The purpose of this article is to elicit discussion of alternatives for overcoming barriers to productivity in the workplace resulting from regulatory excesses in the Brazilian public sector. The horizon of work is the positioning of public administration in the contemporary socio-economic context. The methodology used was a compilation of unstructured interviews, preparatory to a research effort in progress geared to the topic. Interpretation of the interviews reveals five sources of inefficiency: the perpetuation of unproductive staff, the accepted standard of inefficiency, the inability to focus, resistance to innovation and the repetition of existing systems. It also puts forward three strategies for overcoming barriers to productivity: simplification of the systems, measurement of the output in the workplace and the flexibilization of norms.
Public administration; Productivity in the workplace; Norms; Normativism; Brazil