Cutting what?

The world's press is full of dark forebodings about the scale of the reductions to be made by every responsible economy in public service spending.  Here in Britain the broadsheets and tabloids alike are gleefully full of hyperventilating predictions of 'swingeing cuts'.

The UK has to find something like £170,000,000,000 in savings in the coming years. The rhetorical game for the politicians is to frame a 'cut' as an abstract necessity rather than as the loss of someone's job, which is what it usually amounts to.

On a long drive over the Bank Holiday weekend I listened to a Merlin Mann podcast which had a topic like 'Finding More Creative Time', a perennial favourite with the GTD crowd.  Part of Mann's argument was the need to combat the pernicious nature of a 'meetings culture'.  We're all aware of the effect that meetings, especially the compulsory yet unagendaed, standing (ie automatically recurring) kind have on morale and also productivity.  He rightfully points out that the most effective, most creative teams tend to have the fewest formal meetings.

How much time do public servants spend in meetings?  The excellent blogs of Winston Smith  (assisted housing), Frank Chalk (teaching) and David Copperfield (policing) each critique the British public service environment from the vantage point of front-line services.  Time 'wasted' in meetings is a consistent complaint in all three.  Meetings mean that less gets done.  That front-line staff hate meetings as much as bureaucrats and consultants thrive on them is all you need to know.

So consider this: -

Every untaken team building away day, additional-yet compulsory-diversity training session or off-site OH&S refresher represents a potential cost saving, perhaps even a retrenchment avoided

If we're having to do more with less then surely we can start by getting more from the people we currently hire*.  A crackdown on useless meetings would have the same fiscal effect as a freeze on new hires. 

My business is based on face-to-face delivery so a total ban on meetings would kill me.  What Mann is really stressing is ensuring that meeting time is seen as a scarce resource.  I work on a rule of thumb that the opportunity cost of putting one salesperson in a room with me for a day is  £900 per representative.  I doubt that too many public servants have the same reason to pause before blocking out colleagues' diary-time via MS-Outlook.

* The flaw in the argument might be that there is less incentive to reward productivity in the public sector.  If less meetings in a hospital = more productive nurses = less nurses.  That the hospital saves money is cold comfort to the staff deemed surplus to requirement