Being told that you work in the back office can be insulting and demeaning. It undermines the role and the contribution that many thousands of people make to the organisations in which they work and the customers that they ultimately serve.
It is a complete myth that you can somehow separate a business into two sections, the saints in the front office who do all of the real work and the sinners in the back office who are wasteful and shiftless. Show me a business that doesn’t need to pay bills, a hospital that doesn’t need cleaners or an airline that does not need a ground crew. It just can’t be done. Hard working people are needed to perform essential support duties to ensure that the more public facing roles are able to perform.
It is also a complete myth that somehow there is a division between various parts of a properly functioning organisation, that they can be compartmentalised and run in blissful isolation. For an organisation to be most effective, the work must flow either by being drawn to the customer or initiated by a customer request. Rather than separating functions into front office and back office, functions that need to be done for the customer should be down as close to them as possible and not segmented off and batch processed somewhere else.
I do not know how we have got ourselves into this mess but we have all painted ourselves into a corner with the mantra of remove waste, improve efficiencies and put the money into more nurses or police or public services front line staff. Organisations need to become more efficient. Waste needs to be removed, cost needs to be reduced and quality needs to rise. But support services are no more wasteful than any other section of society, they are not an efficiency waiting to be realised. To point the finger of blame behind the counter is offensive and it needs to stop.
If you are told something often enough you will start to believe it and being told that you work in the back office, out of site and not relevant to where the real work is done has to have a bad effect upon the morale of those employees. Back office is a horrible phrase, I shudder every time I hear it said and it is becoming more and more common. Support service is much more appropriate, if you need to make a distinction.
When I am asked if I work in the back office, I say no because there is only one office and that is the one that serves the customer.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 