Council staff 'waste more than two-thirds of their working day'

Friend of mine had a job working for Bristol council in one of their offices. Don't know she did exactly, but she said she was paid quite well just to use the internet all day. She could also pick the job back up whenever she wanted, as she often went traveling.

That's my only experience of anyone I know who works for the council, and like this article, she did nothing.
 
[TW]Fox;17205752 said:
Is everyone missing the fact the same report claims private sector staff 'waste' more than half the working day? Sounds like a load of rubbish to me.
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I foudn this figure interesting.
I know in our workplace that every single member of staff will be working, doing something contstructive for over 85% of the time. I can think of only one staffmember out of the 23-23 or so who would be less productive than this.
Everyone else is usually occupied with a work task for 100% of the time, the figure is only dimished by an occasional no show.

Private sector idle for 56% of the time, seems incredibly high. You'd think task assignment could be changed to deal with such.
 
Hikari Kisugi said:
Everyone else is usually occupied with a work task for 100% of the time, the figure is only dimished by an occasional no show.

h.
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I very much doubt that. so you have no conversation, no toilet breaks, no gathering round the vending machines, going for a smoke or just sat in front of the computer (assuming office) doing nothing or looking at non-work stuff.

56% sounds High but I bet very few places get down to say 20%
 
My dad used to work for the council when he was younger. He used to spend most of his working day either at home on a "break" or with the rest of his crew while they attempted to do as little work as possible.

That's not to say it might be very different now. Just thought I'd share. :p
 
Working for a local authority I can say that there is some truth to this. Some people are notorious for it. However, I can't imagine that things are hugely different in the private sector...there's always chancers.
 
In nz they had the same problem. They cut through the crap and the attitudes and ran it like a private company. Now it's a reference model for efficiency and productivity.

Personally I would make all public positions a five year contract based on performance.
 
I worked as an apprentice IT technician for a year, everyone was working I never noticed any slacking, maybe myself a bit but nobody else :cool:
 
AcidHell2 said:
I very much doubt that. so you have no conversation, no toilet breaks, no gathering round the vending machines, going for a smoke or just sat in front of the computer (assuming office) doing nothing or looking at non-work stuff.
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I should have been more precise, my figure was over 85%, but for the entire durtaion of the office hours everyone has a task assigned, 100% of then time, there is something for people to do, if we have a lag event, then the practice manager will generate a task for someone to do, might have been something of lower priority that would be done if someone had a free minute.

Out of the 23/24 only 1 smokes, and she is attempting to quit, she mokes before work, at lunchtime and after work.

I didn't count toilet breaks in the figures, and frankly any survey that does it clearly trying to make the figures look worse for the sake of it. Everyone needs a toilet break during work once in a while, unless these survey people were finding council workers were consistently taking 20 minutes in the bog every couple of hours, which... might be the case given how low the figures are.

I'd go mad if I was that bored at work, 68% of my day doing nothing, no wonder morale is in the floor, when asked to do something its almost novel and thus threatens the 'safe zone' of doing nothing.
Be interesting to see if that figure increases after the public sector cuts this autumn and the coming years.
 
Robboftw said:
Anyone else work(ed) for the Council and noticed this, or had any experiences?
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I worked for the council on a 6 month contract.

One time, a guy in there was asked to write 22 addresses on envelopes, the addresses were printed on a sheet of A4, he had to hand write them one on each of the envelopes as the label printer was dead - thats it.

He took 8 working days to do it. But the management were so scared of him as he was high in the union so they didn't complain or anything they just let it all pass.

Apart from that he did quite literally nothing or blatantly read the paper/books. When management tried to give him work with reasonable deadlines he shouted at them (again literally!!) then very loudly called his union mates.

In the council there was seemingly no interest in cost or profit or value for money, so his boss never bothered sorting out the situation. After all, what's the point? What is to be gained? It seemed obvious management were thinking 'it's an easier life just to let blokey do what he wants .. ok .. who cares'??

Thank god I was just a contractor .. what a horrible dump.
 
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Ah yes, the public sector, where the under-paid people who work within (but have or at least did have relatively stable jobs) are frowned upon from those outside who potentially can earn tonnes more but work in a less stable and more cut-throat environment.

Councils breed admin, admin breeds paperwork, paperwork breeds near minimum wage staff who don't work for any other reason than they need to work to earn money, they have no love for their job, no passion. They don't get the corporate "pick-me-ups" many take for granted, like that big corporate dinner in the posh hotel at the end of every year, they get nothing but scorn from people when they say who they work for.

I'm all for black and white opinions on things in some cases, but in this case, the workers are a symptom of the job and the job isn't going to change so people in the private sector simply need to get over it and enjoy the fact they can potentially earn a LOT more over their career.

And that's without going into the fact that this brush tars those that work in the NHS or other emergency services.

Go and live along with an NHS properly trained nurse for a week and come back and tell me they don't work hard for far less money than you would imagine...
 
manic_man said:
snip.
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It is a symptom of management not the job. there are lots of private dector dead end jobs on minimum wage with no perks, like data entery.They still have very high targets.

Laziness breeds laziness and management and unions don't help this. Once you get used to doing nothing, then working seems hard, same as once you get used to working hard, doing nothing quickly gets tedious and boring.
 
In our tarring and feathering are we using the phrases civil servant, public sector worker and council employee as synonyms of each other? It might be helpful to define whether any distinction is made or if we're using the terms interchangeably before going much futher as it's not made all that clear in the article - I am as shocked as I possibly can be that there's a lack of clarity in the journalism.

Some public sector staff will waste time, some private sector staff will waste time and this becomes news? My point is simple here - to judge all based on examples that you've heard or even based on a small segment of personal experience is foolish, there are good and bad in every organisation.
 
I'm sure that the DM's 68% figure is exaggerated, but I remember that workload was slack at the MOD when I did a year's placement there. My next job was similar, answering tech support calls but in private sector. It was more busy and I preferred that.
 
semi-pro waster said:
to judge all based on examples that you've heard or even based on a small segment of personal experience is foolish, there are good and bad in every organisation.
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Indeed but the OP specifically asked for anecdotal evidence.

Obviously you can't form any conclusion off 'My mate Barry knows this bloke whose younger brothers wife's mate works for the council and ....'

But the stories make for interesting reading ...

I think the only way to form reasonable conclusion would be to sub-contract bits of work to the private sector, and see how much resource they need to use to get it done. If they can do it with 4 people, and the council have a team of 22, Houston, we have a problem!
 
These numbers should be taken with a very large pinch of salt. We once had a consultant in at the cost of £1,000 a day to do productivity surveys on us. He sat with me for a full day with two stopwatches in his hands. One ran when I was doing what he determined was 'productive' work. One ran when i was being 'unproductive'.

He counted things like walking to the printer to retrieve a letter I was sending to a customer as non productive. It even got to the point that he was counting the time I was spending browing my folders to find the correct place to save a file as non productive, until I told him to GTF. Of course he wasn't going to be able to sell any future services to my company unless he found that we were at least 50% non productive.
 
Speaking as someone who works for a local council in Scotland I can say that in our small IT dept we have a few people who could be described as lazy but it's not as bad as it sounds.

Personally, I'm slammed at the moment, anyone want to help?! :D

I dislike the constant bashing that we get and the idea that we are all highly paid and gets loads of perks. Er yeah sure, what exactly are these? We aren't even allowed to accept a pen from a company rep for fear that we might be taking a bribe :confused: - We don't have any 'away days' or lunches, and now they are taking away our water coolers. Great.
 
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