Self-Service Administration: The Administrative Department Shrinks, the Workload Grows

// Translation of my 'How hard can it be?'-column in this weekend's de Volkskrant .

Everyone who works in a somewhat larger organization will recognize this: increasingly more administrative work has been shifted to online self-service portals. Filling out and entering your own receipts. Entering your new address details in the HR portal yourself. Managing the accounting of your projects on your own.

I don't mind, I'm not too lazy to handle such tasks myself. However, I do sometimes wonder whether it has actually made things more efficient.

The administrative and HR departments may have become smaller and claim to be doing the same work with fewer staff, but one can question whether less time is actually being spent on administration.

Here's how it goes with travel claims now: the employee looks up the process on the intranet, reads the procedure, and logs into the system. But the first five minutes are spent figuring out how the form works. Oh yes, one of the drop-down menus on the form doesn't work in Safari, only in Firefox. "You just have to know," they said on the phone at the helpdesk. The employee then has to email the secretariat to ask what the project code for such-and-such project was again. "Ah, so it's about the second set of four digits, that's where I have to enter them?" Then, they have to take photos of all the receipts with their smartphone, or if they're feeling particularly masochistic, scan them using the copier.

The old way with travel claims: a trained professional who works several hours a day with the administrative software and has a specialized scanner, scans all the receipts, fills in almost everything, and asks the other employee to complete some details.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of these digital self-service services are one big inefficiency operation, making it seem as if there are cost savings because the department that used to do the work is shrinking. But if you were to measure the total time now spent organization-wide, it could well be more.

When measuring the success of such operations, often the focus is only on whether a certain department—HR, administration, secretariat—is growing or shrinking, rather than how much time everyone is spending on a particular process as a whole.

To encourage efficiency, it would help if each time a support department asks you to do more tasks yourself, you bill the time difference to that support department. So if a travel claim used to take five minutes and now takes twenty? Off you go, send an invoice for fifteen minutes to the financial department. But first, look up in the self-service portal how exactly to create an invoice. And, of course, also invoice the time it takes to do that.

>> Read the column in Dutch at de Volkskrant.