Back in the late 1960s, a Welsh surgeon was returning home late, fell asleep at the wheel and fatally crashed into a tree. My aunt, a doctor, remarked that 30 years earlier a surgeon of such eminence would have had his own driver, and the accident would not have happened.

Probably true. And it reminds us of a time when people who did useful things were given people to work for them so they could do useful things more easily. These were drivers, secretaries, assistants and orderlies. They made useful people’s lives easier.

What is the great-grandson of the 1930s chauffeur doing? There is a worryingly high chance that he is working in hospital administration, perhaps in HR or compliance, and is adding to the surgeon’s workload with every click of his mouse.

Genuinely productive people now form a minority in any organisation

In every organisation, whether in the public or private sector, a great inversion has taken place where the people who do actual, useful work (from surgeons to call-centre staff) find themselves working at the behest of a vast army of box-tickers and pen-pushers who demand that they must conform to a host of metrics and proxy targets so their contribution can fit into a cell on a spreadsheet. Although this caste often uses capitalist language, its principal achievement is a kind of Sovietisation of the modern organisation.

As in the Soviet system, the people who report, quantify and measure things end up with all the power and none of the scrutiny. Rather than fostering motivated teams and trusting them to make decisions, every job is reduced to an algorithm, with the participants treated as wholly interchangeable components. Although beadily focused on the output of productive staff, the administrative caste effectively marks its own homework when it comes to its own activities.

And this is my explanation for the ‘productivity crisis’. It isn’t that there has been no improvement in productivity. It’s just that genuinely productive people now form a minority in any organisation. Not only do they feel powerless, they have spotted that any monetary gains from performance improvements will never translate into better pay or working conditions for them. Instead, they will be dressed up as ‘cost-savings’ and presented as such to investors by the finance director and the chief executive (who used to be the finance director before he got promoted) since the chief preoccupation of the modern organisation is the collation of numbers. Any money left over will be used to hire even more people in bogus administrative roles, largely as a reputational firebreak for the executive team, who are much more motivated by fear of scandal than by satisfying customers. According to Mattie Brignal in the Telegraph, HR salaries alone stand at £25 billion, up from £15 billion in 2017. Why? Executive paranoia seems the most plausible explanation.

Let’s be honest. The reluctance to return to the office is a form of industrial action by knowledge workers who have no collective bargaining power, but who discovered after the pandemic that it’s difficult to sack everyone simultaneously. I largely support this action. The modern organisation is now controlled by administrative overlords whose main aim is to work the few remaining productive staff as hard as possible while paying them as little as they can, even though these people perform the jobs for which the organisation exists. Not having to buy a bloody Travelcard is the best hope you have of a pay rise.

‘Ah, but you must come back into the office. We need the value of serendipitous encounters.’ This plea would carry more weight if it weren’t for the fact that the same people calling for ‘serendipity’ hadn’t spent the previous two decades trying to eliminate the agreeable working conditions which made it possible.