Many have told us that working in municipal public service has been their most rewarding professional experience. They have talked about the opportunity to have a positive impact on their city. They have also more candidly talked about the pleasures associated with the wielding of power. Others have spoken of the interesting nature of the challenges they have faced. When we took on our role in City government we looked forward to this kind of work environment. 

However, this not been our experience. We have found working for the City of New York frequently boring and frustrating. We haven’t had much impact. We haven’t experienced that assertion of power. The longer we spent in the service of City government, the less challenging it became.

We have written previously about the ways in which the City is a progressive and humane employer. The City is particularly successful in attracting and retaining a diverse group of employees, certainly reflective of the city’s demographics, and much more so than in the private sector. For all its faults, the civil service system does provide a point of entry for skilled workers from demographic groups otherwise overlooked by the private sector. Many highly skilled recent immigrants, particularly with engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical) educations at non-US institutions are able to find employment with the City. 

While not as generous as they once may have been (for non-uniform workers), City employment benefits are still what employees in the 21st Century are entitled to expect. Health insurance options are comprehensive and inexpensive, paid vacation and sick time can accumulate, protections are in place against harassment, discrimination and retaliation of various sorts. Opportunities for training and advancement exist, particularly for front line workers. Our agency has a professional organizational development team that tries to do its best. Various messaging from employing agencies, as well as from the central Department of Citywide Administrative Service attempts to be welcoming and encourages tolerance and respect. 

But, unfortunately, and despite the systems in place, our day-to-day work experience has been of a “hostile work environment.” Generally, City work has been depersonalized, made unrewarding and is subject to frequent arbitrary exercises of managerial authority. 

  1. Lack of discretion. 

In our position we had very little discretion over our work. In previous jobs in the private sector we could actually make decisions about things. We could decide to buy things. We could initiate programs. We could hire people of our choice to do jobs. None of this was possible in City government. We had no budget authority. We couldn’t buy the tools our staff required. We couldn’t reduce or increase the size of our staff depending on the work available. We couldn’t create new ways to solve problems and attempt to implement them. We had to work with the resources already in place to perform the tasks that they were already doing. We could coach people in how to do their jobs better (which was by far the most rewarding part our job). 

For most of our tenure we were prohibited from speaking or meeting with people from outside our agency without permission. We had never experienced this before. This cut us off from information from a wide range of sources. It prevented us from collaborating with others. It made it difficult, often impossible, to solve simple problems that came to us either from other agencies or from the public. This was another means of limiting our discretion over our work. It was infantilizing and demoralizing. 

Diluting managerial decision making even more, is the institutional preference for group decision making. Most decisions required multiple large meetings. The radical democracy of City government administration meant that each had their say (although those higher up in the bureaucracy were more closely paid attention to). Often, responsibility for a decision was broadly dispersed – making managerial authority even more circumscribed. This had the advantage of making it impossible to blame anyone for a bad decision. 

2.The importance of hierarchy. 

Hierarchy was more important in decision making than experience or expertise. Decision making was about power relationships. The higher up in the pecking order one was, the more one was deferred to – regardless of one’s knowledge of the subject matter of the decision. Our experience in the private sector was that even if an individual did not have the most senior title, if they had the subject matter expertise, their advice and counsel were respected and taken seriously. In government, powerful officials made essentially random, willful decisions because they could. Policy making and discretion came with power. At the end of the day, decision making was about the excise of power by individuals who formally had it. 

This situation made work unrewarding. The further down in the hierarchy you were, the less discretion and power you had over your work and the more powerless you were and felt. Those on the bottom had their work tightly circumscribed by those above them. Given that, it is no wonder that operations level government employees are often viewed as lazy drones, attempting to cut corners, work less and of having no initiative. The system makes their jobs more boring and enervating than they might otherwise be. As result, people don’t feel invested in their work. 

We have never had a job before where going out to lunch seemed like a luxury. Those with power above us expected us to be available from about eight A.M. to about eight P.M., five days a week, and generally to be available on the weekends, if needed. If emails and calls were not responded to immediately, supervisors got annoyed. And, of course, the CityTime system, about we have written, provided no incentives to employees to make themselves available beyond nine-to-five because that time was impossible to record. 

Yes, professional employees are generally expected to take responsibility for their work, and to be available to the organization on short notice. But that generally comes with professional responsibility and control over work. Because we had so little discretion over our work, it was essentially not professional. When officials called us, they were looking for data about our work, to complain about a mistake, or to order us to do something. They were not calling to take advantage of our professional judgement; or to confer with us about decision making. Almost always, the subject of the calls had an artificial deadline associated with the work, generated by the power of the people involved – not by the requirements of the task. 

3. There are too many people.

We were rarely busy. As far as we could tell, our staff were rarely busy. Everyone tried hard to appear to be busy. Folks talked about how busy they were. Folks complained constantly about the demands made on them by their work. And yet, we spent hours, days during our tenure in City government reading. We tried to keep our reading as work related as we could – so we read non-fiction rather than novels at work. Because of CityTime and City rules, no non-City work could be done during City work hours and the City expected City work to be done at one’s desk. So, ideally, in order to comply with the rules, if one had no work to do, one was to sit at one’s desk with their hands folded, staring straight ahead (and not surfing the internet), something like in first grade. Also, seeking additional work was not done – as it was seen as getting out of one’s lane; straying into other peoples’ domains. 

We had too many people for most of the work we had to do. However, for one or two of the functions we managed, we had a very small percentage of the staff required to actually do the job that was our brief. We made do. Assigning underemployed people to the work where we were understaffed wasn’t possible; in part because it wasn’t practical (due to the work sites or the expertise required) and in part because the civil service and union rules prohibited people from working outside of their job description.

In our case, our underemployment was as a result of the hierarchy not taking full advantage of our expertise and experience, the hierarchy’s removal of discretion from our work and the impossibility of taking initiative to take on new projects or do things in new ways. That would be regarded by the hierarchy as impermissible coloring outside of the lines. Most of what we were called on to do in interacting with supervision was providing data about the performance of our business unit up the hierarchy. Often that data was found to be unsatisfactory – but we were rarely allowed to improve the way data was collected or the way in which staff work was organized.

The other task that took up our time was compliance work. Our business unit was frequently audited by both the City and State Comptrollers. Much time was spent providing information to auditors and informing them about the manner in which the work was done. As the audit reports were being written, we were required to respond to drafts of audit reports. The hierarchy was deeply involved in the preparation of these responses, requiring many meetings and drafts. The hierarchy did not contribute to the drafting, or defend the work of our business unit to the auditors and their inquiries. They did not have our backs. They sat back and criticized our work and quibbled over our drafting. They wanted to distance themselves from responsibility for the substance of the business unit’s work, which they micro-managed. We also spent a good deal of time preparing data for internal reports (many of those data points measured things that were important decades ago, but no longer had relevance. It was impossible to change them, we were told by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, because that would make the data “not comparable.” The fact that the data measured nothing of value was unimportant to them.). We took a wide range of required trainings on conflicts of interest, sexual harassment (more than once a year), government ethics and preventing various forms of discrimination. We filled out various disclosure forms. 

We spent a very small portion of our time in City government engaging in problem solving, helping people or trying to provide improved services to city residents and visitors. We occasionally suggested ways in which we might be more useful to City government, and those inquiries were never responded to. We were to keep in our lane. 

Senior people in the hierarchy seemed to always be busy. Rushing from meeting to meeting. Cutting phone conversations short with subordinates because someone more important was calling on the other line. Supervisors often seemed overwhelmed. They failed to read the many memos they demanded, prior to meetings. They seemed not to have time to respond to emails and calls from subordinates. And yet, meetings that were scheduled for an hour always had to take an hour – even if the business at had took only a few minutes. Meetings with supervisors seemed to meander along, especially late in the day. Meetings involved redundant numbers of people. Air time at meetings was frequently taken up with talk of weekend plans and the weather, as well as with endless self-congratulation about minor accomplishments. Our guess is that even many Commissioners often don’t have enough to do. 

4. No recognition of performance. 

We had never previously worked in a job for more than a year or two without being given more responsibility, being promoted and having our compensation substantially increased. We recognize that the last of these wasn’t what government service was about. What employees were rewarded for in government, though, was obsequiousness to power. It was the sole currency of the realm. The few people we saw advance were people who flattered their bosses and entertained their willfulness. This sounds naïve, maybe even trite. Of course, this happens in all organizations and bureaucracies. But we experienced nothing like this in any of my prior private sector positions. In City government, responsiveness to power was the exclusive talent being rewarded (we suppose that shouldn’t be surprising in an enterprise that is political at its heart). There was little recognition of a high level of skill, the ability to improve efficiency or increase revenue or, particularly, improving the job satisfaction and performance of employees. Being useful to the boss, or having a political network within government, was what mattered in terms of rewards and advancement. And, as we have discussed, advancement through civil service tests seemed to have little relationship to professional ability. The tests seemed not to measure anything of value for managerial positions. 

It was another dispiriting part of the work environment that it seemed not to matter how well you did your job. You did not receive recognition or reward for high performance (longevity was often recognized). We tried to praise our excellent employees for their frequent good work, and this was appreciated and had some value in an otherwise unrewarding work environment – but without the ability to provide tangible rewards they were essentially empty gestures.

For example, at one point, upon a manager’s retirement, we promoted a really excellent first line supervisor into a managerial position. This person was a woman and a person of color. However, the bureaucracy never gave this individual the increased salary or the more senior title that came with the added responsibility. After about a year in the managerial position without the raise, the person asked to be returned to her supervisory position. It was maddening. We were unable to do a good thing, even after the expenditure of considerable effort to get the person into the position.

As a result of this culture, and these often obsolete and often overly restrictive systems, City government work was, unfortunately, generally unrewarding. We suspect that this produces widespread dissatisfaction with work and poor morale. We certainly felt unchallenged and unappreciated. But then again, maybe, despite our fancy education and wide experience, we’re simply a lazy, unimaginative, useless, time serving bureaucrat. Like in the novels of Kafka, the system produces the behaviors it claims that it is designed to prevent.