, employees often stretch the job so that the bosses would naturally think that the subordinate is busy because the task is quite hard and require lot of effort

Like the MS word how it justify the left and right margins of the paragraph without interfering in the same number of words per line, the bosses do believe that if more time is taken, the task is heavy. Always bosses feel happy to assign heavy tasks to people. Only to satisfy such bosses the people smartly show that every day and every hour of the day, they are busy doing the assigned job.

Most corporate bosses feel proud and happy at seeing such scene as they feel that they have assigned effective tasks to their subordinates and that keeps the subordinates on their toes. Interestingly both the subordinates and the bosses are not fooling each other, but they are fooling the corporate. Such culture is rampant in corporate that are run directly by the entrepreneur by being in the helm of affairs.

No one really verify or validate how much time is required to complete the given task, how much infrastructure the corporate has for the said task, whether the said task falls into the domain of ‘routine’ or highly innovative, prior art is there or not etc.

People bother only whether the task assigned for the given quarter has been completed in the given quarter or not. If it is so, they are naturally the super performers. Really how much time is required to complete the said task no one cares, because both the bosses and the subordinates consciously follow the Parkinson’s Law.

The people in R&D’s in most corporate are those known to spread even the most insignificant and impact less work to the entire time (entire quarter) so that they can easily fool the people around.

If the HR function diligently interferes, the time, effort and resources of the corporate can be saved effectively.

Dr S Ranganathan