Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology the Latest Organization Overrun by Administrators and in Deep Trouble. By Rick Morton, excerpted from an exclusive in the new online newspaper “The Saturday Paper.”
The workplace culture at the Bureau of Meteorology [BoM] is so toxic that a man was hospitalised twice for psychiatric care, another had a heart attack while working extreme overtime, and was asked to come back earlier than a doctor advised, and at least five more staff took stress leave because of panic attacks and anxiety regarding management oversight. …
Gag orders have been issued to prevent forecasters from speaking to journalists unless their comments are pre-approved. …
The recent rebranding revealed much:
In the context of a heavily criticised launch of a new brand for the BoM — in conception and especially in execution — multiple staff from different corners of the agency told The Saturday Paper that the disastrous public relations strategy is symptomatic of a bigger, more serious problem.
“This branding thing is a stupid little symptom which reveals more about what is actually going on at the bureau than most people would expect,” one employee says. …
Under these reforms, which began after the appointment of Andrew Johnson as director of the BoM, regional forecasting centres in every state and territory have been shuttered. State managers have been sacked and a national desk has been created instead.
Johnson has pushed the project with fervour. The new branding, complete with public insistence that the Bureau of Meteorology be referred to respectfully as the Bureau, was, according to sources at the BoM, “completely driven by him”. …
The rebrand itself is curious, though. So many resources went into the project, except when it came to graphic design. Several sources have told The Saturday Paper that near the end of the process, Andrew Johnson drew the new logo himself.
“He wanted something that wasn’t scientifically correct,” one staff member says, “so he drew that and that’s what we ended up with.”
Johnson denies drawing it himself, but says he did “provide feedback on it during its development”. The logo, a map of Australia with what look like isobars drawn over its surface, is scientific gobbledegook. …
“Recently Andrew Johnson launched the new 2022-2027 strategy and rounded off the presentation by telling us all that we had to print off the strategy, read it and he would be testing us if he bumped into us in the office,” a staff member says. “He was dead serious.”
A forecaster who cannot be identified because they still work with the BoM said the “reaction around me on shift over the last few weeks to the new branding announcements has been somewhere between exasperated laughter and anger”.
They continue, “That this is prioritised by management, over severe long-term understaffing of mets [meteorologists] — seemingly not of management and consultants — combined with a huge top-to-bottom restructure of the public service hitting the really hairy stages.
“All of this at the tail end of three La Niñas in a row with the potential for most of the east coast to flood so easily. Meteorologists are tired and overworked. The public reaction today was honestly wonderful and heartwarming. I’m so happy the public saw the bullshit instantly.” …
Bizarrely, the BoM hired EY Sweeney on a $93,000 contract in March to conduct market research regarding the rebrand. What the consultants found was that just 15 per cent of people recognised the Bureau of Meteorology as “the Bureau” — the preferred name for brand recognition in the now-failed repositioning. More than 60 per cent, however, associated “BoM” with the agency. …
Incompetence has consequences:
Residents in Lismore in particular were trapped after catastrophic flooding appeared to catch officials off guard. …
“There absolutely needs to be a royal commission into what happened at Lismore. I saw grad mets barely off course in charge of things they would never have been in charge of up until that point. Lismore happened right in the short-staffing period. We go into that event, everyone is already fatigued and working long hours.”
At this time — when a meteorologist was due to speak at a press conference about the unfolding flooding emergency in NSW, next to Premier Dominic Perrottet — there was a particular sensitivity within the agency about the warnings provided to the public. This forecaster was told they could speak only from pre-approved lines.
A separate source, who is no longer with the BoM, told The Saturday Paper that the organisation was “down 24 or 25” meteorologists and there were “no meteorologists in management”. The source said good people were slowly forced out, especially meteorologists: “There is such a strangled culture there now.” …
As science was censored or relegated to the sideline and messages became more tightly controlled, the culture at the BoM deteriorated even further. In July and August this year, tens of thousands of dollars were paid to the conflict resolution firm Momentum, which promised to mediate workplace disputes and teach staff how to get along. …
The bureau remains utterly divided. This is about much more than a rebrand; it is about a dysfunctional culture at one of the country’s key science agencies, a place central to how we predict and respond to the natural disasters that will worsen as the climate heats.
“They have a duty of care to the Australian people,” a former employee says.
“I watched them put up meteorologists for live crosses pretending to be in another state so it didn’t look like we had no one on the ground. I watched colleagues have nervous breakdowns or just fall apart in front of my eyes. It was so distressing.”
Sounds like a classic case of bureaucrats versus people-with-skill. Administrators gradually take over an organization, appointing more like themselves and jacking up their salaries and perks. The technical people who actually do the work of the organization — meteorologists in this case — become second class employees.
We’ve also seen this happen at the universities and CSIRO in the last few decades. These organizations used to run with no (zero) nontechnical staff, except perhaps a typist or two. But the government bureaucrats who fund them appointed more and more administrators “to let the technical people concentrate on their technical jobs”. Sure.
The administrators are in charge, so they have to be paid more, even though they are much less qualified and have few skills. After a while there are more administrators than technical people, gulping down most of the budget in wages.
So unnecessary. Do these organizations function any better than 50 years ago? Or are they worse, but with better PR? They certainly cost more, make stupid decisions, and employ many make-work bureaucrats.
The trouble of course is that the administrators making the decisions don’t know the subject area and are generally not as smart as the technical people they are overseeing. Ignorant and stupid in charge is unsustainable. The technical people are not going to tolerate being serfs to a dumb overseer class forever. Recruitment of skilled people dries up, as the talent goes elsewhere. Sure, people can be found to be fill the technical roles, but they’re not as good — and the organization’s ability and output suffers.
