Unacceptable Productivity Levels

This is an analysis of the logs that both FEMA Corps and a corps member kept for tracking the hours his team spent on disaster recovery. Follow the link at the bottom to go to the actual log itself and see the breakdown of the hours logged and worked by Summit One, a FEMA Corps team.

Hours Reported

Each team's team leader is required to record the number of hours that the team works. There are three sections involved in how many hours are reported. The sections are: hours worked, hours spent in training, and ISP (Individual Service Project) hours. ISPs are projects that each team member spends doing his/her own service projects, such as volunteering with a local Habitat for Humanity group. All corps members have different hours based on how many sick days and personal days are taken, but every team has hours similar to the ones listed in this project because each corps member is required to work 1,700 hours in the ten-month period. This, unfortunately, becomes an incentive for team leaders to exaggerate the number of hours worked by each corps member and include hours during which the corps members are doing nothing.

This particular corps member logged a total of 1,446.25 hours. This can be broken down into an alleged 1,015.5 hours working, 178.25 hours doing ISPs, and 252.5 hours in training.

Hours Being Productive

This corps member kept track of how many hours he actually worked and how many hours each day he spent doing other various things. This corps member recorded himself working for 454 hours, of which, 162.75 of these hours were training and only 291.25 hours were spent working. This includes the 178.25 hours doing ISPs. This means that this corps member only spent 113 hours (a measly 7.8% of his time log) actually doing anything productive for the FEMA Corps organization. Despite the entire team's, and in all reality, the entire corps's objections to such a low productivity level, no changes were made.

Hours Being Unproductive

During all the times that the corps members were supposedly being productive, working or training, there is a vast mismatch between hours productive and hours reported. During CTI, FEMA Corps's training with AmeriCorps, this corps member's team leader reported that he was in 252.5 hours of training. However, during that time, FEMA Corps members waited for staff a total of 89.75 hours. This does not include the fact that the training sessions were almost all completely redundant, lasting for an unnecessary five weeks, but the corps members were unable to track how many of the training hours were useful.

When the teams were sent out into the field, the corps members were responding to Hurricane Sandy. This particular team was working directly with FEMA employees, knocking doors in Staten Island, letting citizens know about the assistance for which they could be eligible in effort to recover from the hurricane. However, most days, the entire team sat in the van doing absolutely nothing except waiting for orders on where to go. This corps member recorded sitting in the van for 561.25 hours total. This is an absolutely unacceptable amount. This means the team spent just under 39% of the total hours waiting in the van, getting nothing accomplished. This does not include the time that the team gets logged driving to and from work every day or to and from spikes (which accounted for three full days of driving from Mississippi to New York).

In the team's most recent deployment, the team was working with FEMA public assistance, helping the local communities get federal funding after the hurricane. However, again, there wasn't any work for the FEMA Corps members to do, so the majority of the hours spent during that period were spent doing nothing, but sitting, waiting for things to do in the office. Again, the corps member kept track of how many hours he spent doing nothing during the day. He logged 341.25 hours of his team sat in the office doing nothing. This accounts for over 23.5% of his entire year's hours.

Conclusion and Log of Hours

An entire log of hours were kept by both the team leader and the corps member. The team leader's log, as required by AmeriCorps staff, was forced to log hours of usefulness and uselessness. As those who view the hours can only assume that productivity is a given during hours logged, nothing ever changed. Without change, the corps members continue to feel useless and nothing gets better. This snowball effect goes unnoticed, and the corps members are feeling more and more discouraged about their time spent "serving" their country as the year continues. The attrition rate being more than one in every three leaving the program is no surprise because of the inactivity and purposelessness the corps members feel.

Who can blame the corps members, however, for feeling useless and unproductive? A total of 992.25 hours have been logged by this corps member, waiting, sitting in the van, and doing nothing in the office. With only 1,446.25 hours logged during the entire eight-month period, being unproductive accounts for almost 69% of this team's entire time log for the whole year.

Please feel free to follow the link below to see the entire chart of hours for productivity.

CLICK HERE to go to the FEMA Corps Summit One time log of hours worked and wasted.