Your Office Is a Service-Destruction Machine

For every effect, there has to be a cause. When a product fails, you can usually trace where it went wrong. But when a service fails, the organisation shrugs, writes off the $100 million investment, and vows to repeat the process — exactly the same way — convinced it will work next time.

The truth is: services are often bad because the way we make them is bad.

The factory of services: office work

These days, most of our economy isn’t about making things but providing services. And services are created in offices. Which means the real factory of modern life isn’t a production line, but email, meetings, and open-plan desks.

According to Atlassian, the average worker receives 304 emails a week and checks their inbox 34 times an hour. Each interruption takes 16 minutes to recover from. The cost: $1,250 per person per year wasted on spam, $1,800 on unnecessary emails, and $4,100 on poorly written ones.

Meetings? The average worker sits through 62 a month. Half are pointless. That’s 31 hours lost, per person, every month. Attendees admit to daydreaming (91%), missing meetings because of other meetings (96%), falling asleep (39%), doing other work (73%), or feeling overwhelmed (45%). Only 47% dared say the meeting was a waste of time. In the US alone, unproductive meetings burn through $37 billion in salaries annually.

Open offices don’t help either. On average, workers suffer 56 interruptions a day, leaving just three minutes to focus before the next distraction. Two hours are wasted daily on recovery — and 80% of interruptions are trivial.

No surprise then that less than 60% of work time is actually productive.

The cult of personality over character

All this is made worse by the modern cult of collaboration. The open office glorifies sociability and constant chatter, never mind that a third to half of us are introverts who find it unbearable.

In her famous TED talk, Susan Cain calls for an end to “the madness of constant group work.” She cites research showing that groups instinctively mimic each other — leading to bland, copycat ideas. Add the culture of personality, where fast-talking extroverts are rewarded over careful thinkers, and the result is mediocrity, not brilliance.

Why services suffer

In this environment, service design becomes a committee sport. The loudest voices win. Tests of the service rarely reflect real customer needs. And when the customer finally does get a say, their verdict is often brutally clear: they don’t want to use what was built. But internally, everything was “done by the book” — documented, correct, and wrong.

The missing ingredient: craftsmanship

At root, the problem is a lack of craftsmanship in office work. A carpenter learns through apprenticeship and trial until their chairs are worth paying for. Every cut matters. In the office, by contrast, a PowerPoint is thrown together — and 39% of the audience falls asleep.

Craftsmanship would mean taking pride in the artefacts of office life:

• Writing clearly, so readers don’t waste time deciphering your intent.

• Making presentations that are engaging and worth attention.

• Producing documents that show thought and care, not just protocol.

The irony: writing short takes time, but writing long takes none at all. So we dump everything in and let the reader pay the cost. Multiply that across an organisation, and the result is predictable: customers reject the service, while the company insists the process worked.

A call to improve the chain

Office work dilutes responsibility through endless collaboration, but most real work is done alone. Collaboration should mean teamwork — a defined group, with shared goals, mutual dependence, and honest self-review. That’s not the same as an open office full of people swapping irrelevant advice.

And that’s why what starts as a good idea so often ends up as a mediocre service: customers use it not because it delights them, but because there’s no alternative.

The fix is simple to say, hard to do: reintroduce craftsmanship into service creation. Care about the quality of office work. How you do things matters as much as what you do. Improve one link in the chain and you lift the whole. Improve every link, and services might finally be as good as they were supposed to be.