Wishing the day away

Council staff 'waste’ more than two-thirds of their working day according to research by a management consultancy.

The study indicated that only 32% of working time was spent productively. The cause it reported was poor supervision. This was far lower than the equivalent productive time by private sector employees, which was still only 44%.

Paul Weekes, principal consultant at Knox D’Arcy and the report’s author, said improving productivity in local government could ‘significantly offset’ planned cuts in the Government’s deficit reduction plan. Consultancy firm Knox D’Arcy, which carried out the research, said if all councils improved to match the private sector, they could increase productivity by a third and do the same amount of work with 500,000 fewer staff.

The research also revealed that public sector managers spent just 15 minutes a day on average actively managing their staff. It suggests that council managers lacked the skills to implement the scale of cuts requested and so were as likely to deliver chaos and reduced services as savings.

From its own work with the public sector APA has seen what can be done to increase management productivity by empowering PAs (which it considers a poorly used resource in some public sector areas) and has specifically created its programme called ‘The Productive PA’ with the NHS to support them. APA Director General, Gareth Osborne, said, “From early research by one of the Scottish universities we know that 31% of time is ‘wasted’, we then found that another 25% is unproductive; constantly being interrupted, redirected or inadequately briefed and managed leading to procrastination and frustration. We can all learn from these chilling facts and look at ways to improve output from 9 to 5.”

APA