Many years ago, I spent seven months working for a local council in the U.K. – never again. If you’re someone who despises having to attend meetings to plan meetings about other meetings, stay clear. One colleague was particularly skilled in the art of time wasting. Her average work-hour would include three cigarette breaks, four trips to the kettle to make coffee, a toilet stop, and a cackling chat with a random colleague. Each of these excursions would require a timely log-on and off from the council computer. So around 20 minutes of work would get done per hour. If I were someone from another department watching this from across the other side of the office, I’d conclude that she was the laziest person in the council. Because I was in the same department and could see what she was working on, I knew she was by far the most effective on our team.
Earlier this month, Dedi Mulyadi, the governor of Indonesia’s West Java province, announced that he plans to publicly shame the “laziest” civil servants in his province on social media to encourage them to improve their performance. The personal details of the apparent underachievers, including their names, addresses, and photos, will reportedly be published on the provincial government’s social media accounts starting next month. A monthly list of top-performing employees will also be released. “If people are proud to be called exemplary, they’ll work harder. If they’re embarrassed to be labelled lazy, they’ll change,” Dedi said.
Naturally, this has seen a fair share of positive and negative reactions, with some people considering it a blatant violation of people’s privacy and others taking the line that anyone who dares to take a government check is fair game for abuse. The mechanism isn’t really the problem. Using public shame or social stigma to encourage people to change their behavior isn’t unreasonable. Fear of social embarrassment is what motivates most of the things we do, for good or for evil.
What bugs me the most is the metric. How on earth do you measure laziness? Regional Secretary Elin Suharliah said the process would be “strictly data-driven.” “No one will be named without verified evidence. Every decision will be based on objective data,” she told the Jakarta Globe. That should be the nail in this scheme’s coffin. First, laziness isn’t merely subjective; it’s entirely context-dependent. There are many people who excel at making themselves look busy in front of their bosses but are actually doing next to nothing. There are some jobs that require a person to be constantly doing things, while other jobs necessitate some moments for reflection. Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to measure laziness between professions. All journalists look like vagabonds compared to lawyers, while the average HR manager is moribund beside someone on a factory floor.
The biggest problem is that this scheme will be “strictly data-driven.” That sounds like the fairest way, but the big problem with any move towards fairness or equality is that one must reduce everything to common but mostly useless metrics. Communist command economies were slow to realize that the main consequence of their obsession with pre-designed, measurable outcomes was fraud. Nobody was lazy because everyone fudged the numbers. Likewise, the global obsession with bureaucratic “efficiency” – from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to the civil service reforms in Indonesia and Vietnam – has entirely missed the point that “efficiency” doesn’t mean “effectiveness.” You could hire McKinsey to prove how cost-cutting “efficiencies” will work in the future, but the reduction of every job down to a list of spreadsheet-suitable core responsibilities or outcomes overlooks either what cannot be quantified or what the assessor doesn’t know.
For example, I used to drink in a pub that, one day, was taken over by new management. The first thing they did was fire the main bartender, who they deemed lazy and inefficient because he took a long time to pour beers, spent less time than his colleagues cleaning tables and collecting orders, and occupied most of his shift laughing and joking with the punters. Within weeks, the pub was empty. The owners soon realized, after several of us regulars pointed it out to them, that the barman was “slow” because, by spending most of his time chatting with customers, he was attracting a regular clientele. Many people would venture inside because they knew that, even if their friends weren’t there, they could at least have a good laugh with the barman. Some would visit just for that. What appeared as laziness, because the barman’s job was reduced to quantifiable but ignorant metrics, had been the establishment’s main asset.
What you actually want, as much across society as within a single workplace, is diversity. (Diversity of opportunity and outcome, after all, ought to be preferable to the equality of these things because it’s far better to have 10 uneven ways of progression than a single, commonly assessable route.) In a company or a West Javan provincial agency, you want some people who diligently do what’s asked of them but won’t ever go beyond their duties; some people who take shortcuts; some who are obviously over-skilled and can do the work in less time than their colleagues; and, occasionally, an out-and-out skiver.
After all, there is no way a spreadsheet can tell you what the laziest member brings to a team. Maybe they are the funniest in the office or the one who counsels their colleagues during times of personal hardship. My guess is that if every West Javan bureaucrat is judged entirely by their “laziness,” you won’t get a more effective civil service, but one in which every official starts to occupy their days with activities that make them look more efficient than their colleagues, but which aren’t all too effective.
I did say that I don’t have a problem with using social embarrassment to change behavior. But the West Javan scheme is actually rather ridiculous. The probable consequence of this ham-fisted approach will be a fair share of stress, online abuse, and doxxing for the “outed” bureaucrats, which will probably reduce overall worker productivity. Additionally, publishing their personal information online is likely illegal. In fact, it’s actually a rather silly idea from a psychological perspective. If Governor Dedi Mulyadi really wanted to embarrass his staff into working harder, he’d host gala dinners every few months to which all West Javan officials and their families would have to attend. There, the list of the laziest staff would be read out loud, in front of the bureaucrat’s loved ones. That’s a few hours most people would strive to avoid.