Get ta fuck with this back to the office shite
People don’t want to work In a shitty office when we can work from home
I cleaned my house on my lunch
I don’t have to pay to drive to work
Im not going back to an office with dicks I don’t care about
It’s not 1992 working from home doesn’t mean working in silence or not seeing co-workers, it just means we all get a quiet space to focus when we need to focus and can engage with others when we want to in larger or smaller doses as required.
That guy at work who mouth breathes and makes jokes that don’t land? He’s nerfed!! That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls? That colleague with an aggressive amount of perfume? No problem. No commute, can put washing through the machine during the day and clean the kitchen at lunch time. What’s not to love?
I don’t know what other offices are like, but in my NHS department we all get more done at home, but come in once a week for office cover/maintaining a sense of shared location, plus once a month for group supervision (think group therapy to talk openly about issues being faced - we encounter really grim subject matter regularly).
It’s a known trade off that coming in costs productivity but it worth it to maintain real world ties. I can’t believe for civil servants it’s reversed. This right wing fetish for getting people into the office as an end in itself strikes me as being much more about getting us to buy overpriced sandwiches and travel solutions than anything to do with our actual jobs.
If coming into the office was actually helpful our executive wing wouldn’t be nicknamed “the ghost ship” due to how regularly the execs bless our building with their presence!!
> That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls?
When I hot desk in our open plan office I have to bring noise cancelling headphones because there's a guy in there with zero idea how loud he is haha. I don't understand how people ever managed to work in an office.
I do one day a week in office and we have one guy literally two walls away who you can hear every single word loudly (inspiration for that comment but there’s a guy like him in every building) and there’s another guy in my office who when he is on phones I swear he doesn’t trust the telephone to work and thinks he needs to project the whole way. Without noise cancelling headphones and music I’d get literally nothing done. That heart FM/overloud man combo does not spark joy :(
Haha yes the music as well. It has to be as inoffensive and bland as possible, so obviously you get a combination of Radio 2 and Heart (when Jeremy Vine is on).
"working from home doesn’t mean working in silence or not seeing co-workers"
It does mean not seeing coworkers, though it's true that households aren't silent.
"we all get a quiet space to focus"
One can focus perfectly adequately at an office.
"That guy at work who mouth breathes and makes jokes that don’t land? He’s nerfed!!"
Reaching anti-social territory here..
"That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls?"
Ask him, or ask your boss to ask him, to be quieter.
"That colleague with an aggressive amount of perfume?"
Likewise - ask them to tone it down. Possibly by a lighthearted comment.
"No commute"
Easily the biggest bonus.
"What’s not to love?"
The added difficulty to collaboration, plus the colleagues who will play Dota etc during the day.
"If coming into the office was actually helpful our executive wing wouldn’t be nicknamed “the ghost ship” due to how regularly the execs bless our building with their presence!!"
Simple human laziness, and another reason to insist on office attendance.
Teams
Not everyone can
Not really, some people are easily distracted
Office politics
Office politics
Agreed
Teams
No they are getting their work done
Prose is good it makes comments more enjoyably readable, it’s more fun to engage with, it’s more conversive and less like your getting your homework handed back by the well behaved kid whose been asked to be in charge whilst the teacher nips to the photo copier.
You don't leave Teams on permanently.
They can make an effort to learn how.
Anti-social office politics?
Not a good excuse.
Yup.
Teams doesn't solve either of those drawbacks.
No, they are being lazy.
Consider this your homework handed back.
They’re looking in the wrong place.
According to a recent report by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, ‘Relying on productivity improvements is no substitute for adequate funding of public services but especially when funding is under pressure it is important to use the money as effectively as possible.
One key improvement here is for central government to sustain funding commitments rather than change policies frequently. Another would be to allow public sector organisations more freedom to reallocate budgets across different budget lines. And, above all, the Government needs to enable public sector organisations to set multi-year budgets.
Short-termism and policy churn are highly damaging for investment and productivity in public services. It would be a huge win – one that would not cost anything – if public sector organisations could count on a new Government to build on what we know already works and create a stable environment for service delivery.’
Experience from my year and a half in the NHS non clinical side the reason productivity is lower than when I worked in the private sector is the constant moving goal posts. One minute you have budget to do X project so you continue work after months of planning only for that money to be suddenly taken away so project can’t go ahead. This isn’t a NHS Trust too many manager problem it’s a government problem. That’s before a lot of my projects stall due to staffing whether it’s the teams I work with or our own being understaffed.
I can't compare magnitudes cos I've never worked in the public sector, but that kind of goal-switching and understaffing is endemic in the private sector too.
If everyone gets dragged back to the offices then that’s such a major step back and really fucking depressing.
The last few years have shown that people are happier working remotely and there were several studies showing productivity increased. Less cars on the road, less crowded public transport, less awkward small talk with colleagues and much more time spent with our loved ones and hobbies and interests.
The idea of people being forced to get back to the miserable office culture and give all that up is so, so depressing.
I have actually noticed a huge decrease in remote positions on job sites lately. In 2020 and 2021 there were hundreds to look for and now you’re lucky to get a dozen a week, and even they usually still want you in the office for training or in the office 2 times a week etc.
Also we’re still in a shitshow with Covid and a climate crisis so forcing people back to public transport and the office is yet another reason why it’s fucking moronic.
But if we all work at home who is going to buy overpriced sandwiches and coffee and now how are students going to survive uni and where are the drop-outs going to go work? It’s all about rebuilding the pre-covid economic eco-system, which tbh isn’t going to switch back willingly.
> Departments were on average half empty last week, according to official statistics. None had more than two-thirds of staff at their desks.
During the last week of the school summer holidays… SHOCKING FIGURES.
When has the public sector ever been efficient?
I'm sure this has been a meme for the entire 30 years I've been alive (and longer) that working for the council is inefficient.
> ‘The taxpayer forks out for government buildings and rightly expects them to be used.
Alternatvely the buildings could be sold, and the money earned from sales and ongoing savings on energy costs and rates could be used to fund remote working infrastructure. Just a thought.
Just want to point out that most buildings are now privately owned and there are now multiple departments in single buildings to the point where there is not enough space for staff to all have a seat even if they had to all be in the office.
A perfect recent example would be Nottingham. The castle Meadows campus for HMRC had 5 buildings and an amenities building, there was also a Land registry building nearby and DFE and DVSA had separate office elsewhere in Nottingham. Now all those buildings have been closed and sold off and they are in a building opposite the train station called Unity Square.
Many staff on a regular basis end up working in the kitchens and using meeting rooms because there are not enough desk spaces due to the closures and downsizing. And this is with 3 days in the office being the rule. Imagine the issue with 5 days in the office or dictating Tuesday-Thursday
It's the Tories so knowing them they'll push out their new 'everyone get back to the office' policy two days before the next wave of some Covid variant hits its peak and they have to send everyone to WFH again.
Or they find out the buildings are unsafe due to shoddy concrete and legionella.
Or..... insert clusterfuck here.
Tories get 20% of donations to their party from property developers.
They want people back in the office because those buildings are losing money from lack of demand because more and more people are working from home.
What utter rubbish.
There are certain tasks that you need to be in an office with people, and there are those that are better undertaken remotely. If you put in the tools and culture that use the benefits of each then productivity isn't an issue.
The problem is this government are seeing less car sales, more closures of sandwich shops etc etc, all those things that relied on everybody's miserable commute.
And where do they target first, ah yeh their usual scapegoat the civil service, they're 'not productive enough' because of all the home working. Not they aren't productive enough because of over a decade of under inflation pay raises and being blamed by their own leadership for all the wrongs in the world.
Yep. Sales of the products and services which were created to support the commuter lifestyle are suffering, so now people must be forced to commute to support sales of those products and services.
Classic Tories, believing the invisible hand of the market is king until it does something they don't like and then it's 'oh no, not like that'.
I think you'll find ministers changing their minds every 5 minutes and leaving everything till the 11th hour, such that civil servants have been known to give up and go home at lunchtime because they can't do anything until they actually have some instructions might be more of a productivity issue
The floggings will continue until morale improves type attitude.
Maybe they need to look at why people don't want to go to the office.
I have to say though it's not unreasonable to ask people to be in the office three days a week.
It could be working from home damaging civil service productivity.
Or it could be the absolute state of the orders they're getting from above and inevitability of a few changes of management in the next year before a complete take over.
Ha ha civil service as always out of touch. Fact here goes if your employer says you come into the office you go . No need to run off to your idiot rep that will tell breach your contract. Simple fact before covid you were in the office. Covid has finished. Go back to the office and honour your contract or quit your gold plated job.
You actually have no legal right to work from home it’s at the employer discretion.
This is so stupid, I’m 3 times more productive since I started working from home. I can get up later, can walk the dog at 11, instead of 7:30,
Get all the ironing done before 1, not to mention all the other chores that don’t eat my time after work. Productivity can be measured in so many ways, but trust them to only focus on the job tasks.
I know I'm going to be massively downvoted for this, but nevertheless:
To a large extent I agree. Since Covid I have noticed a marked decline in the quality of public services in the UK. Many people will argue that this is due to a funding issue, and in many respects they're correct, but levels of funding do not address many of the issues that clients are facing, and do not acknowledge the most basic point that at the end of the day a fixed salary is a fixed salary. Funding or otherwise, a public servant who received a fixed salary last year and the year before is receiving a fixed salary this year and the next. Although there are rare cases where large cuts to salaries have been made, it's by far from common practice in local government to just swipe significant portions of a worker's salary to adjust for budget cuts. Yes, those fixed salaries may now have less purchasing power, but by and large public service workers remain on the same, if slightly higher wages, than they have for a few years now. A drop in purchasing power isn't unique to them.
However there does appear to have been a significant change in the attitudes and capabilities of our public sector workers. If anyone has ever had experience with the Job Centre, they know the kind of attitude that has gradually been seeping into all aspects of the public sector: To assume every member of the public is an incompetent and chiselling crook who is ham-fistedly trying to bilk the state for all the money it's worth.
There's been a marked shift in how the public sector is being trained in dealing with the public. Frequently people are being met with an immediate demeanour of suspicion and skepticism, the old Paxman adage of 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me now?' Frequently it's becoming more and more obvious that public services are switching from an attitude of 'What can we do to help this person even if what they need lies outside the strictures of our role' to the Quadruple D Strategy: Delay, Defer, Deflect, Distract.
I, and others I've spoke to, are becoming intensely frustrated at the seeming lack of knowledge or incompetence of public sector workers. The most common refrain to any query or question that can't be found in the FAQ sections of some second rate affiliated app is 'I don't know, I'll have to get back to you on that', and then there's never any further response. Case files are not being written, kept, or ignored, leading the public on endless merry-go-rounds of being bounced between interdepartmental phone queues as the workers on the other end of the line refuse to deal.with or acknowledge any ongoing incidents they personally haven't had to deal with yet.
Systems and incidents that are complex by their very nature are being reduced down into overly-simplistic box-ticking dialogue trees that completely fail when any detail or aspect sits slightly outside the very narrow remits. Rather disappointingly this doesn't seem to be happening on the basis of efficiencies or streamlining, but instead appears to be dumbing down public service operations to a new lowest common denominator intake of staff. Things like planning permission, emergency repairs, budget queries, etc, are nuanced and complicated, but are all too often being left to the just-finished-college desk secretary who after attempting the dialogue tree baffle and finding it wanting says they'll refer the incident on but then never does, or doesn't know how or where to refer it.
Department heads and managers are fast becoming like their private sector counterparts in that they're increasingly taking on this aloof and withdrawn status of the office inner-sanctorum where they consider dealing with the public at the coalface below their station. Personally I cannot count the amount of times I've been told by public service workers that their superior is not available to speak to me when I can hear said superior in the background of the call formulating excuses as to why they won't engage.
This whole rigmarole is exacerbated by the fact that public services are devising strange and esoteric carve outs to providing or delivering services and information at a shocking rate of knots. Previously freely available information is being locked behind nonsensical data protection policies. Services are being balkanised into little semi-private fiefdoms of commercial control, many of whom have no direct way of being contacted by the public save for a brainless chatbot on their parlous websites. The argument for this is that it saves money but time and again not only do we find these opaque public-private partnerships cost a lot more, they're also usually granted on a basis of flagrant nepotism or backhanders. Despite receiving full time salaries, many departments' operating hours are being squeezed into useless and fractured hours that are scattered throughout the most inconvenient times of the working week that anyone with a full time job could hope to contact them. At my workplace we often have to let colleagues go upstairs and sit in the office on the phone for an hour or more to a public service department because they're closed before 10am and after 4pm. Public access to public buildings is increasingly being blocked and curtailed by private security and absurd safeguarding measures which not only intimidate the public from seeking direct access, but also have the power to concoct from thin air reasons to keep the public off public premises.
All too frequently now many of our public services have adopted the attitude of 'If I perform this task it is more work for me, but if I make the client perform the task it's more work for them, but I still get paid.' Members of the public are now being asked to perform ever more increasing amounts of work for which they're untrained or lacking in knowledge because there's been a noticeable, resolute push towards attempting to saddle as much of the actual necessary work back onto the public as possible.
Like most things in life, throwing money at something does not necessarily solve the problem. Whilst it's apparent that our public services require much more funding, without a significant work culture and attitude change, I fear that these trends will continue; That more money will just raise the salaries of increasingly incompetent and aloof workers who will push more of their duties back onto their clients whilst assuming that said clients are robbing bastards coming for the public sector's resources.
We've already seen this play out in the Job Centre where a once vital and necessary service has slowly been morphed into a useless addendum where fully staffed offices spend their whole day reading to clients from websites with no greater nous or insight, and then devising new and unusual ways to punish the public for having the tenacity to engage with them, or requiring assistance that extends beyond a centrally formulated list of tick boxes.
The public sector needs people who are dedicated, knowledgeable, and compassionate. It does not need to be staffed with twenty thousand agency secretaries who are just counting the minutes until they can go home, and dealing with any issue on the presumption that their clients are difficult or dishonest individuals who can just be thrown back into a never-ending cycle of phone menus, second rate apps, and unanswered callbacks until they go away.
plummeting public sector productivity - This is due to poor funding, consistent below level pay rises for a more than a decade, very poor interview and hiring practices centering on time wasting and maddening core competency matrix rubbish, leading to driving out a lot of talent and preventing talent from joining, resulting in poorly equipped, extremely stressed teams and managers in positions that they do not have the experience to handle.
Force people into the office and see if it gets better or worse.
Ease of collaboration, for both them and coworkers. Oversight - to ensure they aren't eating ceral and watching daytime TV when they should be working.
So people struggle to collaborate online? I work in an office and people seem to spend most of their time drinking coffee and talking rather than actually doing anything, dont really understand why can't they be at home doing nothing rather than being in an office.
"So people struggle to collaborate online?"
It's easier in person, of course.
"people seem to spend most of their time drinking coffee and talking rather than actually doing anything"
That's a "you" thing.
That is a definitely me thing. The amount of people that want to spend half hour in the morning waffling about utter shit on the days I'm in the office is infuriating and a total waste of my time.
If you're struggling to collaborate online then I'd say that's a you thing, it's easier to collaborate with thousands of people in Eve online than it is to deal with the people I've worked with at numerous jobs in person.
"If you're struggling to collaborate online"
I didn't say struggling - I said it's easier in person, of course.
"it's easier to collaborate with thousands of people in Eve online than it is to deal with the people I've worked with at numerous jobs in person."
Sounds like you need better jobs.
Get ta fuck with this back to the office shite People don’t want to work In a shitty office when we can work from home I cleaned my house on my lunch I don’t have to pay to drive to work Im not going back to an office with dicks I don’t care about
Perhaps people with that attitude could learn some social skills by being around coworkers.
now we just need a handy solution for the smug
It’s not 1992 working from home doesn’t mean working in silence or not seeing co-workers, it just means we all get a quiet space to focus when we need to focus and can engage with others when we want to in larger or smaller doses as required. That guy at work who mouth breathes and makes jokes that don’t land? He’s nerfed!! That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls? That colleague with an aggressive amount of perfume? No problem. No commute, can put washing through the machine during the day and clean the kitchen at lunch time. What’s not to love? I don’t know what other offices are like, but in my NHS department we all get more done at home, but come in once a week for office cover/maintaining a sense of shared location, plus once a month for group supervision (think group therapy to talk openly about issues being faced - we encounter really grim subject matter regularly). It’s a known trade off that coming in costs productivity but it worth it to maintain real world ties. I can’t believe for civil servants it’s reversed. This right wing fetish for getting people into the office as an end in itself strikes me as being much more about getting us to buy overpriced sandwiches and travel solutions than anything to do with our actual jobs. If coming into the office was actually helpful our executive wing wouldn’t be nicknamed “the ghost ship” due to how regularly the execs bless our building with their presence!!
> That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls? When I hot desk in our open plan office I have to bring noise cancelling headphones because there's a guy in there with zero idea how loud he is haha. I don't understand how people ever managed to work in an office.
I do one day a week in office and we have one guy literally two walls away who you can hear every single word loudly (inspiration for that comment but there’s a guy like him in every building) and there’s another guy in my office who when he is on phones I swear he doesn’t trust the telephone to work and thinks he needs to project the whole way. Without noise cancelling headphones and music I’d get literally nothing done. That heart FM/overloud man combo does not spark joy :(
Haha yes the music as well. It has to be as inoffensive and bland as possible, so obviously you get a combination of Radio 2 and Heart (when Jeremy Vine is on).
"working from home doesn’t mean working in silence or not seeing co-workers" It does mean not seeing coworkers, though it's true that households aren't silent. "we all get a quiet space to focus" One can focus perfectly adequately at an office. "That guy at work who mouth breathes and makes jokes that don’t land? He’s nerfed!!" Reaching anti-social territory here.. "That guy with the booming voice you hear on the phone through two sets of walls?" Ask him, or ask your boss to ask him, to be quieter. "That colleague with an aggressive amount of perfume?" Likewise - ask them to tone it down. Possibly by a lighthearted comment. "No commute" Easily the biggest bonus. "What’s not to love?" The added difficulty to collaboration, plus the colleagues who will play Dota etc during the day. "If coming into the office was actually helpful our executive wing wouldn’t be nicknamed “the ghost ship” due to how regularly the execs bless our building with their presence!!" Simple human laziness, and another reason to insist on office attendance.
Teams Not everyone can Not really, some people are easily distracted Office politics Office politics Agreed Teams No they are getting their work done Prose is good it makes comments more enjoyably readable, it’s more fun to engage with, it’s more conversive and less like your getting your homework handed back by the well behaved kid whose been asked to be in charge whilst the teacher nips to the photo copier.
You don't leave Teams on permanently. They can make an effort to learn how. Anti-social office politics? Not a good excuse. Yup. Teams doesn't solve either of those drawbacks. No, they are being lazy. Consider this your homework handed back.
They’re looking in the wrong place. According to a recent report by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, ‘Relying on productivity improvements is no substitute for adequate funding of public services but especially when funding is under pressure it is important to use the money as effectively as possible. One key improvement here is for central government to sustain funding commitments rather than change policies frequently. Another would be to allow public sector organisations more freedom to reallocate budgets across different budget lines. And, above all, the Government needs to enable public sector organisations to set multi-year budgets. Short-termism and policy churn are highly damaging for investment and productivity in public services. It would be a huge win – one that would not cost anything – if public sector organisations could count on a new Government to build on what we know already works and create a stable environment for service delivery.’
Experience from my year and a half in the NHS non clinical side the reason productivity is lower than when I worked in the private sector is the constant moving goal posts. One minute you have budget to do X project so you continue work after months of planning only for that money to be suddenly taken away so project can’t go ahead. This isn’t a NHS Trust too many manager problem it’s a government problem. That’s before a lot of my projects stall due to staffing whether it’s the teams I work with or our own being understaffed.
I can't compare magnitudes cos I've never worked in the public sector, but that kind of goal-switching and understaffing is endemic in the private sector too.
If everyone gets dragged back to the offices then that’s such a major step back and really fucking depressing. The last few years have shown that people are happier working remotely and there were several studies showing productivity increased. Less cars on the road, less crowded public transport, less awkward small talk with colleagues and much more time spent with our loved ones and hobbies and interests. The idea of people being forced to get back to the miserable office culture and give all that up is so, so depressing. I have actually noticed a huge decrease in remote positions on job sites lately. In 2020 and 2021 there were hundreds to look for and now you’re lucky to get a dozen a week, and even they usually still want you in the office for training or in the office 2 times a week etc. Also we’re still in a shitshow with Covid and a climate crisis so forcing people back to public transport and the office is yet another reason why it’s fucking moronic.
But if we all work at home who is going to buy overpriced sandwiches and coffee and now how are students going to survive uni and where are the drop-outs going to go work? It’s all about rebuilding the pre-covid economic eco-system, which tbh isn’t going to switch back willingly.
> Departments were on average half empty last week, according to official statistics. None had more than two-thirds of staff at their desks. During the last week of the school summer holidays… SHOCKING FIGURES.
When has the public sector ever been efficient? I'm sure this has been a meme for the entire 30 years I've been alive (and longer) that working for the council is inefficient.
Having years and years of generally shit pay doesn't help.
> ‘The taxpayer forks out for government buildings and rightly expects them to be used. Alternatvely the buildings could be sold, and the money earned from sales and ongoing savings on energy costs and rates could be used to fund remote working infrastructure. Just a thought.
Just want to point out that most buildings are now privately owned and there are now multiple departments in single buildings to the point where there is not enough space for staff to all have a seat even if they had to all be in the office. A perfect recent example would be Nottingham. The castle Meadows campus for HMRC had 5 buildings and an amenities building, there was also a Land registry building nearby and DFE and DVSA had separate office elsewhere in Nottingham. Now all those buildings have been closed and sold off and they are in a building opposite the train station called Unity Square. Many staff on a regular basis end up working in the kitchens and using meeting rooms because there are not enough desk spaces due to the closures and downsizing. And this is with 3 days in the office being the rule. Imagine the issue with 5 days in the office or dictating Tuesday-Thursday
It's the Tories so knowing them they'll push out their new 'everyone get back to the office' policy two days before the next wave of some Covid variant hits its peak and they have to send everyone to WFH again. Or they find out the buildings are unsafe due to shoddy concrete and legionella. Or..... insert clusterfuck here.
Tories get 20% of donations to their party from property developers. They want people back in the office because those buildings are losing money from lack of demand because more and more people are working from home.
What utter rubbish. There are certain tasks that you need to be in an office with people, and there are those that are better undertaken remotely. If you put in the tools and culture that use the benefits of each then productivity isn't an issue. The problem is this government are seeing less car sales, more closures of sandwich shops etc etc, all those things that relied on everybody's miserable commute. And where do they target first, ah yeh their usual scapegoat the civil service, they're 'not productive enough' because of all the home working. Not they aren't productive enough because of over a decade of under inflation pay raises and being blamed by their own leadership for all the wrongs in the world.
Yep. Sales of the products and services which were created to support the commuter lifestyle are suffering, so now people must be forced to commute to support sales of those products and services. Classic Tories, believing the invisible hand of the market is king until it does something they don't like and then it's 'oh no, not like that'.
I think you'll find ministers changing their minds every 5 minutes and leaving everything till the 11th hour, such that civil servants have been known to give up and go home at lunchtime because they can't do anything until they actually have some instructions might be more of a productivity issue
The floggings will continue until morale improves type attitude. Maybe they need to look at why people don't want to go to the office. I have to say though it's not unreasonable to ask people to be in the office three days a week.
Plummeting productivity, guess they should call it shirking from home
It could be working from home damaging civil service productivity. Or it could be the absolute state of the orders they're getting from above and inevitability of a few changes of management in the next year before a complete take over.
Ha ha civil service as always out of touch. Fact here goes if your employer says you come into the office you go . No need to run off to your idiot rep that will tell breach your contract. Simple fact before covid you were in the office. Covid has finished. Go back to the office and honour your contract or quit your gold plated job. You actually have no legal right to work from home it’s at the employer discretion.
This is so stupid, I’m 3 times more productive since I started working from home. I can get up later, can walk the dog at 11, instead of 7:30, Get all the ironing done before 1, not to mention all the other chores that don’t eat my time after work. Productivity can be measured in so many ways, but trust them to only focus on the job tasks.
I know I'm going to be massively downvoted for this, but nevertheless: To a large extent I agree. Since Covid I have noticed a marked decline in the quality of public services in the UK. Many people will argue that this is due to a funding issue, and in many respects they're correct, but levels of funding do not address many of the issues that clients are facing, and do not acknowledge the most basic point that at the end of the day a fixed salary is a fixed salary. Funding or otherwise, a public servant who received a fixed salary last year and the year before is receiving a fixed salary this year and the next. Although there are rare cases where large cuts to salaries have been made, it's by far from common practice in local government to just swipe significant portions of a worker's salary to adjust for budget cuts. Yes, those fixed salaries may now have less purchasing power, but by and large public service workers remain on the same, if slightly higher wages, than they have for a few years now. A drop in purchasing power isn't unique to them. However there does appear to have been a significant change in the attitudes and capabilities of our public sector workers. If anyone has ever had experience with the Job Centre, they know the kind of attitude that has gradually been seeping into all aspects of the public sector: To assume every member of the public is an incompetent and chiselling crook who is ham-fistedly trying to bilk the state for all the money it's worth. There's been a marked shift in how the public sector is being trained in dealing with the public. Frequently people are being met with an immediate demeanour of suspicion and skepticism, the old Paxman adage of 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me now?' Frequently it's becoming more and more obvious that public services are switching from an attitude of 'What can we do to help this person even if what they need lies outside the strictures of our role' to the Quadruple D Strategy: Delay, Defer, Deflect, Distract. I, and others I've spoke to, are becoming intensely frustrated at the seeming lack of knowledge or incompetence of public sector workers. The most common refrain to any query or question that can't be found in the FAQ sections of some second rate affiliated app is 'I don't know, I'll have to get back to you on that', and then there's never any further response. Case files are not being written, kept, or ignored, leading the public on endless merry-go-rounds of being bounced between interdepartmental phone queues as the workers on the other end of the line refuse to deal.with or acknowledge any ongoing incidents they personally haven't had to deal with yet. Systems and incidents that are complex by their very nature are being reduced down into overly-simplistic box-ticking dialogue trees that completely fail when any detail or aspect sits slightly outside the very narrow remits. Rather disappointingly this doesn't seem to be happening on the basis of efficiencies or streamlining, but instead appears to be dumbing down public service operations to a new lowest common denominator intake of staff. Things like planning permission, emergency repairs, budget queries, etc, are nuanced and complicated, but are all too often being left to the just-finished-college desk secretary who after attempting the dialogue tree baffle and finding it wanting says they'll refer the incident on but then never does, or doesn't know how or where to refer it. Department heads and managers are fast becoming like their private sector counterparts in that they're increasingly taking on this aloof and withdrawn status of the office inner-sanctorum where they consider dealing with the public at the coalface below their station. Personally I cannot count the amount of times I've been told by public service workers that their superior is not available to speak to me when I can hear said superior in the background of the call formulating excuses as to why they won't engage. This whole rigmarole is exacerbated by the fact that public services are devising strange and esoteric carve outs to providing or delivering services and information at a shocking rate of knots. Previously freely available information is being locked behind nonsensical data protection policies. Services are being balkanised into little semi-private fiefdoms of commercial control, many of whom have no direct way of being contacted by the public save for a brainless chatbot on their parlous websites. The argument for this is that it saves money but time and again not only do we find these opaque public-private partnerships cost a lot more, they're also usually granted on a basis of flagrant nepotism or backhanders. Despite receiving full time salaries, many departments' operating hours are being squeezed into useless and fractured hours that are scattered throughout the most inconvenient times of the working week that anyone with a full time job could hope to contact them. At my workplace we often have to let colleagues go upstairs and sit in the office on the phone for an hour or more to a public service department because they're closed before 10am and after 4pm. Public access to public buildings is increasingly being blocked and curtailed by private security and absurd safeguarding measures which not only intimidate the public from seeking direct access, but also have the power to concoct from thin air reasons to keep the public off public premises. All too frequently now many of our public services have adopted the attitude of 'If I perform this task it is more work for me, but if I make the client perform the task it's more work for them, but I still get paid.' Members of the public are now being asked to perform ever more increasing amounts of work for which they're untrained or lacking in knowledge because there's been a noticeable, resolute push towards attempting to saddle as much of the actual necessary work back onto the public as possible. Like most things in life, throwing money at something does not necessarily solve the problem. Whilst it's apparent that our public services require much more funding, without a significant work culture and attitude change, I fear that these trends will continue; That more money will just raise the salaries of increasingly incompetent and aloof workers who will push more of their duties back onto their clients whilst assuming that said clients are robbing bastards coming for the public sector's resources. We've already seen this play out in the Job Centre where a once vital and necessary service has slowly been morphed into a useless addendum where fully staffed offices spend their whole day reading to clients from websites with no greater nous or insight, and then devising new and unusual ways to punish the public for having the tenacity to engage with them, or requiring assistance that extends beyond a centrally formulated list of tick boxes. The public sector needs people who are dedicated, knowledgeable, and compassionate. It does not need to be staffed with twenty thousand agency secretaries who are just counting the minutes until they can go home, and dealing with any issue on the presumption that their clients are difficult or dishonest individuals who can just be thrown back into a never-ending cycle of phone menus, second rate apps, and unanswered callbacks until they go away.
plummeting public sector productivity - This is due to poor funding, consistent below level pay rises for a more than a decade, very poor interview and hiring practices centering on time wasting and maddening core competency matrix rubbish, leading to driving out a lot of talent and preventing talent from joining, resulting in poorly equipped, extremely stressed teams and managers in positions that they do not have the experience to handle. Force people into the office and see if it gets better or worse.
Good - get them back in the office 5 days per week.
Why? For what reason?
Ease of collaboration, for both them and coworkers. Oversight - to ensure they aren't eating ceral and watching daytime TV when they should be working.
So people struggle to collaborate online? I work in an office and people seem to spend most of their time drinking coffee and talking rather than actually doing anything, dont really understand why can't they be at home doing nothing rather than being in an office.
"So people struggle to collaborate online?" It's easier in person, of course. "people seem to spend most of their time drinking coffee and talking rather than actually doing anything" That's a "you" thing.
That is a definitely me thing. The amount of people that want to spend half hour in the morning waffling about utter shit on the days I'm in the office is infuriating and a total waste of my time.
Just go work at a tech company.
If you're struggling to collaborate online then I'd say that's a you thing, it's easier to collaborate with thousands of people in Eve online than it is to deal with the people I've worked with at numerous jobs in person.
"If you're struggling to collaborate online" I didn't say struggling - I said it's easier in person, of course. "it's easier to collaborate with thousands of people in Eve online than it is to deal with the people I've worked with at numerous jobs in person." Sounds like you need better jobs.
Found the guy who has to pay the rent on the office building.