The Revolving Door of Bureaucracy and the Flight of Young Talent
The 2024 CASN selection has once again recorded a fantastic number of registrants. Millions of young people, mostly dominated by Gen Z, are willing to jostle virtually to compete for a single civil servant appointment decree. However, behind the hustle and enthusiasm, there is a silent and worrying phenomenon: the “Revolving Door” or rotating door within our bureaucracy.
This term usually refers to the movement of high-ranking officials to the private sector. However, today, this “rotating door” occurs at the basic talent level. Many competent young people enter with high expectations, but soon choose to rotate out.
They dare to make extreme decisions: resigning just months or years after being accepted. The question is, why does the bureaucracy, now armed with modern regulations, fail to retain the people it needs most?
Professional Prison
In terms of regulations, the government has actually responded to this challenge through Law No. 20 of 2023 on Civil Servants. This law brings a new paradigm, namely the transition from mere personnel administration to Human Capital Management. Its promises are very enticing: more agile and meritocratic career development.
Unfortunately, in the field, the good intentions of this regulation often clash with the thick wall of organisational culture. Although the Government Regulation on ASN Management regulates promotion patterns in such a way, the practice is often still shackled by rigid seniority conventions.
Quoting the Self-Determination Theory from psychology experts Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, humans need three things to stay motivated: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The problem is that our bureaucracy often unconsciously “kills” that autonomy through monotonous administrative routines. For talents with high achievement orientation, a challenge-free work system is not a comfort zone, but a professional prison.
Not Just Salary
It is often heard that young people today are not resilient and only chase material abundance. However, if we examine it, many of those who “migrate” from the bureaucracy actually choose to work in SOEs or startups with far more brutal work pressure and overtime hours.
This phenomenon aligns with Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory. A person is willing to work hard as long as there is a clear correlation between effort, performance, and reward. In the private sector, the reward and punishment system runs mathematically and measurably.
Meanwhile, in the bureaucracy, the performance appraisal system often evaporates into mere formalities that appear comprehensive on paper but are empty in execution. When the sweat of high-performing employees is equated in value with those who merely “come, sit, and stay silent”, the professional pride of top talents is wounded. They prefer to tire themselves creating in places that value capacity, rather than ageing in stagnant stability.
Mentor Crisis and Cultural Clash
Another crucial trigger of this exodus is the failure of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), or the poor quality of relationships between superiors and subordinates. Our bureaucracy is still very thick with top-down leadership styles. The Gen Z character, which thirsts for transparency, dialogue, and clear goals, often clashes hard with this hierarchy.
Many leaders demand new staff to immediately think tactically like veterans of decades, but leave them groping without adequate mentoring or coaching. Even more ironically, when innovative aspirations emerge, they are often labelled as “insubordination” against the seniority caste. As a result, the initial burning motivation for public service plummets.
Closing the Revolving Door
Indonesia is not short of smart people. The always overflowing LPDP scholarship queue every year is proof. However, there is a chronic mismatch when these golden talents return and enter the system. This talent leakage is an extraordinary loss of national investment. We are pursuing the Golden Indonesia 2045 vision, but how can it be achieved if the bureaucratic machine keeps losing its “best parts”?
Retaining top talents can no longer rely solely on threats of hundreds of millions in fines or blacklist sanctions for those who resign. The solution must touch the cultural and structural roots. Agencies must create an ecosystem that values ideas and opens measured experimentation spaces.
In addition, transparent career paths, including accelerating the implementation of a fair single salary system, become a crucial foundation. At the same time, bureaucratic leaders must urge themselves to transform into coaches, not just stamp-holding foremen.
The bureaucracy should no longer be just a shelter for those seeking static comfort. It must become a grand stage for those bold enough to bring change. If we fail to calibrate this, prepare to see our bureaucratic door continue to rotate, releasing the nation’s best talents, one by one, to other sectors that more humanely value their competencies.