Dealing with office bureaucracy

One of the biggest challenges of working in a hierarchical company is the bureaucracy - it can slow you down and frustrate you. Despite having so many resources and skilled employees, companies with strict bureaucratic structures can't reach their full potential. Here are a few tips on how you can work around the many problems of such a structured workplace.

Too many useless policies

You will find that there are countless policies dictating every little thing - but as useless as they may seem, these rules usually have a reason behind them. You probably don't need it, but it must be useful to a different function of the organisation. So try to find out why exactly a seemingly useless policy exists.

Too much paperwork

It is usually beyond an employee's scope to decrease the amount of paperwork needed during a project, but the best way to reduce your sufferings is to create templates. Every time you have to do paperwork of a similar nature, just bring up the template and fill it out so that you don't have to do everything from scratch.

Lack of empowerment

Bureaucratic companies don't give employees individual decision making powers, which actually hurts company productivity in the long run. If you feel that you are having to get your supervisor's approval for every trivial matter, you should talk to them about this and try to work out a better system.