to the Employment director general, Maria Mindhammar, defending in a replica, the time reporting system, Time, which the agency recently put in place, and that I ask questions about in my op-ed.
I declare myself not, however, about how the employees shred their working hours in Time, but only about what the system requires of them, which is that they register the performed activities at least every hour and a maximum for each quarter.
However, I can appreciate that on average it can take about 5 minutes per day for the employees to manage the system, and about 30 minutes for a manager to go through the week’s figures with their subordinates. I think it is quite reasonable estimates, in all cases, if employees take the system seriously. They do it is of course not safe.
Perhaps it is that an employee writes in a dejected tone to me in an email: ”most of The copies yesterday’s presentation”. Another employee writes as hopeless: ”using the standard points because you don’t have time to look.” And then, of course, fast, but no reliability in the figures, it will be hardly. It would be interesting to take note of how Mindhammar and her competent colleagues, the actual estimated duration of Time before its introduction – now if they at all made any such estimate.
however, It took not a long time after the publication of my article, before it began to drip into the mail with me where employees at the employment service, express far-reaching criticism of the Timing and other control systems of the authority. For example, the stresses an employee at the authority’s headquarters, which works closely with the management team ”to the managers who eventually made the decision to introduce the Timing of broadly agree with you. The problem has always been that we have had a ministry that is not given in the question.”
another employee, who worked for many years at the head office, writes: ”Authority is characterized by constantly new control tools, tystnadskultur and fear of retaliation if we express a dissenting opinion”. An additional employee in an office out in the country states that employees devote at least fifteen minutes a day on administration, and managers requires ”that we spend several hours a month for these useless follow-up system”, and yet ”have not received feedback by their manager on the results from any of the systems, whether single unit or as individuals”. Also this person is talking about a widespread tystnadskultur: ” On the AF, the silence is compact and the fear of the total. No one dares to protest against the higher bosses ‘ quirks, and the few that made it (middle managers that I know of) have been forced away from the authority.”
How representative these testimonials are for the authority is, of course, difficult to know. But the chief director is not ”only once” says to have heard any dissatisfaction from the employees raises questions about how leadership looks in the authority and how open and listening management is vis-à-vis the employees, and vis-à-vis the trade union representatives in the authority.
It is remarkable, however, is not that I do not know this (as a member of the Tillitsdelegationens scientific advice, I know), but that the employment service is working with the delegation at the same time as the ahead of Time. In what way is the authority’s various control systems in line with the Tillitsreformen? This remains Mindhammar the answer required.
It may be true. But it does not mean that all those other authorities applies equally elaborate accounting system that the public employment service. In addition, a number of other authorities run away in a certain direction does not mean that they are running in a good direction, or that direction is good for everyone.
You should be able to expect that the highly paid managers in the state have their own analytical abilities and that they, with sensitivity to staff, makes decisions based on their own agency’s circumstances and needs and not only takes after the other, with the justification that ”we have no choice”.