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Jumping through bureaucratic hoops? Stop doing that!
October 31st, 2008
On the job, you will find you are often confronted with quite futile, counterproductive situations.
You may be expected to do things or follow some process which is basically a waste of your time, because you get nothing out of it.
Bureaucratic processes are the obvious issues.
On the job, they can be a total waste of time, money, and effort.
They’re often designed to meet audit requirements, but they usually don’t even do that. They may be statutory requirements, out of date, and nobody even notices until the paperwork comes back with a whole new procedure attached. They may be internal procedures, created by somebody who’s since died, and nobody’s too sure why they’re doing them.
They can also cost a fortune in terms of productivity. It’s not too unreasonable to say that every second spent on bureaucracy can be spent on doing something much more useful, and definitely more productive.
Government departments, in fact, around the world, are trying to reduce the amount of bureaucratic processes, because it’s not in their interest, either. There are some things they have to do, by law, which do serve a useful purpose, but times have changed. More isn’t better, because it costs them a fortune to do it.
Nobody would think that was the case in business. American businesses may not agree about many things, but bureaucracy and degrees of difficulty in getting things done is one of them.
These situations are generally created by bad or obsolete business models. Some employees are really operating museums, not business products. There is no reason, real or imaginary, for these fossils to exist in modern business.
In fairness, businesses don’t try to create problems for themselves. But the business environment, and the tax laws, and the law generally, require a lot of actual movement of information. That, combined with mysteriously antiquated procedures, has created a lot of hoops for business to jump through, and the workplace gets the result.
Many of these fossils are based on old paper systems. Until recently hard copies of information were required for public information, court evidence, and by statute as proof of compliance with laws and regulations. The data versions of these things may take up less space, but they take up more time, because there’s more data.
The trouble is the effect on the workplace and business. People have to provide information, process information, and operate systems based on that information. Nobody disputes that.
The cost, and the result, however, is that gigantic amounts of time and possible productivity are used in the process. Nor does all this information and electronic efficiency seem to speed anything up. Things that can be done with a click aren’t happening much faster, as they should.
This is another legacy of the paper systems, when time frames like two weeks were a realistic estimate of movement of paper. Now, that’s two weeks wasted, to the thinking of most people. Delays do cost money.
They also cost jobs. The cumulative effect of delays, and business conducted at a snail’s pace, is to slow down the movement of money. Employers, understandably, are in no hurry to hire people to watch the grass grow. Employees, confronted with a ridiculously slow moving series of processes, are hardly enchanted. It’s nobody’s idea of a career to simply go through the motions and hope something eventually happens.
Paper-pushing had a bad enough reputation during the days of paper, let alone now. The sheer number of bureaucratic tasks the average small business has to deal with are quite staggering. Small business literally raises taxes, and does the data entry, across a huge range of business activities.
It’s not as if the bureaucratic processes actually work, either. Even housing is affected. Subsidized housing in the US is now under threat because government payments to landlords are so slow the landlords are going slowly broke.
The unemployed don’t need to be told that bureaucracy leaves a lot to be desired as a way of life, either. People can be hopelessly lost, in seconds, in some weird, incomprehensible situation which is legally required, and on which the payment of their benefits depend.
Not too surprisingly, the processes cost more than the benefits. The cost of filling in a form and processing it and losing it and having to fill it in again, if translated into wages, could be a part time job for someone.
That’s a pretty good basic cost evaluation of the bureaucratic process.
The machine is now running the operators.
Find a hoop, then find a way around it. It’s better business, better as a career, and it’s time
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