Real-time statistics of Public Service Employees at work?

positron

Government of India has just launched a website that shows real-time attendance figures of staff at all government offices across the country.

http://attendance.gov.in/

I wonder if Irish Government would consider such a thing? :pac:

solomafioso

RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE JOE!

wes

positron wrote: »

Government of India has just launched a website that shows real-time attendance figures of staff at all government offices across the country.

http://attendance.gov.in/

I wonder if Irish Government would consider such a thing? :pac:

How much did that system cost, that could have been better spent on you know providing services, as opposed to checking if someone showed up or not......... BTW, someone showing up doesn't tell us a whole lot about the level of service provided or anything you know useful. Pointless exercise, and a waste of money from a country where million still live below the poverty line.

BMJD

Clock in. Go to sleep. Look good on the interwebs. Result.

Barely There

Little Brother is watching you.

AnonoBoy

I thought that's what Boards.ie was?

Aren't we all Public Service Employees wasting the taxpayer's money?

Riskymove

what on earth is going on at the Ministry for Urban Development?

Lovely Bloke

As a person who has worked in "Real Time" analysis of a pretty large call centre this is unbelievable data to get a look at.

Tiddlypeeps

wes wrote: »

How did that system cost, that could have been better spent on you know providing services, as opposed to checking if someone showed up or not......... BTW, someone showing up doesn't tell us a whole lot about the level of service provided or anything you know useful. Pointless exercise, and a waste of money from a country where million still live below the poverty line.

That is not complicated software, if they were charged a large amount of money for writing it then they were ripped off. Unless I'm missing some features. The biggest expense was probably installing the software on all the devices but they likely have IT people on staff anyway so shouldn't have been anything major. It's very likely something like this will pay for itself very quickly because it discourages people from taking unnecessary sick days or not tracking days off.

As long as the public don't have access to data at an individual level then I have no problem with a system like this. It seems like a good way of adding transparency to the system.

Tar.Aldarion

being there has no indication on whether work is being done, or efficiency.

wes

Tiddlypeeps wrote: »

As long as the public don't have access to data at an individual level then I have no problem with a system like this. It seems like a good way of adding transparency to the system.

Firstly, I highly doubt the project was implemented cheaply, such silliness never is.

Secondly, what tranparency is provided really? So someone showed up for work. So What? It doesn't tell us anything about if they did anything at all that day. Seems like a simple case of looking like there providing transparency, but its really doesn't give us anything.

barry181091

wes wrote: »

Firstly, I highly doubt the project was implemented cheaply, such silliness never is.

Secondly, what tranparency is provided really? So someone showed up for work. So What? It doesn't tell us anything about if they did anything at all that day. Seems like a simple case of looking like there providing transparency, but its really doesn't give us anything.

Very very pretty front-end. He is right though - this cost A LOT of rupees to set up. More than they will ever get back in real efficiency tbh :P

Btw, Council workers now have to clock in and clock out under new rules. Has it improved efficiency? No, just annoyed employees.

Imagine being an engineer and having to clock in :rolleyes:

Iwasfrozen

wes wrote: »

Firstly, I highly doubt the project was implemented cheaply, such silliness never is.

Secondly, what tranparency is provided really? So someone showed up for work. So What? It doesn't tell us anything about if they did anything at all that day. Seems like a simple case of looking like there providing transparency, but its really doesn't give us anything.

India has a very big problem with public sector absenteeism. Even if it cost a lot of money to set up (and I doubt it since IT grads are ten a penny in India) it will be well worth its cost. We could do with something like that here.

Tiddlypeeps

wes wrote: »

Firstly, I highly doubt the project was implemented cheaply, such silliness never is.

Secondly, what tranparency is provided really? So someone showed up for work. So What? It doesn't tell us anything about if they did anything at all that day. Seems like a simple case of looking like there providing transparency, but its really doesn't give us anything.

Just because the system isn't completely transparent doesn't mean this move doesn't add some transparency. Someone is much more likely to get work done if they are there than if they aren't. Obviously it's no guarantee that they will be productive, but it's a step int he right direction. It would be very difficult in a lot of departments to turn up to work and literally do nothing all day. I can't imagine in Ireland a nurse or doctor turning up for work and not being called out on sitting in the canteen all day, whereas they may not be called out on taking lots of unnecessary sick days. Desk jobs are pretty much the only ones I can think of where you might get away with turning up and doing literally nothing all day long, but even the vast majority of those would be noticed.

It's not even close to a perfect system, but getting people to actually turn up is a pretty big advantage.

barry181091 wrote: »

Very very pretty front-end. He is right though - this cost A LOT of rupees to set up. More than they will ever get back in real efficiency tbh :P

Btw, Council workers now have to clock in and clock out under new rules. Has it improved efficiency? No, just annoyed employees.

Imagine being an engineer and having to clock in :rolleyes:

That dashboard looks like a cookie cutter straight out of the box dashboard. It's possible they paid a fortune for it, but fairly unlikely in a country that is renowned for it's abundance of cheap software engineers. I can only imagine the number of bids they would have received on that tender. The tender process their is the same as the rest of the world, it's a transparent process to stop corruption. Corruption can still happen, but typically this is in the form of awarding the tender to a friend even if they aren't the best candidate but the bid still needs to be legit and still needs to be in the same ballpark price as the other bids. I have no idea how to go about finding that particular tender and the odds of it being in english are slim. Do you actually know how much it cost or what are you basing your assumption on?

Where can I read up on how the new clock in system has effected attendance and efficiency within he county councils? That would be interesting to read about.

That's also fairly different to the indian scenario, there is no accountability to the public with a clock in system. If a particular department has very low levels of attendance then something is clearly wrong at a management level. In a closed system it very likely ends there. There is very little incentive for anyone at a higher level to step in and address the issue. If the information is exposed to the public then they can lobby the government to reduce costs in the inefficient area if it's a case of there being more staff than needed, or to implement better disciplinary measures if that area is clearly under strain.

Could you imagine the public outcry if staff attendance levels in the HSE were dramatically lower than the average? People on one of the many long waiting lists wouldn't be too happy to find out the consultants or technicians in the department they are waiting on take on average 20 sick days a year. Just incase it's not obvious this is a made up example to show a possible outcome of this sort of system.

Victor

Tiddlypeeps wrote: »

Could you imagine the public outcry if staff attendance levels in the HSE were dramatically lower than the average?

We already know that HSE absenteeism is high: (a) staff are constantly exposed to large numbers of people, many of whom have infectious diseases (b) you don't want sick staff with infectious diseases exposing themselves to thousands of other staff and already sick patients.

Tiddlypeeps

Victor wrote: »

We already know that HSE absenteeism is high: (a) staff are constantly exposed to large numbers of people, many of whom have infectious diseases (b) you don't want sick staff with infectious diseases exposing themselves to thousands of other staff and already sick patients.

Do we? High compared to what? Where are these numbers track or is it just speculation? Either way they should still be meeting averages. You can compare the various hospitals with each other, and with absentee levels in hospitals of similar sizes in other countries. HSE was probably a bad example because you don't want to do anything that might encourage a sick employee to come in, but even there you can put measures in place if employees are clearly taking the piss like requiring a doctors note for sick days if they don't already etc.

I don't see any harm in tracking those numbers and making them available to the public. Worst case scenario is it's redundant because absentee rates are perfectly normal, but it shouldn't be an expensive system to implement so the worst case scenario is pretty unlikely.

Cookie_Monster

2 present out of 50,000 at the moment, quiet day...

Also 50k is tiny, must be a very very small subset. Surely the Indian public service employs millions to run a country that size?

Victor

Tiddlypeeps wrote: »

Do we?

It's an important enough issue that they publish monthly reports: http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/Publications/corporate/Absenteeism_Reports_.html

http://www.publicpolicy.ie/absenteeism-hse/

Absenteeism In The HSE
11 Sep 2013

High rates of absenteeism in the HSE often attract significant media and political attention due to the associated costs to the taxpayer. In addition to a substantial sick-pay bill, absenteeism may lead to increases in agency and overtime costs as replacements are found for sick and absent workers. This sentiment was expounded in 2012 by Health Minister James Reilly who claimed that the high expenditure on agency staff in the HSE is largely attributable to high levels of absenteeism.

More: https://www.google.ie/search?q=HSE+absenteeism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb&gws_rd=cr&ei=MVw0VKb9J6iM7Abx34CoAw

positron

Cookie_Monster wrote:

Also 50k is tiny, must be a very very small subset. Surely the Indian public service employs millions to run a country that size?

Its being rolled out to various departments and organisations within the public sector in India. You are right about millions of people in public sector - Indian Railways alone employs over a million people.

Capt'n Midnight

Hey, let's fit critter cam to all our civil servants , and web enabled shock collars so we can keep them busy

moc moc a moc

Attendance is irrelevant if all they do is sit around playing table quizzes all day, or using the office whiteboard for an in-depth illustration last night's football game.

The above is not speculation; I've seen it happen with my own eyes.

jimgoose

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Hey, let's fit critter cam to all our civil servants , and web enabled shock collars so we can keep them busy

I don't see why not. I'm paying for the gowls.

dxhound2005

The Chinese are a great bunch of lads when it comes to this sort of thing.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/07/world/asia/china-phantom-jobs/

Hong Kong (CNN) -- China has removed 162,629 "phantom staff" from government payrolls, as Beijing presses on with a campaign against official corruption and misuse of public money, state media reported.

Hebei province in central China was the worst offender, with 55,793 officials found to be getting paid even though they never worked, followed by Sichuan and Henan, state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday