I thought I'd share my experiences with the most commonly stereotyped "bureaucratic job".... a government job. :)
It was a memorable summer... my first real job. I was working in an army base in Hawaii in the housing office. Due to scheduling issues and time of shipment, roughly 70% of incoming service members arrived on the island with their household belongings still in transit. This shipping process would take 2-4 weeks on average. On a given in-processing, a soldier would have to stop at up to 10 offices to get all their assignments and living arrangements set up. Often, our office was the last stop.
My job was to tell these already disgruntled soldiers that their stuff would not be here for weeks and ask if they'd like to use our complimentary furniture rental service. This crappy furniture included beds from WWII (1940's)!!! Needless to say, they were not happy and I often took the brunt of their frustrations. My typical process would be to take the soldier's furniture request down to a piece of form paper, then input it into the computer. I'd then print it out on 4-ply paper, sending 3 sheets off to different departments - warehousing, housing, and processing. When a delivery was done, I'd have to confirm proper quantities, then re-print 4 sheets to schedule a pick-up on a given day.
Through the layers of processes and paperwork, it was relatively efficient. Less than 1% of processing had errors. The bureaucracy in place kept things very organized and things got done. Unfortunately, there was a tremendous amount of redundancy and no one seemed to be happy with the arrangement... workers disgruntled and soldiers frustrated with the whole ordeal.
Ultimately, while the process was effective enough, the bureaucracy had one major flaw. There was no vehicle for change. Process was so set that the only metric of success was efficiency. It was readily apparent to all involved that the system (or set of many systems) must be revamped; however, it never happened. In-processing needed to be synched with cargo shipment so rental furniture was not needed. It frustrates me to even write this, thinking of how bad a system can be put together through many add-ons and ill-fitting band-aid solutions. Once again, the principles of bureaucracy are noble and effective in nature, but need to be implemented with a sense of flexibility to adapt to situations.
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6 years ago
2 comments:
It's difficult to find an organization more bureaucratic than the Government. while other organizations may consider feedback from their customers in order to improve upon their existing services, the Government usually assumes that they've already thought up everything, and only the execution of the procedure remains to be performed. Unlike private organizations that can survive only by customer satisfaction and hence must be ready for change, the Government has no incentive to change, so why do so?
In your example, I'm amazed that bedding from WWII is not yet in the museum! Perhaps the bedding can be sold as antiques to pay for new beds for the US soldiers?!
Change I think is most difficult to achieve in Organizations where there is little or no repercussions for their actions which can easily visible.
If the same situation that you explained was there in say an apartment complex or some place with competition from others, then people would go somewhere else which will result in losses for the organization.
Since, in your case the Soldiers were supposed to follow the procedure and there is no alternate for them, people who are responsible for managing or defining the process do not really care.
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