Microsoft has offered around 60,000 people a way out of the company, in the same week it reported soaring profits. You can call that cost-cutting with good PR. You can also notice that Microsoft decided its work is changing and its payroll has to follow. Germany has never made that this kind of decision about its own state. But it should.
In Germany years went by promising an administration that is faster, more digital and closer to citizens. There are plenty of strategies, commissions and even a “digital ministry”. Digitalisation was sold as a way to reduce work. Yet political leadership and central administration added posts. The work moved onto screens and the people stayed. It seem that we are great in discussion and much less comfortable discussing what should happen when these reforms work.
If technology and simpler rules reduce the amount of work needed to deliver a service, we need fewer people to administer it. Otherwise, we are paying for a new system and an old one. And paying we are … just one number: According to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, just alone the administration across Germany’s social protection system costed an estimated €51.2 billion in 2025. Those are not pensions, healthcare or other support the system provides - this is just the administration of those services.
Of course, a system needs administration. But how much of that work is necessary and how much continues because we have organised ourselves around processes we no longer need?
My - almost physically painful - real life example
Last week, I got a small glimpse of what that looks like in real life … and I am sure many have similar stories of their own.
I needed to renew my passport and those of my children. I booked the appointments, filled out the forms and made sure to get the right amount of cash money with me because - of course - card payment is not possible at the German Embassy in Amman.
We handed in our mobile phones at the gate and brought books, knowing that a passport appointment was unlikely to take only a short time. We entered at 9:00am and left close to 11:00am.
And guess what … most of that time I watched an employee transfer the data from my finished forms into another form. Whether a law or a habit requires it, the state pays a person to retype what I already gave it.
We recently went through a comparable process at the Australian Embassy in Amman. Australia also asks for forms and a considerable amount of documents. But once at the embassy, the staff checks everything, you pay by card and you are done in around 5 minutes.
That does not make Australia a model of administrative simplicity. In my experience, Australian bureaucracy can be every bit as frustrating as the German version. But in this case, the difference was hard to ignore.
The employee at the German embassy was doing her job. The question is why we have designed a job that requires someone to enter information I have already provided while my children and I sit and watch… in a room that cant be more sterile and boring … without your phones :)
Max Weber understood both the usefulness and the staying power of bureaucracy. Professional officials and clear rules can make a state more predictable and fair. But he also observed that an established bureaucracy is among the social structures which are most difficult to dismantle.
A century later, we are still living with that tension. We build procedures for good reasons. Then circumstances change, technology changes and the procedures stay. We add digital forms to paper processes and create new units to modernise old ones. The organisation grows around the problem. More organisation for each problem.
At some point, reform has to reach the staffing plan.
That does not mean taking a chainsaw to the public sector or getting rid of people whose work is needed. It means examining what an office actually does, removing unnecessary steps and deciding which positions need to be filled when people retire or leave. It means offering training, redeployment and where appropriate, voluntary exit arrangements (see the beginning of this text). And it means measuring whether a redesigned service costs less and works better for the people using it.
Refilling a post needs no decision. Cutting one however needs a manager who volunteers to lose budget and rank. So every post gets refilled. Roughly 30% of municipal employees will retire by 2030 and if we let reflex decide, nothing will change. Civil servants can’t be dismissed, but they can be reassigned. So:
In administrative functions, refill one post in two.
Have procedures connected to automatic redundancy after a set date.
A digitalisation project that does not reduce working time or posts is reported as a failure.
Savings go to the frontline, publicly and by name.
We can continue doing the same work with fewer people.
A digital application should not end with an employee copying it into another form. And a successful administrative reform should not end with the same headcount doing the same work on newer computers.
I have been in the Apple camp my whole life and never expected to write this, but Germany should learn something from Microsoft.