Agenda - Council - 12/22/1981 - Laserfiche WebLink

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ICarolina, in some federal agencies--sig- nificant gains have been made. But most political entities haven't gone beyond lip service. The lack of progress is partly con- Icealed by'a great show of effort across the c. ountry. Productivity has become a buzzword among bureaucrats. The output iof reports on the subject is itself an awe- some feat of productivity. But the political system is stacked against productivity. By nature, headway lis made in small steps over a long time. Politicians, however, need quick, highly visible accomplishments that will help them win the next election--and sexy is- l.sues that can be covered in a 30-second TV spot. "We've got a long way to go be- _ fore productivity has sex appeal," says INorth Carolitia's two-term governor, James B. Hunt Jr., one of the few elected officials who has launched a serious cam- paign to improve efficiency. Hunt doesn't Itry to talk about productivity to most au- diences-for fear of putting them to sleep. Improving productivity in government lis far more difficult than in business. Gov- ernment has no Unambiguous bottom line. The rewards go to those who ex- pand their staffs and win big appropri- ations, not to those i who find ways of saving money. "Managers in government know that the good guys get hurt," says Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, Democrat of Colorado, who is pushing a bill to force agencies to lay out clear ob- jectives and be judged by how well they meet them. "If you're lean, mean, and ef- fective,'' she'says~ "you get killed." An acre of idlers The public thinks civil servants do lit- tle and do it badly. The most recent Har- ris poll on the subject (in 1973) rated government employees' output far below that of other workers. Anecdotal evidence of sloth abounds. The Agriculture Depart- ment is famous as a citadel of idle talk and unoccupied offices. A productivity consultant who attended a conference a few years ago in the.General Accounting Office sat flor three days at a vantage point where he could watch about an acre of civil servants at their desks. He put his industrial-engineering talents to work tabulating the activities of people he could see. He concluded they were working 20%' of the time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures government productivity, has produced figures that seem to contradict public perceptions. Every year the BLS surveys the hours worked in over 3,000 government tasks, from delivering letters to locating deportable aliens. The survey now covers 373 agencies and depart- ments--66% of the civilian federal work force. Since 1967, the BLS index shows, productivity for the federal government as a whole has been growing by 1.4% an- nually (see the chart on the next page). In recent years federal productivity has speeded up while the private sector's has slowed, so that the government is now beating business in the productivity game. Unfortunately, the measurements so la- boriously collected by the BLS are far from exact. Gauging government activity is in- nately difficult. How do you measure the FORTUNE ,~,st 10. la~l lz17