State bodies fail to attract the required number of employees in the state. There is a shortage of staff in all key services to a greater or lesser extent. This negatively affects the duration of processing requests from citizens and paperwork. Sometimes you have to wait forever for a response from the tax or migration service.
Labor Market 2022
The situation with personnel in civil services is not exceptional - a shortage of workers is typical for the labor market in 2022 as a whole. In particular, in the first quarter, all records regarding labor shortages were broken. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek), there were 100 vacancies for every 133 unemployed.
Number of vacancies in government agencies
With the exception of the Education Inspectorate and the Health and Youth Inspectorate, all organizations suffer from staff shortages. The statistics at the end of June 2022 are as follows:
Hospital
In addition to staffing shortages, the civil service is struggling with an increase in employee absenteeism. Due to illness, the rate of such absenteeism ranges from 5 to 8,4%, and this is more than before the COVID-10 pandemic.
What specialists are missing?
Customs, the Infrastructure Support Service and the Labor Inspectorate said it was particularly difficult for them to fill the positions of legal specialists, IT experts and financial analysts. UWV has long struggled with a shortage of medical examiners.
Most of all, there is a shortage of personnel in the Tax and Customs Administration. In particular, additional specialists are needed to recalculate Box 3 taxes and childcare benefits.
The solution
Civil services use different methods to compensate for the shortage of staff. NVWA partially solves the problem of shortage of personnel using drones, artificial intelligence and surveillance cameras. DJI is hiring external workers. The IND service is also trying to recruit people in large numbers: they are very much needed for projects, in particular, for issuing documents to refugees from Ukraine for the right to reside in the Netherlands.
Due to limited capacity, the IND can process fewer asylum applications in the Netherlands. Asylum seekers have to wait longer for responses to their requests, as well as for making an appointment or making a final decision. In part, it was the lack of staff in the IND that caused the refugee crisis this year.
Increasing staff turnover
Representatives of the NVWA say that employees are heavily burdened with additional workload due to understaffing. As a result, employees have less recovery time, which increases the risk of being fired. There is also less time for social bonding, which can lead to lower engagement and therefore higher employee turnover.
Publication Date: 22.08.2022
