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September 26, 2006
Waste
I've read recently that everyone in Germany lucky enough to have a job wastes 32,5 of his precious 250 working days per year. This is not done on purpose, of course, the hours just fade away in useless meetings, or because the same task has been assigned to two different people, and in ever increasing administrative tasks. I would readily subscribe to that considering how often I have to sit in meetings which I think could well be conducted in at least half the time they usually take if everyone only went to the meeting well prepared. The time that is wasted in this way is estimated to cost the tax payers more than 170 billion Euros per year, a mind boggling sum which equals about 8% of our gross domestic product. Another alarming estimate is that worldwide 30% of the working hours are squandered on unproductive activities.
A study conducted by Proudfoot Consulting blames inefficient leadership for this waste of time and money. Managers don't find the time to do their job properly and they don't talk enough to their employees. Unproductivity is generated by bad planning and controlling. Further reasons are bad training, ineffectiv communication and IT problems.
Too true! Far from making things easier for my computer at my office takes quite a few minutes off my working hours each day causing problems I didn't have before. Countless are the times when I wanted to bite into my keyboard or give that cheeky Dr Watson a good punch on the nose. And if at last you have persuaded the computer to perform a difficult task for you you can bet on it that next time both of you will have forgotten how to do it and you will be back to square one again.
It is a bit of a consolation, though, that even private firms face the same problems that I thought hitherto to have been only inherent to the civil service: too many administrative tasks, too many fruitless meetings etc. Still - I went into the civil service as a natural scientist fifteen years ago. But now a very small amount of my working hours is actually devoted to scientific work. Instead, writing a scientific report has become a kind of luxury. And because even the civil service has to cut down costs now and then a substantial number of the scientific and technical staff that has left the department over the past years has not been replaced. Strangely enough, the overall number of employees seems not to have changed much. But the only unit that has been prospering lately is the one that is supposed to do the administrative tasks for the department. Instead of taking this kind of work away from us they succeed effortlessly in creating even more of it for us. And that is a real waste of potential. For all of the scientific staff members were employed because of their special skills and knowledge in the first place which we are not allowed to use anymore to the extent we would like.
I find it quite remarkable that during the last 30 years actual production has been moved out of Germany to the East and lots of small or medium sized firms have gone bankrupt. But the civil service has been forever increasing. They just seem to breed among themselves. If one of the Federal Offices is closed another one springs up out of nowhere. But as long as our Parliament consists mainly of members from the civil service and lawyers there's not much hope that things will change in the near future. What a waste!
Posted by Mausi at September 26, 2006 08:26 PM
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Comments
If Germany wastes 32.5 days out of 250, then I reckon that works out at around 13%.
If the world squanders 30% of work time, then surely this could be considered as an example of German efficency! (admin talk)
The rise in the public sector is happening here in the UK too, shocking.
Posted by: Simon at September 26, 2006 08:51 AM