EPO - Bringing Fun to the Teams

The EPO management will indeed leave the upper floor empty (squeezing the workforce together in the remaining floors), allegedly to save energy. Apparently the long-term goal of "Moving teams together" is renting out some of the PschorrHöfe buildings, increasing the already astonishing financial surplus of the EPO even further. When the New Career System was introduced, the incentives provided to employees with regard to career progression turned out to be detrimental to the working atmosphere, by creating a competition for artificially limited ressources (colleagues became rivals in the annual competition for resources, without which career progression could no longer take place). A similarly divisive approach is now being introduced by the upper management for rooms: While some colleagues are allowed to keep their room, many others lose their rooms (not only those who want to work from home anyway, but also many colleagues who like to work in the office the majority of time). This is again divisive and detrimental for the working atmosphere. It is the task of the lower managers (the team managers and the directors) to distribute the available rooms and to decide who will lose their rooms. There is a broken link in the managerial hierarchy: Such decisions are taken by the upper management, which instruct the lower management to implement it. However, upper management ignores any feedback from employees (even from the lower management including directors). Furthermore, lower management was carefully selected. Only those who have an above-average positive view of the situation at the EPO have become team managers or directors.

Any negative effects on the working atmosphere are blamed on the lowest managers. Upper management says that the cause for any discontent is a lack of communication and how the information was presented. According to the EPO's internal narrative, it is not the decisions which cause the discontent, it is allegedly the fault of the line managers who communicate it wrongly. So according to the EPO it is just a question of communication, not the decisions themselves. What is implemented by the upper EPO management is (again) a strategy of "divide and conquer". First, the available ressources (like career steps or rooms) are artificially limited. Then the employees are made to compete for the artificially limited resources.

As non-managerial employees, we sometimes wonder what the idea behind this could be. We can only guess. One evident reason seems to be that limiting the available resources (rooms or career progression) is convenient because it saves money (one could assume that the personal bonuses of the upper management are linked to increasing the profits of the organisation). It seems that the idea is also to increase employee performance by letting us employees fight and compete with each other. But at which cost? This kind of cost saving and targeted increase in efficiency is being ruthlessly carried out on our backs. Lastly, from an (upper) managerial point of view, creating unrest by artificially depleting the resources available to us employees might potentially also be advantageous in keeping us busy, dividing us and therefore keeping the workforce under control, by applying the "divide and conquer" principle. Such an approach comes at the cost of a hostile and toxic working environment for non-managerial staff working at the EPO. But as long as the goal is to increase the financial profit even more, this is the perfect approach, isn't it?

I am an outsider, not working at the EPO and I am generally very supportive of Examiners and the current difficulties they face. Having said that, I struggle to see what is so wrong about the letter regarding a change in the use of office space. Yes, maybe it could have been worded better, but the basic concept and premise doesn't seem so unreasonable. My assumption is that many examiners choose to make extensive use of the ability to work from home, and that this results in many offices being empty on a given day. If this is the case, why is it so wrong for the EPO to consider how to better use the space? Is it because these measures are being applied to a significant extent to examiners who actually use their offices almost every day? I can see why that is counter-productive. Maybe I am missing the point, but I am curious and would like to understand better. Can someone enlighten me?