Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Of MITs and shortcuts: Why asking employees to do senseless work leads to cutting corners

Imagine a particular floor of a corporate head office. On this floor are former heads of department and top executives who have just a few years to retire from active duty. For some on this floor, the times have caught up with them. Many are unable to keep up with the times, especially in terms of the technology that is being deployed.

But all of these individuals are yet to hit the big 60, and so they have no choice but to report to work every day. And when they come to work, they must work. So they are given the “Most Important Tasks” or (MITs). By the way, let us call this floor The House of Lords!

MITs is a term I coined to describe a task that has been assigned — usually by someone in authority — that the assigned person finds pointless, unreasonable, or simply frustrating. Anyone who has worked in an organisation of any kind will recognise the sentiment immediately.

It is the feeling that comes with being asked to fill out a form that nobody will ever read, attend a meeting that could have been an email, or prepare a report that disappears into a senior manager’s drawer never to be seen again. For those in the House of Lords in our opening paragraph, their MITs are mainly representing their Chief Executive at functions he did not want to attend.

Most of us have experienced this kind of thing and quietly complained about it to a colleague before begrudgingly getting on with the task. It is the kind of thing we tend to dismiss as one of those unavoidable irritants of organisational life. Yet, the research says we should not be so quick to dismiss it, because the consequences of giving employees what academics call “illegitimate tasks” are far more serious than most managers realise.

A study published in the November 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Theory and Practice, titled “Cutting Corners at Work? Understanding Why and When Illegitimate Tasks Fuel Service Employees’ Expediency,” examined this precise phenomenon. The researchers wanted to understand why service employees sometimes take shortcuts—cutting corners at work, engaging in what they call “expedient behaviour”.

These are the small acts of unethical improvisation that employees resort to to get things done faster, easier, or with less effort than the proper method would require. A bank teller who skips a verification step. A hospital orderly who fills out part of a form and guesses the rest. A customer service agent who marks a complaint as resolved without actually resolving it. These are the kinds of behaviours that are individually minor but collectively devastating to service quality.

The conventional explanations for this kind of behaviour tend to focus on character — the assumption being that employees who cut corners are lazy, unethical, or simply do not care about their jobs. The researchers in this study challenged that assumption by asking a different question: what if the environment in which the employee works is actually driving these behaviours? What if the organisation itself is the problem?

The answer they found is instructive. Using a combination of a scenario-based experiment involving 232 full-time employees and a field study of 223 frontline service employees, the researchers found that illegitimate tasks—tasks that are perceived as unnecessary, unreasonable, or outside the scope of what the employee was hired to do—generate a very specific emotional response: workplace anxiety. And it is this anxiety that then becomes the emotional fuel for expedient, corner-cutting behaviour.

Think about what this means in practical terms. When a manager assigns a task that has no clear purpose or that falls outside the reasonable expectations of a job role, the employee does not simply shrug it off. The task creates anxiety. The employee begins to question their situation, feels a loss of control, and experiences a growing sense of helplessness. And when human beings feel helpless and anxious, they look for shortcuts—not out of malice, but as a coping mechanism. The shortcut is a way of reasserting some control over an environment that has begun to feel overwhelming and irrational.

This is a very different picture from the lazy, indifferent employee that most managers conjure up when they encounter corner-cutting behaviour. The reality, according to this research, is often an anxious, overburdened employee who has been given too many tasks that feel meaningless, and who is simply trying to survive the workday.

The researchers also found an interesting protective factor. Employees who are what is known as “polychronic” — those who are naturally comfortable handling multiple tasks at the same time and who generally enjoy variety in their work — were less susceptible to the anxiety-inducing effects of illegitimate tasks. In other words, certain personality traits can serve as a buffer against the negative effects of poor task assignment. But of course, a business cannot depend on its entire workforce being polychronic to protect itself from the consequences of poor management practices.

For businesses in Ghana, this research should carry some weight. We operate in an environment where bureaucracy is often formidable. Many organisations—particularly in the public sector but certainly not exclusively so—are known for their love of processes, procedures, and paperwork. Employees are frequently asked to do things that have no discernible impact on the quality of service delivered to the customer, but which must nonetheless be done because that is how things have always been done, or because some regulation demands it.

The front office of a bank. The reception area of a hospital. The counter at a government services agency. In all these environments, the employee dealing with customers has likely, at some point that very day, been asked to complete a task that felt pointless. And if the research holds, that experience has left a residue of anxiety that is shaping every subsequent interaction — including the interaction with the customer standing right in front of them.

This is why task design matters. When managers assign work, they should ask a fundamental question: Does this task make sense? Can I explain clearly why this needs to be done and what value it adds? If a manager cannot answer that question, the task is a candidate for elimination or redesign. The cost of keeping it—in terms of employee anxiety and subsequent corner-cutting—is almost certainly higher than the cost of getting rid of it.

There is also an important message here about the dignity of work. Part of what makes any job meaningful is the sense that what one does matters. When employees are consistently assigned tasks that feel arbitrary, humiliating, or pointless, it sends a message that the organisation does not value their time or their intelligence. An employee who does not feel valued is, as the research shows, an employee on the path toward disengagement and shortcuts.

Organisations that are serious about service excellence in Ghana must take a hard look at their internal task structures. Not all work assigned to frontline employees is legitimate work. Some of it is administrative clutter. Some of it is unnecessary duplication. Some of it is the result of poor process design that has never been reviewed or challenged. Cleaning all of that up is not just an exercise in operational efficiency—it is an act of respect toward the employees who have to do the work.

The fastest way to produce an employee who cuts corners is to give them a job full of corners that should not exist in the first place. Fix the job, and there is a good chance you will also fix the behaviour. The shortcut trap, it turns out, is not really about the employee at all. It is about the organisation that built the maze and then wonders why people are taking shortcuts to get through it.

I have been wondering. Will the results of the above-referred study hold if conducted specifically in the House of Lords? Those on that floor have, pretty much, very little to do. Would they still cut corners? Anyway, I am just thinking aloud.

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