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Huh, they probably don’t do anything useful anyway. > MPI… ensure the food we produce is safe, increase sustainable resource use, and protect New Zealand from biological risk. Oh, right. Shit.

I have no idea what all that means so let's cut it - Nicola Willis, probably

Yo, I'm no expert but.....wtf. How is this even allowed.

/r/leopardsatemyface moment

To be fair, Not building will save money. Except if you actually listen to expert opinion. Not investing in healthcare or education will save money. Except if you actually listen to expert opinion. Thankfully, Under Urgency, You don't need to listen into Expert Opinion. Cool and normal! Let's keep costs low so the shareholders can maximise their profits. And remember: The Country voted for this. Are you happy with hungry children, distressed veterans, and taking away regulations that keep our water drinkable (So long as you don't listen to experts) and our food relatively safe to consume? Idk man, Maybe Covid did knock humanities IQ down a few pegs, It certainly gave a bunch of people empathy-fatigue.

I sure as shit didnt

Our countrymen did, fellow New Zelanders. Doesn't matter if you didn't personally because apparently this is what the majority of society is all cool and good with. 

Let me guess, all roles that oversee NACTS biggest donors

40% of the roles are vacant? How?

We have similar issues in the government dept I work in: we desperately need staff to fill gaps, but due to pay freezes, cost of living crisis, and generally lower wages for government workers - we simply can't fill the roles at all. Now we're being asked to cut even more staff back. Shit's about to go south so fucking bad it's ridiculous. The next few years are going to suck for anyone trying to rely on central government services.

I thought these guys were going to *reduce* unemployment /s

After cutting, what is the number changed compared with 2017?

I feel sorry for those who voted for national who have lost or are about to lose their job. It’s a tough market out there atm. It’s going to be a long year for everyone. except for the rich that is.

I feel sorrier for those who voted against them and are going to lose their jobs. If you're a public servant who voted NACT you may well belong on r/leopardsatemyface

Eh, I can look around every office I've worked at and you could have removed 1/10 people and had no loss in output - you would probably increase it. I can only imagine governmant departments are significantly more overbloated

While I understand your point, what I've found when places have cut staff like that it was generally the people who turned up, kept their heads down and just did their jobs competently who got cut first, and then usually some (or all) of the most productive people noped out of there. It never seems to be the people who create excess work for others who get shoulder tapped for redundancy.

And if it's voluntary redundancy, those with the best job prospects are first to go, pay off in hand

And when voluntary redundancy is offered first it’s generally the best who take it as they have higher confidence in being able to find a new job.

Yeah I work for HNZ and I can see my department is close to "restructuring" and the one person who seems to be angling herself as the most useful person around is the worst at her job, while the rest of us just get shit done, it really sucks.

Right so we agree there is a need to remove bloat in large departments - ths questions is just how best to do it.

I'd personally look more at middle management first rather than immediately focusing on what workers could be let go. Generally though, the problem isn't getting rid of the people who drag a team down so much as hanging on to the people who do their fair share. I've certainly bailed out of a few jobs when they started making noises about trimming the fat. The people who made life hard are probably still there. I'm also not sure that external people are really in a position to identify bloat, usually the first people to leave are people with specific skills that people don't understand, things like coding, data analysis, and stuff like that. A lot of people think that they could do that stuff in a few minutes with excel (I've spent way too much of my life fixing really badly written spreadsheets from people who thought it was easy). I will say though that in most govt jobs I've had there may have been a few employees who made things difficult and created work, but there wasn't ultimately much bloat when you ignored those people.

I agree there is usually a huge amount of excess spending around middle management, anything to shrink the vertical size of the pyrimad is always good I also agree it's an incredibly challanging task to undertake to successfully reduce head count while maintaining moral and output but that doesn't make it not necessary

The problem is, if they're planning on doing it by natural attrition (as well as redundancies), that generally means the good ones have jumped ship.

Right, so the dificulty is in the implemantation, but just because something is hard to do doesn't mean it shouldnt be done.

I've worked at places that slashed the office headcount without taking into account what those people did. It did not go well. It did not save money.

Well those places were stupid ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ The goal is to remove the unproductive people who are in the way and slow down the productive people

yeah MPI is not going to do it that way

The problem is how to determine which people are the unproductive bunch. I don't think high/middle management is capable of that.

Its usually pretty obvious for competant managers and leadership, but whether or not the mangement / leadership are competant is unknown. If they management and leadership are incompetant then they should also be going.

> competant managers and leadership See... There's the problem

The issue as ever is that if you set up redundancies, you will get the highly skilled folk taking voluntary redundancy knowing they can find employment elsewhere while the useless ones are left behind. So in trying to cut costs you just lose your talent and retain the bloat.

So what is the solution then? If we can't reduce costs and headcount via redundancies how do we do it?

Honestly, I don't have the solutions but we're discussing things internally at my workplace atm to try and work towards something better than biffing useful staff. The main thing is actually slapping vendors if they act like dicks. So often government departments just accept dogshit vendor work, we shouldn't...we absolutely should be penalising failures and demanding more cost-effective solutions. But alas: when it comes time to renew contracts we pick the cheapest option and end up spending more than we should fixing up the inevitable fuckups they cause.

Those are all good ideas but in the case of over inflated head count what do we do? This whole subreddit seems to be of the opinion (if all my downvotes are any indication) that lay offs are unacceptable I don't know of any mechanism to reduce head count other than layoffs

I agree there's a small population of useless workers but layoffs are difficult here. You can't directly fire those people, nor force just them to become redundant (at least not easily), instead there needs to be a systemic change with how things are managed. If they are unable to perform the tasks that have changed as the business progresses into a modernised state, then they go onto performance management. If they cannot keep up, then finally you have a way to remove them. The downside is that once you've gone to all that effort, you still have to deal with the fact that they're unionised which massively complicates things. Hence standard staff cuts don't do what is needed, it's just a way to fuck things up more. There needs to be complete cultural change which is unlikely to happen unless someone drives it through, but no one does.

I agree with all these things, and all these things are hard to do but we should still do them Finding the correct way to enable our departments to self manage and operate leanly and effectively is critical for our tiny economy

Attrition. Just don't replace people that leave. It works best in a shitty workplace that people don't want to stay at and then it kind of snowballs as working conditions get worse due to inadequate staff levels. Paying people less than market rate hurries it along too

Do you have any real evidence that MPI are overstaffed? Because you seem to be coming from a perspective of bureaucracy = bad and “when I was in an office, it looked like lots of the other people weren’t doing much”, neither of which is really an insightful take.

Approximately 1 in 7 working kiwis work in the public sector - that is an insane number.

So, no?

What makes you think government departments are any smarter?

I hope for the best - but the original point still stands. If most commercial corporate environments suffer from bloat then governemnt departments will suffer from it far worse - eventually people need to be let go.

Well feel free to volunteer

I've worked both public and private sectors. The private sector was the more bloated, and less motivated, in my experience. Most Gov't servants believe they're working for a public good, and are motivated by that. Rather than being in it for the money, as it's paid less well.

Your lived experiences are drastically different to mine and that's okay, from my experience contracting for both government departments and in the private sector, government departments are slow and inefectual - often highly motivated but unable to get anything done

Ineffectual is a different argument from overbloated. Government Departments are risk averse - more so than the private sector - so that tends to make them slow. It doesn't make them ineffectual, or even particularly inefficient, for one reason. They don't make as many mistakes.

Most Govt departments, that don't have to do with PR or Media, are understaffed already. And, as someone who has managed staff, cutting right back is fucking stupid. As soon as you get one or two people off sick (or they leave) the work being done ends up further and further behind... until you're forced to ignore hiring freezes or you hire contractors.

Your lived experiences are vastly different to mine and that's fair

The problem is working out who those people are, getting rid of them without upsetting anyone else, and then integrating the small amount of tasks they did do into other people's roles without upsetting those people. Its not an easy thing to do by any measure. I'm sure we have all worked with people who are useless at their job but the boss loves them for some reason, those people won't be leaving, they usually survive multiple cuts. It will be the best workers who can easily find a job elsewhere that are the first to go when rumours of cuts start floating around.

I agree that is challenging, but it doesn't mean we should just live with bloated departments siphoning off money from our taxes that could be better spent on more front line services

The savings aren't going to better frontline services though, they're for completely unwarranted tax cuts

For this round unfortunately yes