17 - New Ways of Working: Bureaucracy Reforms

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Indonesia announced its first COVID-19 case in the second week of March 2020 and then, to prevent COVID-19 from further spreading, the Government of Indonesia eventually enforced a social restriction called PSBB (Large-Scale Social Restriction) which later became PPKM (Community Activities Restriction Enforcement), with various levels of implementation, even until today. This restriction has forced most people to work from home, regardless of their readiness.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the government works in a very significant way. Suddenly, without any preparation, government employees were forced to work in a very intensive information technology environment and to work from home. The Indonesian Ministry of Finance (MoF) is no exception to this situation. Compared to other government ministries and agencies in Indonesia, the MoF was in a relatively better position, thanks to its long track record of adopting digital transformation.

Given the urgency of the government to adopt flexible working arrangements, this chapter was written to elaborate on how bureaucracy is adapting to the new ways of working (NWOW) due to the COVID-19 pandemic with the support of digital technology and how this NWOW can then be adopted and be a norm in the future. We analyse how civil servants adapted to this NWOW by utilizing available digital tools to conduct their administration tasks and deliver services to the public. Specifically, we would like to know the answers to the following questions:

• 1. How well do civil servants accept the NWOW?

• 2. What are the requirements for having an effective NWOW?

• 3. What are the side effects of the adoption of the NWOW?

• 4. What are the civil servants’ expectations for the future NWOW?

• 5. How does the NWOW affect civil servants’ performance?

We conducted our analysis based on the results of internal surveys administered by the MoF (Program Reformasi Birokrasi dan Transformasi Kelembagaan 2020a, 2020b). The surveys were conducted online and participation was by respondents representing the MoF employees belonging to different organizational units. We understand that these surveys are not representative of the Government of Indonesia as a whole. However, we believe that the results provide valid findings regarding the adoption of the NWOW as they are commensurate with findings from other similar surveys done by other prominent institutions. The results show that civil servants can adapt to the NWOW without affecting their performance.