‘I used to say: no electric car.’ Mascha Geuze (50) sighs audibly above the cacophony of beeps in the snow-white Kia. She had prepared everything so carefully: this morning at seven o’clock she left Bemmel to be on time at her pick-up address in Oss, yesterday she already imaginatively drove the route via Google Maps. But now she’s standing still in a vinex neighborhood with a car that keeps yelling to shift into ‘P’. When she also turns out to be standing in front of the wrong door, she concludes: ‘These are the nerves after all.’
The fact that these go through her body is because this is her second ride as a driver in student and care transport. As a planner she is normally in Oss at the office of transport service Van Driel. But now that more and more holes are appearing in the rosters due to a shortage of drivers, she is trying to close them herself. She is not alone: the head of department, the taxi teacher, administrators and ‘ladies of P&O’ also take a seat behind the wheel before entering the open-plan office.
They decided to drive after a cry for help from their bosses Maarten and Maurits van Driel. With a shortage of one hundred drivers out of a workforce of one thousand people, father and son were already forced to take some rides before working hours. The same goes for Mrs. Van Driel, sister Van Driel and even her partner, who does it before going to his own work elsewhere. A pub without staff can close for a day if necessary, the family business can hardly say to vulnerable students: then no school for a while.
Bullshit track
Van Driel is not the only company trying to alleviate staff shortages by calling on office workers. KLM asks them to assist in the departure halls and baggage handling during peak times. PostNL does the same when delivering letters. In healthcare institutions, policy and communication advisers play a game of badminton with clients. And to deal with delivery problems, DPG, publisher of, among others, requested de Volkskrantjournalists to run a newspaper route in the morning.
‘Now that the staff shortage in more and more sectors is endangering the service provision, organizations are looking more closely at which tasks really need to be kept in the air’, says labor economist Robert Dur of Erasmus University. ‘That suitcase has to be on the belt, while the marketing can wait a day.’ In this way, the shortage reveals which tasks are indispensable for a company. These are often the executive functions; low paid and low valued. But is the reverse also true: do the office workers who are now assisting have a miss-able job?
Not immediately, Dur thinks. For now, the only way to determine if someone has a “bullshit job” is to ask them themselves. The professor did so and saw that 10 percent rate their own work as meaningless and sometimes even harmful to society. These percentages are higher in companies where the work is cut into pieces in such a way that there is no view of the end product – such as on an assembly line – but also in useful jobs in themselves where bad management results in a lot of ‘bullshitisation’, such as lengthy meetings. or paperwork. And: a disproportionate number of people in marketing and PR find their work useless, Dur discovered.
Mascha Geuze would be the last to name her work that way. ‘Every job is important,’ she says. ‘We all form a link in the whole.’ Because if Geuze didn’t make such well thought-out plans, drivers wouldn’t know where to be at what time. The fact that this planning has not prevented her from arriving too late at the door of brothers Nick (11) and Lucas (7), with a car that now calls for ‘check the system’, prompts her to come to a different conclusion. ‘Apparently I have no technical insight.’
Fortunately, her mood does not suffer. The students are welcomed with a cheerful ‘good morning’. “Sorry I was late,” she says, looking in the rearview mirror. “But I had some problems with the vehicle. Were you able to sleep a little with that heat?’ The brothers turn out to be taciturn types. Although the eldest wants to lose something when they are around the corner. ‘You were late. Our school bell has long gone.’
Workload
Father and son Van Driel also have no doubts about the usefulness of good planning. The office employees who assist do not do so instead of their own work, but before it. They find it heartwarming. This is not a long-term solution. Because the workload is only getting higher, while their own departments are also struggling with a shortage of personnel.
Robert Dur therefore does not expect office workers to have to fear being permanently banished to a place outside the open-plan office. He does think that the current shortage can leave a permanent mark on organizations. ‘They can look for new ways of working with less useless tasks. And employees who are now in jobs that they find useless can look for work in which they do see meaning.’ It is difficult to say whether the shortage has been resolved by then. “But it certainly leads to happier employees.”
In Oss, Geuze comes running back laughing from a deserted schoolyard at five past eight. ‘The teacher understood all too well that we were late,’ she says. ‘The school itself is also struggling with a staff shortage.’