Critics complain they pile more tasks on to people whose time would be better spent on the work they were hired to do. The author Craig Lambert calls it an example of “shadow work” in the workplace, which “just gets grafted on to people’s duties without their consent or sometimes even their awareness”.

The savings from cutting support staff are easy for organisations to calculate, while the costs of lost productivity across the rest of the workforce are hard to measure. But that doesn’t mean they should be ignored.