Working for the Government -part two

 A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.


No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.


So much for government targets.


I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public.  Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.