Procrastination is the action or habit of delaying activities or situations that must be attended to, replacing them with other more irrelevant or pleasant situations. Based on this definition, we can understand that those tasks that are most likely to be postponed are those that do not entertain us.
I found this term with its definition online precisely at a time when I am suffering from this work and productive dysfunction. Today I had to work on improving the draft of a book that I am writing and that is getting complicated. And you see what I dedicate my time to… Procrastination is a natural tendency of people both in their personal life and in their work dimension. It is shocking to think about the number of romantic partners who would have been saved and children who would not have been lost if we had not fallen into the trap of procrastination. But this is another topic since in this forum we only need to discuss the impact of procrastination in the workplace of the Public Administration. We are going to present a set of reflections in this regard:
First, delaying the work activities that attract us the least is a natural tendency that is usually overcome through different mechanisms: the self-demand and self-discipline of the public employee, the objective urgency to overcome the obstacle, the supervision and pressure of the administrative person in charge, the pressure of the group before increasingly collaborative work dynamics, etc. It is these work logics that allow it to emerge that one’s activity is becoming the bottleneck of the project so that one is forced to dedicate one’s time to something one does not like for whatever reason.
Second, is the tendency to procrastinate more pronounced in face-to-face work or in remote work? The answer is ambivalent. On the one hand, it may seem that the almost physical pressure of in-person work can favor correct attention in a timely manner to those tasks that we find undesirable. But it can also be argued that with remote work we can enjoy an environmental quality of greater tranquility and peace that allows us to face the most thankless and complex tasks. It is common for workers to leave a weekly space to manage what they consider “browns” and take advantage of teleworking to solve them fluently.
Third, procrastination becomes a very serious problem in the management of complex public projects in which the participation of a team that works collaboratively is necessary. Public work is usually channeled, in large part, through these dynamics that make them very vulnerable to being affected, at one time or another, by a public employee who is late and breaks the work dynamic. This contingency places the administrative person responsible for this project in a position of constant alert that usually generates a lot of stress. These potential dysfunctions are usually overcome, but with a lot of collective and, especially, managerial effort.
Fourth and most relevant, what worries me is not so much procrastination but the possible response to this challenge in a superficial or epidermal way. That is to say: the thankless task is assumed, but it is done in a weak or even frivolous manner, without considering the core of the problem or addressing the intervention that is really necessary. It is about the atavistic dynamic of throwing out balls that do not provide added value but rather negative value since someone will have to address, again, the substance of the issue, be it another employee, the administrative manager or again the same employee, but with an enormous effort to return the unplayed ball to him. This type of pathological work behavior has always existed, but it seems that it has increased significantly in recent years. The reasons may be many and some very deep and complex: we live in times of change in which there is an erosion of authority and trust in multiple dimensions, of relaxation of responsibility since it is politically correct to understand all types of problems and contingencies. that may affect a worker, even if they are bizarre and inconsistent, etc. The result is that it is now easier than ever to respond to the challenge of procrastination in a superficial and formal way.
Fifth, it would be necessary to analyze whether there is any cause-effect relationship between the major changes in the new organization of the Administration’s work and this tendency to respond to the phenomenon of procrastination in a light and insubstantial way. From my point of view, the three big news are teleworking, collaborative work and the unstoppable aging of public employees. Could these three ingredients explain this phenomenon? It is not clear and will depend on many factors, but there are some elements that lead us to think that there is some causality. Teleworking means that teams have less and less space to share physical proximity with colleagues and the administrative manager. In this context, it is easier to generate (and more complex to monitor) insubstantial contributions. The virtualization of work can diffuse these bad work practices. The same can be said, although it is a paradox, with collaborative work. These bad practices are obviously not the norm, but they can subtly empower employees who are more prone to procrastination. Another very different issue is that linked to the aging of public employees. When a worker is aware that his employment relationship is near or in the final phase, he may have the natural temptation to relax. It depends on each personal and professional profile, but there may be a general inertia in which seniors become less and less involved in work dynamics due to exhaustion, lack of incentives to retrain, professional disappointments, or considering that it makes no sense to repeat the dynamics. typical of Sisyphus (so prone in the Administration), due to resistance to the profound change that the organization of work is experiencing, due to that feeling that one has little time left to remain in the convent…, etc.
These negative trends are overcome through the overexertion of the most dynamic and self-demanding employees and thanks to increasingly stressed administrative managers who spend more time attending to work not resolved by their employees than performing truly managerial functions. But perhaps this extra effort is not enough given the empirical evidence that during the post-pandemic years, public administrations respond increasingly worse, both in time and in content and content, to the needs of citizens.