Smoking bureaucracy...

Every organisation comes with its own bureaucracy, and with that comes form filling.

My first office job at the tender age of 19 was temping for an international bank in HR Administration. When I joined, they were still reeling from having their name changed from ‘personnel’ as it was seen as an un welcome Americanism in their eyes. We shared one networked PC with email between 12 of us, but we all had our own ash tray and adding machine on our desk.

For about 3 months, I happily processed season ticket loan applications. My proudest moment being when my boss agreed to use my design for a new form when it came to reprinting due to a brand redesign.

Today global organisations of the shape and size of that one are proud to have all these forms as digitised applications on the Intranet, linked to a monolith integrated back end Oracle type system for HR and Finance (still called accounts back in the day). But why wouldn’t you, we all have a networked PC on our desk and having anything resembling an ashtray is a firing offence, no matter how many breaks you take instead. So we submit a form and authorisation requests and permissions effortlessly fly between inboxes.

But digital form filling has created 2 problems for me:

1. Amending a form to reflect new requirements and requests is now a major change request nightmare. We don’t just change the form and print some more; databases and workflows have to updated. Most forms I seem to fill in now are not fit for purpose, and you need to be an expert in creative writing to explain what you really want in the character limited free text fields;


2. And this is the most important one, not taking the form to be signed. This used to be the opportunity to chat with the pretty girls in HR, the smart people in accounts or the curious people in IT. Most of all, it was the opportunity to interact with your boss. To chat about the holiday featured in the request for time off form and to build a relationship beyond an email.

Best of all, it was when you could to sit in their office and ponce one of their cigarettesfor a change.