Eaglelord17
Army.ca Veteran
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This is normal in most places. My workplace used to employ 180 front line workers, 10 planners, and 3 supervisors. Now it employs 40 front line workers, 10 planners and 3 supervisors. The current 40 front line workers are also less efficient than 40 of those 180 were because of constant switching and changing of machines so they don’t get as efficient as they used to on a process.At one point last year there were more people doing dashboard summary reports than supporting fire protection and damage control systems for the RCN. I don't know if pointing that out helped get the billets filled, but the amount of 'policy and process' people seems to grow while actual technical support is stagnant. What's funny is they generally ignore our input when looking at processes changes, despite not actually using the processes the are looking at changing.
Part of it is just people refusing to re-evaluate the whole situation. If you have 3 supervisor positions, it doesn’t matter that they are handling 1/3 the employees, you don’t give up those positions. Mind you paperwork requirements of management had also gone up substantially so they basically are just managing emails rather than any actual front line supervising.
Part of it is also a lack of actual workers to make stuff happen. Look at the CAF if your trade is say able to have 100 people and you have only 40, those upper ranks are likely mostly filled and the lower ones tend to be where the vacancies are despite the lower ranks being the ones doing the actual work.
The government needs to bring in a external effiency group to evaluate what we have, what we need it to do, and who to cut. Thats how the proper cuts are made. Sometimes it is worthwhile to completely reinvent the wheel to a more efficient system.Problem is that every axe swinging exercise, ends up cutting frontline staff, because the useless types only job is protecting themselves from being cut. meanwhile the Frontliners are to busy working to see the axe.
My previous employer did this. Basically they had this really attractive, friendly, young female come in to evaluate the jobs (male dominated industry). Most of the guys who had a lot of down time in their jobs would spend as much time trying to talk to her as possible. You can guess which jobs got substantial man power cuts or reassessed to do more work.