From an outside perspective I agree with the spirit of this. But it’s not free work, it’s work that came at the expense of other work. To me it depends heavily on proportionality between official and shadow effort, the latter decreasing as the perceived importance of the former increases. But perhaps you do not always know enough to determine the importance of official work. Your manager may not realize they need to sell you on the work they delegate to you, as frankly this is somewhat an absurd notion. So it’s multifaceted.
In a work utopia, I think all effort would be undertaken by means of persuasion not assignment. You make a good point, that this might naturally help workers to more appropriately balance their shadow work with official work, since they would have more information.
In a work utopia, the very concept of shadow work would be eradicated, as you well know, because there would be no barrier to managerial reciprocity to experimentation and free association. Imperfect communication exists in both directions presently, mostly due to managerial immaturity.
Good call. In fact, now that I think about it, a workplace utopia would be free of management all together and consist solely of self-organizing workers. All work would be self-initiated.
Well now I do take issue with that conceptualization. The ideal work should be self-organizing however as finite creatures we require layers of abstraction in our dealings with information. Just think of the brain’s neural levels. There are lower and higher levels. Details are delegated to the lowest level that can manage them. It is not that management will not exist, but that management will come to be doing what it is actually supposed to do. Every person is a manager.
I’ve never seen shared shadow work get rewarded, and in environments where they reward individual local optima and # of stores completed in a sprint (instead of innovation and teamwork), you may want to keep your shadow projects to yourself and use them to beat out other workers metrics-wise.
Doing secret projects, that never get revealed, to increase your personal competitive advantage is an interesting idea. There are probably work cultures that are hostile enough to developer initiative, where this would be the better option. I am usually bothered enough about inefficiencies in general process, that I can't help but try to fix them, even though it requires revealing my work and getting buy-in. But, doing this may not always be in my best interest. Thanks for the comment!
From an outside perspective I agree with the spirit of this. But it’s not free work, it’s work that came at the expense of other work. To me it depends heavily on proportionality between official and shadow effort, the latter decreasing as the perceived importance of the former increases. But perhaps you do not always know enough to determine the importance of official work. Your manager may not realize they need to sell you on the work they delegate to you, as frankly this is somewhat an absurd notion. So it’s multifaceted.
In a work utopia, I think all effort would be undertaken by means of persuasion not assignment. You make a good point, that this might naturally help workers to more appropriately balance their shadow work with official work, since they would have more information.
In a work utopia, the very concept of shadow work would be eradicated, as you well know, because there would be no barrier to managerial reciprocity to experimentation and free association. Imperfect communication exists in both directions presently, mostly due to managerial immaturity.
Good call. In fact, now that I think about it, a workplace utopia would be free of management all together and consist solely of self-organizing workers. All work would be self-initiated.
Well now I do take issue with that conceptualization. The ideal work should be self-organizing however as finite creatures we require layers of abstraction in our dealings with information. Just think of the brain’s neural levels. There are lower and higher levels. Details are delegated to the lowest level that can manage them. It is not that management will not exist, but that management will come to be doing what it is actually supposed to do. Every person is a manager.
I’ve never seen shared shadow work get rewarded, and in environments where they reward individual local optima and # of stores completed in a sprint (instead of innovation and teamwork), you may want to keep your shadow projects to yourself and use them to beat out other workers metrics-wise.
Doing secret projects, that never get revealed, to increase your personal competitive advantage is an interesting idea. There are probably work cultures that are hostile enough to developer initiative, where this would be the better option. I am usually bothered enough about inefficiencies in general process, that I can't help but try to fix them, even though it requires revealing my work and getting buy-in. But, doing this may not always be in my best interest. Thanks for the comment!