Bureaucrats: 

• Annoying
• Boring
• Controlling
• Dull
• Energy sucking
• Fail to follow-up
• Galling
• Hard Core rule-followers
• lack Innovation
• Jack asses
• horde Knowledge
• Love complication
• Think they are Mighty
• Love to say to say No
• Over-complicate everything
• Purse their lips when a rule is broken or bent
• behavior should be Quashed before it spreads
• Restrictive
• Short sighted
• Touchy
• Do not Understand the roadblocks they put up
• LoVe to have you fill out forms
• Clock Watchers
• X
• Y
• Z

Yea, I’ve been dealing with a lot of bureaucracy this past week.  When I was asked to fill out yet another form, I remembered this is why people hate HR.  We are too closely associated with meaningless bureaucracy.

It’s not that there isn’t a reason to fill out the form. There is, or there used to be but no one has asked if we still need that form in the last five years.  And even if we do need it,  do we need it handwritten and faxed in?

If you look at the list above, most of those words or phrases have been used to describe HR.  Part of the HR/bureaucracy association is because our jobs are rarely understood and we don’t communicate what we do very well.

There may be perfectly good reasons why a form needs to be filled out or a rule followed but before we put another road block in a person’s way, lets ask ourselves some questions:

1. Do we really need this form/policy/procedure?

2. Does this requirement/policy/rule make progress easier? Or does it hinder it? ‘

3. Is customer service important to how we do our job?

What do you think? How do you beat the bureaucracy label? Do you have any words starting with X or Y or Z that describe bureaucrats?