By John Boothman
ENHANCING productivity – the art of getting us all to work more efficiently – has been much in the news lately. Paul Murphy, chief executive of Jersey Business, lamented that the Island’s productivity had been falling since 2007, and we now run ‘the risk of being overtaken’. (Whisper it softly but we already have been, by historic rivals such as Guernsey and the Isle of Man.) Respondents to a survey cited lack of resources, lack of skills, unforeseen events and government processes as key barriers to progress.
A few days later, we were told by Economic Development Minister Kirsten Morel that we needed to raise productivity by ‘at least 7.5%’ over the next 17 years simply to support the increasing number of pensioners. If that is indeed what he meant it seems a very modest target: less than 0.5% a year.
There’s no doubt we have a problem, yet it seems fair to ask whether our public sector organisation (of which Deputy Morel is an influential member) is part of the solution – or part of the same problem.
In 1957, the redoubtable English author C Northcote Parkinson published a volume of essays of which the best known is Parkinson’s Law. He had developed an interest in organisational efficiency and set out to measure the relationship between input and output in UK government departments. His startling conclusion (expressed in the proposition ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’) was that the correlation was weak, or indeed non-existent. As he put it: ‘the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to one another at all’.
Evidence for this was provided by two famous institutions: the Royal Navy, and the Colonial Office. Although in a centralised service, such as defence, output is hard to measure, Parkinson felt that a suitable naval surrogate was the number of capital British warships. He pointed out that in 1914, this was 62, at which time there were 2,000 officials at the admiralty. By 1928, the number of ships had fallen to 20 but the number of officials had risen to 3,569; and by 1954, when he was writing, and there was only a handful of capital ships left in the fleet, to 33,788. Similarly, in 1935 when the British empire was near its peak, the number of staff at the Colonial Office was 372; in 1954, after India and several other former colonies had been granted independence, it had risen to 1,661.
Parkinson’s explanation for this phenomenon was twofold. Firstly, officials multiply subordinates, not rivals; and secondly, they make work for one another. Multiplication occurs when someone (A) feels overworked, and makes the case for an assistant, or preferably two (B and C) – since appointing one might threaten A’s own position. Unfortunately, the work of B and C needs to be constantly checked and corrected by A, and they also make work for one another. This leads on to the second factor: as an organisation grows it becomes more unwieldy, requiring more internal departmental and cross-departmental meetings, memos, internal phone calls and (more recently) emails and Zoom calls to coordinate the activities undertaken.
Parkinson’s Law was written tongue in cheek. There is no doubt that a large organisation can accomplish things a smaller one cannot. Yet his findings still have resonance today – in fact, in an era of mega-organisations they are of more pressing concern than ever. And the biggest single organisation in Jersey, employing at the end of 2022 8,127 staff, is the government workforce. That compares with 6,720 five years earlier, which equates to a 21% increase during a period of (supposedly) fiscal retrenchment. (Of course, the raw figures exclude the many highly-paid consultants brought in to do jobs beyond the reach of the well-paid mandarins already in post.)
One development that has brought remarkable productivity gains in many administrative bodies is process automation. Few companies or government departments would have had much help from computers when Parkinson was writing in the mid-1950s. Seventy years on, the picture is very different. From the chief executive to the lowliest clerk, the ubiquitous desktop, laptop and tablet provide instant access to advanced mathematical capabilities and a global array of data – as well as providing an immediate messaging system. For over 25 years enterprise resource planning (ERP) has had as a core component the automation of desk-based drudgery, to improve management information and reverse headcount growth. Successive Jersey governments have spent large sums on office technology. Is there any real evidence that this has paid off, either in efficiency savings or better public services? The sad answer is No.
Professor Parkinson would have been unsurprised by this. As he pointed out, ‘The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear.’ Even he, however, might have been astonished by the latest fad for ‘working from home’. Those who have tried it (including the present writer) will acknowledge that in most cases its impact on personal productivity is distinctly negative. The distractions of the internet (including social media and shopping sites), the postman and delivery driver, the window-cleaner, visiting grandchildren and personal phone calls – not to mention the temptation of an afternoon nap in the summer sunshine – mean that work is regularly interrupted and output tails away. Supervision is a necessary discipline in most workplaces. There’s a cynical old saying, ‘works well when watched’; but isn’t that true for most of us?
Organisations in the grip of Parkinson’s Law not only proliferate: they slip the moorings of accountability to those they are supposed to serve, becoming self-serving instead. This tendency is all too obvious in our own bureaucracy. For officials, interaction with ‘the outside world’ becomes increasingly irksome. Irritation turns to exasperation, then contempt. Dealing with the public eats into time set aside for yet another committee meeting or group motivation session, so the phone numbers and email addresses of those with whom we might wish to communicate are withheld or concealed. Call centres are programmed to dissuade all but the most patient supplicants. Help desks are closed or undermanned. Letters are ignored or responded to weeks, or even months, later.
Office staff, especially in Jersey, are expensive – the public sector payroll is now somewhere near £10 million every week. But it’s not just a matter of money. More employees mean more immigration, more housing, more office space, more healthcare, more cars, more school places – all pressure points in an island struggling to keep its population in check.
How can the government machine – or any organisation – escape these tendrils? By thinking about efficiency at every level. As individuals by working, not harder, but smarter. As teams charged with achieving something specific, by staying focused and not becoming mere talking shops – and ensuring each team member knows what is expected of them. For the organisation as a whole, choosing leaders with the necessary wisdom and imagination to drive continuous improvement.
Above all, energies currently expended on internal processes and preoccupations need to be redirected outward towards those who use States services and, through their taxes, pay for them. In health, education and other departments, we need far more emphasis on staff directly engaging with members of the public – teachers, doctors, nurses, police officers, social workers – and less on those tiers of managers and administrators who sit above or alongside them.
No one imagines frontline workers could cope without leadership and support, but we must get the balance right. An inward-looking organisation too deeply absorbed in promoting its own interests is on the high road to disaster. Right now, I think we’re still heading in the wrong direction. And I’m pretty sure Professor Parkinson would have thought so too.
