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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I once had a brief foray as an OSHA consultant in a Western government department. By the time I got there it was thinly concealed sinecure. The workload was laughable and the majority of the job was evaluating complaints from employees that were angling towards some sort of compensation graft. Actual safety in an office environment did not require the large team we had. I didn't last too long before the lack of meaning in the job led me back to the private sector.

I remember in one case, a 'partially blind' person's emotional support guide dog was causing a genuinely severe allergic reaction in a nearby seated work colleague (whereby 'nearby' I mean on the opposite side of the floor). All the other consultants basically ran and hid from the job because the blind person had a history of 'requesting' danegeld support items to make them more comfortable at work. I was flabbergasted at their workstation on an open floor plan which was fully surrounded by 6ft high partitions to give them their own private office protect them from sunlight due to their light sensitivity. After a brief investigation I figured out it was the dog bed in their pod that someone had authorised that had not been cleaned for years. Getting it regularly cleaned along with a HEPA air conditioner sorted it out, but the cost of maintaining the kayfabe disgusted me.

You have any opinions on what could make it work better? Interesting to hear there were more staff than necessary rather than too few

It was mainly the entrenched 'not for profit' drive behind the organisational culture that led to inefficiency. There were no incentives to cut costs (staff) and in the process make the remaining staff more efficient.

Normally every few years a new party will get in power and appoint a taskforce to cut costs in the public sector, but as an outside force it would never be able to maintain a reasonable level of efficiency. With inefficient staff, more would be required to undertake the workload so staff bloat would increase again over time.

There would probably need to be a taskforce for efficiency embedded directly within the department(s). This would include management/organisational consultants (or more cheaply, an FTE role with those skills).

Government culture can complicate these issues in other ways. The public sector is left leaning in their politics and is unionised. Due to self-regulation it is very difficult to fire government employees for laziness and incompetence. It can require multiple admonishments and a performance management process that can last years. The process of firing an employee is so draining on middle management that they arrange for transfers to other departments to make it someone else's problem. Or wait for a wave of redundancies to effectively bribe people to leave.

The refusal to weaken employment regulations around firing people makes the public service collect some of the laziest people I have ever come across. I remember one 55year old man that had spent a career at just above the entry level rank for unskilled workers. He told me stories about how he would skip work to attend environmental protests. He regularly turned up late and left early. His work turnover was less than half of the average (and the average was not that high). He had managed to coast through his career and despite his workmates despising him for his laziness, he had never been fired. This man was a union representative which I saw him exploit multiple times in the short period I knew him.

It gets worse. Government deliberately aims to hire minorities. This includes people with a disability. A small fraction of people with a disability are for want of a better word, grifters. On top of the risk of hiring some of these people, they are created through filing a false workers compensation claim for a workplace injury, PTSD or the like. The OSHA consultants strongly suspected that grifters would tell their friends about techniques to file claims and get long periods of time off work or better yet a total and permanent disability determination for money indefinitely.

But I digress and you asked for solutions. Besides the efficiency taskforce I would look at weakening regulations around the grounds for firing staff. Also for the OSHA team, assign soft KPI's for caseload clearance with rewards for completion and performance management for those that fall way below expectation. I say soft KPI's because management discretion would be required as you would prefer to reward and not punish consultants for taking difficult (and time consuming) cases.

I've really only scratched the surface about government culture. Changing it is like trying to clean an oven with only warm water and a wash cloth.

Thanks for the thought out response, I'll definitely reflect on this information.

This is one reason that I’m generally against ADA for most things. I don’t mind wheelchair ramps and the like, but the problem is more or less that there’s almost no limit either to the things that can be considered “disabilities” nor the requests (which have basically the force of law behind them) even at great cost to the rest of the company and the other people who work there. If I have a mental illness, I get essentially extra time off to deal with the anxiety or depression or whatever. The rest of the workforce not only doesn’t get the xtra time off, but has to then take up the slack I leave behind. And because a lot of mental illness has few physical tells it becomes an easy thing to fake. I go to the doctor and get a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or ADHD with little actual screening against cheating, go tell HR my demands accommodations and get extra benefits to myself.

I touch on this in in my other comment.

I have a friend who is a paraplegic. He tells me that the genuinely disabled despise these sorts of grifters as they drain resources and weaken the acceptance for making allowances for people with disabilities such as through the ADA.

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