UK newspaper shows how management techniques supposed to cut costs are making public service workers’ lives a misery

Writing in The Guardian’s blog ‘Comment is free’, Gregor Gall explains how the introduction of private sector practices into government agencies, supposedly to gain efficiency savings, are provoking strikes and crushing employee morale (“In the name of efficiency”). But is it only the public sector that is suffering from today’s obsession with new management techniques aimed almost entirely at reducing costs — whatever that takes?

It seems that the UK equivalent of the IRS, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, has introduced ‘hot-desking’ to maximize utilization of desks and reduce the existence of ’surplus’ desks. This has meant “employees are barred from having tea, coffee, sweets, crisps (chips) and paraphernalia like photographs of family and teddy bears on their desks because these suggest ownership and desk rigidity.”

Not content with acting like Scrooge on a particularly bad-hair day, management went further:

In one HRMC office in the north west of England, local management established what the workers there have labelled a ‘Guanteddymo Bay’. All staff’s teddy bears were removed, staff said, by ‘dawn raids’ and ’special rendition’ from their desks and placed in a locked glass case so the workers can still see their teddy bears but not touch them.

This would be laughably ridiculous were it not so sick — and so totally believable.

The inexorable march of macho management stupidity

Cutting costs has gone from being a natural practice in any profit-based organization to a global obsession. And like all obsessions, somewhere along the way it has both lost touch with reality and spawned a level of irrationality that renders it inhuman and oppressive.

As Gall explains:

Quite apart from the dehumanizing side to the experience of these examples of work, such new ways of working easily create inefficiencies themselves. They either stop work from being done at all, or slow down the existing rate of work because of plunging morale and ill-feeling by staff.

What we are facing is a new dogma, enforced by an updated and far more ruthless version of the Spanish Inquisition. Its creed is an unthinking assumption that anything that reduces costs in financial terms is essential to corporate health and survival, whether or not it makes more difficult and unpleasant elsewhere.

Many costs have nothing whatsoever to do with money

What about the cost in employee morale; the costs in human unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life; the costs that come from creating unemployment in one country by shifting work where labor is cheap because people have few rights and are more or less desperate for the work? You can’t quantify any of these on a balance sheet, but all add greatly to the sum of human misery in a world that surely has enough of that already.

People starve in our world, though there is enough food for all, if it was shared out properly and not on the basis of individual corporate profit. People die from the lack of simple drugs because it is ‘uneconomic’ to sell drugs in poor countries when huge profits are available in rich ones by peddling expensive cures for simple problems like indigestion (glorified with the title of ‘acid reflux disease’) and imaginary ailments like ‘restless leg syndrome’. Aren’t these also costs?

Sure, they don’t fall on individual corporations, or even most government agencies, but they do fall on the human race as a whole — and on certain countries and continents far more than on others.

As a leader, are you saving monetary costs while increasing the rest?

I wonder what your own, personal balance sheet as a leader would be, if you could add up all the costs for which you are responsible, not just those that appear in the form of monetary amounts?

Maybe you could do a rough reckoning in your mind. How many of these hidden, non-monetary costs have you been lessening? How many have you been increasing, even as you drive down those that count in ‘the numbers’?

• The cost in lowered motivation due to constant and often mistaken ‘change initiatives’, the imposition of change without proper explanation and consultation, and the limitation of proper training (due, of course, to the costs involved).
• The cost in health and well-being caused by overwork, the long-hours culture in many organizations, and forcing remaining staff to take on the work of their colleagues who have been let go to cut wage costs, though the work demand remains the same.
• The costs in human misery, fear and stress caused by making every part of work and career progress ruthlessly competitive, so pitting colleagues against one another and thrusting people into simplistic categories of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
• The inefficiencies caused by refusing to pay for improved systems, better working practices, and newer technology.
• The tax on the future that arises when you cut back on research and development, denying progress that may improve people’s lives and working experience through innovation.
• The costs imposed on the sick and the old by reductions in healthcare benefits and the increasing tendency to limit pensions to the minimum the organization can get away with.

Our thoughtless assumption that each year brings greater progress — that mankind is on some grand march into a glowing future — is increasingly out of sync with reality. Far from adding to the sum of human happiness and prosperity, the last few decades have seen us marching resolutely backwards towards a ruthlessly Taylorist view of efficiency — one in which money is all that counts and the continuing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is a natural process of evolution.

If efficiency hurts this much, maybe we would all be better off without so much of it? Free the Guanteddymo Bay bears!

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