Stevek76 wrote: ↑27 Jan 2023, 10:47am
Most big organisations, private and public, are a management basket case in my experience. I'm not sure that one really has an easy answer, other than long term efforts to improve management culture in the uk generally.
The graphs posted earlier are however still more relevant here. Dubious management but actually funded properly (along with social care funded properly) = decent patient outcomes. Dubious management with poor funding and unnecessary demand loading from bare bones social care provision = rubbish patient outcomes.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was an olde fashioned civil servant working at a low-grade level in a local office. The management there was minimal, since the traditions of how to do the various jobs were long-honed, well-described in various manuals, taught effectively in a 13 week induction period for new staff and practiced without anything other than a series of work-checks by a simple hierarchy of supervisor-managers.
There were a couple of motives on top of the public service ethic that tended to encourage good work rather than bad - semi-annual audits by the NAO and by the regional office auditors. Error rates, fraud signals and much else were assiduously detected by those auditors, who enjoyed finding the most minor of such things.
The penalties were nothing worse than a poor reputation for an office found wanting. Error rates of 1 - 1.5% were just acceptable (and had to have the associated cases corrected toot-sweet)! Anything more - or (worse case, a fraud detected) were a case for more serious probing along with the descent of the office's reputation into the pit of the damned.
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In short, the staff managed themselves and their work within a light framework of well-honed traditions, checks and a culture in which pride in one's work was prominent.
Then the Thatcher Thing came and everything was "reviewed and improved" (double-speak for "interfered with and degraded").
"Management" suddenly seemed to be the be-all and end-all, especially "management" operated from on-high by ideological dogmatists that we now call neoliberals. It all became about profit and loss, especially profit for various private companies brought in to "manage" various aspects of the work "with business efficiencies". The "efficiencies" were only about them making loadsa profit by diverting the government income stream from citizen services to shareholders and CEOs of the outsourced robbers and despoiler companies.
From the Tory instigator point of view, this was double-good. They could service their mates in the private sector by outsourcing, PFIing and otherwise handing over as much as they could of public services to private profit making. In addition, they could contract with those private profit makers to do the various dirty deeds that resulted in less service going to "the undeserving poor" that Tories see as the majority recipients of public services.
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Profit making business - especially of the modern kind acting without of any framework of moral responsibility or similar wider considerations supportive of the society on which they prey - is the dirty oil to the life-giving water of public service. The two don't mix. The oil floats on top and pollutes everyone trying to get at the public service mode of working and living.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes