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Email from the staff management service on Saturday Federal workers have asked to list their achievements from the week before, part of Elon Musk’s efforts to evaluate government productivity. Management professor Peter Harms said the strategy without a transparent purpose could be a waste of time.
Federal employees for liability for their weekly productivity can take hundreds of thousands of hours from their working days.
The staff management service sent an email to all federal staff on Saturday asking you to list five points from the bullet describing what they have achieved in the last week, according to numerous reports. Elon Musk, who is leading the efforts to reduce the expenditure of the Ministry of Government, said on social media: “All federal officers will soon receive an email asking to find out what they did last week. If it does not answer, it will be considered resignation. “
If all two million federal workers spent five minutes in response to the email – for a time when Musk said the task would require – the process would take a total of 10 million minutes or more than 166 600 hours, Fortune calculated. Federal workers make an average of about $ 106,000 a year or about $ 51 hours for a 40-hour work week, according to OPM, which means that the time needed for all federal workers to respond to the email can cost the government around 8.5 million Dollars salaries-more than half of the current DOG budget of $ 14.4 million.
The OPM email is aligned with President Donald Trump’s efforts to identify and eliminate the alleged corruption within the federal government’s bureaucracy. The administration has called for the thinning of thousands of state jobs aimed primarily at test workers. Trump supported Musk’s intention to terminate workers who do not respond, saying that on Monday they would be “half -drilled” as they did not respond to the email would indicate that the workers did not have active bills and therefore did not exist. The OPM email to federal workers has been reported to mention the risk of termination.
Not all federal departments – including Trump’s own appointments – have complied with Musk’s request to respond to the OPM email. The main agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI, told the employees not to respond to the email.
“The Ministry of Defense is responsible for the review of the work of its staff and will carry out each review in accordance with its own procedures,” writes Darin Sulnik, who fulfills the obligations for the Secretary of the Defense for the staff and readiness, writes to X.
Trump said the agency leaders, who do not comply with the Directive, do it only to protect themselves from sharing confidential records. “It was done friendly,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday until he met with French President Emmanuel Macron. “They do not mean that in any way combined with an elon.”
The Ministry of Health and Human Services with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was asked to comply with the email, but only after the general adviser to Sean Kevini had been acting to some employees not to respond.
“I’ll be honest with you. After putting over 70 hours of work last week, occupying the administration’s priorities, I was personally offended to receive an email below, “Kevini said in an email seen by Associated PressS
Federal workers, many of whom expressed the horror and powerlessness of Dog’s rage from abbreviations, reacted in a similar way. Some employees filed a case on Monday on Monday that the threat of widespread dismissions as a result of not responding to OPM’s email was “one of the most massive employment frauds in this country’s history.”
OPM did not respond immediately to FortuneRequest for comment.
Are management emails effective for management tools?
Though Opm’s Correspondence Has Drawn Backlash from Employees and Their Managers Alike, Sending Out An Email Asking Employees Whats of Pres A Professor of Management at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business.
If OPM or Dog is trying to analyze the jobs of each government agency, asking employees about the tasks they are involved in is an effective way to do so, he said. Doge can probably quickly use machine learning or AI to aggregate and sort the answers in a large set of data. Asking employees about their work is also a common human resource tactics used to inform future training or future job descriptions.
“To what extent does the workforce do this to their employees? The workforce does this continuous, “said damage FortuneS
But on the basis of Musk’s enrollment of employees’ request to justify their positions or to risk being fired, the OPM email can serve a different and less effective purpose, Harms said. The Directive reflects Musk’s playboy shortly after he purchased Twitter, now X, in 2022, when he asked employees to engage in “extremely hardcore” working conditions or resign. Given the similarities in strategies, Harms said the OPM email could easily be interpreted as the equivalent of corporate reduction.
For some employees, summarizing their jobs in five points of the bullet may be an unfair reflection of their work, claims that Harms, especially if they are asked only to capture short-term tasks, not the longer-term impact of their roles in the course of a month or year.
“You have millions of federal employees and they will have to spend some time of their day to complete this, and most of what they do is quite routine and probably quite boring,” Harms said. “So you just lose this period of time [replying to the email] It’s not so useful. That is why we do not do weekly reviews of the results with our employees. “
If Musk wants to use accountability emails as an effective tool for managing or collecting data in the future, he will focus on transparency and clarity to ensure that this is the best interests of employees, they have proposed damage.
“I can see where it also causes powerlessness and fear,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s completely illegitimate. It would be legal if it were better designed and if there was a point. “
This story was originally presented on Fortune.com