Transcription
Hello, everybody who is joining us for this Global Government Forum webinar. Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, wherever you are joining us from for this event to launch the second edition of the Responsive Government Survey. My name is Richard Johnston, and I’m the Executive Editor of Global Government Forum, which is a media and events company and website focused on bringing together public and civil servants from around the world to share best practices and help address common problems.
As part of that mission, Global Government Forum and our knowledge partner, PA Consulting, have come together to investigate how responsive governments are to the many challenges that they face in the 21st century. The first Responsive Government Survey was conducted in 2021 and provided unrivaled insight into perceptions of government responsiveness in the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. The background for the second survey, which was undertaken in late 2022, was just as tumultuous. High inflation, budgetary pressures, and volatility caused by global conflicts, as well as mass industrial action, added to the impact of the pandemic from the previous survey and how governments were recovering from it.
In this session, we’re going to share some of the insights from the 2023 Global Responsive Government Survey that was published late last month, as well as look at how the confidence of public servants has changed between those two surveys. Then we’ll hear from some of the experts who contributed to the report and who have kindly joined us today. We would also love to hear from you. If you have a question that follows on from the research or from what the report finds, or if you’d like to ask our panel for advice on how to be more responsive in your own work, please do get in touch using the Q&A button that you will see on your Zoom app.
Before I set out the headline findings from the report, let me introduce the rest of the panel who have joined us today. First, we’re joined by Greta Haveland Berg, the Managing Partner and Country Head for Norway in the PA Consulting Group. Greta leads PA Norway’s public sector practice and is an expert in delivering digital transformation in the public healthcare sector. She leads large government initiatives, redefining citizen services using a user-centric approach and co-creation across several public sectors. Greta also leads Norway’s hub for innovative healthcare service design and transformation and leads the transformation of mental health and systemic patient services across local governments and hospitals. So, hello and thank you for joining us today.
We’re also joined by Alexander Evans OBE, the Professor of Practice in Public Policy at the London School of Economics. Alexander is a former Strategy Director in the UK Cabinet Office and also a former Henry Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress and a former Senior Fellow at Yale. A career diplomat, he has worked in Number 10 Downing Street in the UK as an advisor to the Prime Minister, as a Strategy Director in the Cabinet Office, as I mentioned, and Director of Cyber in the Foreign Office. He’s also worked for the United Nations and the U.S. State Department.
Last but by no means least, we’re joined by Michael Wernick, the Jarislowsky Chair of Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa and a former Cabinet Secretary in the Canadian government. Michael’s distinguished 38-year career as one of the key leaders of Canada’s world-class federal public service culminated in serving as the Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet. This came after 28 years as an executive in the federal public service, including 17 years in the community of deputy ministers. All this makes Michael one of Canada’s most experienced and influential public sector leaders. In his current role at the University of Ottawa, he now provides advisory services and mentorship to emerging leaders and to new generations of students.
It was great to get all of our panelists’ perspectives on the Responsive Government Survey when I was working on the report, and it’s fantastic to have them join us today to discuss the findings. As I say, please get your thoughts or questions into the panel, and we will get to a discussion of the report findings very shortly. But before we do that, and before I ask the panel to share their initial responses to the research, I want to share some of the results from the survey itself. So, first slide, please, Raquel. Thank you very much.
We’ll start with an overview of what the Responsive Government Survey is. Next slide, please, Raquel. The Responsive Government Survey sets out to investigate the responsiveness and agility of public services around the world. The research program, which, as I mentioned, is conducted in partnership with PA Consulting (and thanks very much to PA for their help throughout this project), is designed to identify how able governments around the world are to respond to the challenges they face across many facets. We’ve already mentioned some of these: the pandemic recovery, public finances under pressure, and increased volatility in the age of Perma-crisis. But there are others, I’m sure, many in the audience watching along will be able to identify, such as increased citizen demand and expectation for digital services, and the pressures of an aging population, among others.
We wanted to find out how able governments are to respond to these challenges and how confident they are in doing so. The research fieldwork takes the form of a questionnaire where government participants are asked to score their organizations on various attributes that we identified as drivers of responsive government. The two surveys we have conducted so far have produced a robust sample size. In the inaugural survey in 2021, there were 873 participants, and then when we expanded it last year, we got 1,796 responses from public servants in the survey that was completed last year across nine countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. This presentation will break down some of the overall global trends from that sample in the main, but we’ll touch on some of the national data as well. If there is more specific insight you would like after the presentation, as I said, please do get into the Q&A function, or we can also provide that information after the webinar if you get in touch and I don’t have it instantly at my fingertips.
Next slide, please, Raquel. Once we’ve got those responses in, we analyze them and identify five key priorities for responsive governments, and these are them: rethinking responsiveness (how the way government reacts to demands can keep pace with the demands they face); embracing positive leadership (how public service leaders can catalyze improvements in public services); going deeper with digital and data (the role that better use of technology can play in creating more responsive governments); building a citizen-centric culture (the extent to which government departments and agencies use feedback and information from users to improve services); and governing through a Perma-crisis (how public and civil service contingency planning has stood up to that list of pressures that we’ve already discussed from pandemics to energy price shocks).
Next slide, please, Raquel. We’ll delve into all of these throughout this brief overview presentation, but we titled this webinar “Success in an Era of Perma-crisis,” and that is illustrated, I think, in response to this question, which we asked in both the fieldwork over the last two reports: “My organization excels at learning and responding rapidly to meeting evolving citizen and end-user needs.” As you can see from this graph, there was a decline in the proportion who said they either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement—a five-point decline from 72% to 67%. This shows that there has been an impact of the era of Perma-crisis, but it is very much worth noting that this is still a very high score: 67% of officials are saying that their organization excels at learning and responding rapidly to meeting evolving citizen and end-user needs. That is still a very positive result, I think, for public servants around the world.
However, that hints a little bit at the story throughout the report: there have been declines in confidence across a number of the measures that we use in the Responsive Government Survey, but what, for lack of a better phrase, you could call resilience—a lot of the scores are still high even despite the declines on a year-on-year basis. There are a couple of other points highlighted in this key finding, and we’ll get to them both: confidence that public services can be improved and how to do it has also fallen on the measure, and there is concern over the impact of politics on delivery.
Officials are also less confident in their organization’s contingency plans. In that era of perma-crisis—an extended period of instability and insecurity—so on the next slide, Raquel, you’ll get into the rethinking responsiveness heading. This is where we start to see, I think, some of the tensions in government responsiveness. For example, 63% of all respondents say that their organization adapts policies and services based on learning from success and failures. However, there is a bit less confidence in the resources available to do so, as you can see from the graph. Less than half of officials—45%—agree that they can quickly allocate budget and resources to priority initiatives. That is, again, slightly down from the last survey. Among the other results, only a third of respondents feel there are few barriers to quickly developing policy ideas into implementation plans.
We did ask respondents for one single action that would help improve the agility of their governments. When we looked into those answers, two factors were the most commonly reoccurring: addressing funding issues and resourcing roadblocks. These are the two things that public servants are highlighting as barriers to responsiveness and going further to improve it. As I said, it’s from a very high baseline.
Next slide, please, Raquel. This is looking at embracing positive leadership across many elements of responsiveness. An interesting contrast exists between leaders and the overall response group. Leaders feel more positive about their organization’s performance and their employee morale than their rank-and-file colleagues. More leaders agree that morale is high in their organization, for example, by 10 whole points—64% versus 54%, as you can see in the graph. Likewise, while 63% of civil servants in the overall sample say their organization adapts to what they do based on what works, that rises to 72% for civil service leaders.
One note I will make here, just for interest when we get to Michael’s contribution, is that interestingly, leaders in Canada are not quite as confident as those elsewhere. Leader scores in Canada are behind the overall national group sometimes. But overall, leaders throughout the survey are more positive about their organizations. One of the conclusions from the report is that leaders need to temper their confidence a little bit or perhaps widen their awareness of staff attitudes, capacity, and knowledge so they can understand how their organizations are working and what their organizations are feeling. There is a little bit of a disparity there at the moment. Leaders need to show government projects and initiatives that meet the challenges that citizens, including their employees, currently face. The initiatives can do that. Purposeful leadership was, of course, a major factor in the COVID-19 response. That was fueled by collaboration, knowledge sharing, and agility. This provides a good template for embracing positive leadership across the board, across all ranges of public services.
Next slide, please, Raquel. This is on digital services and going deeper with digital and data. These are key elements to creating a more responsive government, with digitization of public services now the norm. But again, there’s been a slight fall in confidence that technology is being used to drive the best policy solutions. Confidence has fallen among public servants in our survey. Only 40% say that digital technologies are fully embedded in policy-making and service design, down from 49% in 2021.
Our key cause for this perceived lack of utilization appears to be financial. Only 38% of respondents and only slightly more—42% of leaders—agree that funding is available for long-term investment in digital transformation. However, there is also a positive story here. Two-thirds of respondents say that how their governments responded to COVID has accelerated progress in digital capabilities. This is in contrast to some of the other questions we asked around whether the COVID response had changed government. For example, only one in three people—37%—say that the COVID response has made it easier to implement new policies and ideas. So there’s quite a difference there in the proportion who have said that COVID has accelerated digital capability. Clearly, there is an opportunity for governments around the world to strengthen digital infrastructure and services. This is something that is fairly clear from the report. One of the findings was the importance of integrating digital and digitalization with people so that those with lower digital literacy are not left behind. One leader in the Canadian public services responded to the survey, calling for a faster transition to digital solutions and accelerated support for online service provisions. This way, better services and additional support for the people who need it can go together.
The next slide, please, Raquel. This follows on from that in terms of service provision, looking at how to build a citizen-centric culture in government across the board. There was, again, a drop in confidence that the processes to improve public services were working. The proportion of officials who believe their organization had a cyclical improvement process to integrate citizen and end-user feedback fell from 58% in 2021 to 45% in the latest survey. That’s the biggest overall decline in any category year on year, hinting at an underutilization of user feedback. The same proportion of respondents—45%—said that whenever possible, their organization uses citizen or end-user input to form policy and implementation solutions. Again, that had fallen from 53% in the previous survey.
There’s clearly been a change in terms of how confident people are that they’re using citizen feedback to drive public service improvement. There was also an interesting finding on the impact of electoral politics on policy delivery. When asked if the need for long-term planning on policy and service design was well understood at a ministerial level and not impacted by election cycles, more public servants disagreed than agreed—40% disagreed, and only 34% agreed. This is an interesting finding in terms of the impact of electoral politics. We also asked officials if wholesale system change is considered within their organization to drive service improvements. Overall, only 32% of officials said that it was. Interestingly, only in one country, Denmark, did a majority of officials agree that wholesale system change is considered an option.
Next slide, please, Raquel. This looks at how governments have responded to this era of perma-crisis in the 2020s that they have faced and how ready they are for what comes next. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the proportion of officials with high confidence that their organization has robust contingency plans has fallen since 2021—from 56% to 45%. But again, to meet the point I made earlier, this is still high. Confidence in contingencies is highest amongst some of the Nordic countries who responded. A majority are confident in their countries’ and organizations’ contingency planning, for example, in Norway and Denmark. Agreement is also above 50% in Australia.
The proportion of officials who believe their organization has cyclical improvement processes has also fallen year on year across the whole sample—from 58% to 45%. This is the section where we can see most clearly the resilience of public servants. Over half think their organization can still capitalize on emerging opportunities even in the era of perma-crisis. Nearly three-quarters of public servants—71%—agree that being able to adapt to significant change is part of their organization’s longer-term strategy. In line with the survey-wide trends I mentioned earlier, there is greater confidence among leaders in their organization’s abilities to respond to uncertainty on both of those scores. So there is still strong confidence in how public servants can respond to the pressures and challenges that they face. This really shows that this is about resilience in a lot of what has been a fairly unprecedented time for many officials.
Um, if you go on to the next slide, I’ll just share some conclusions before we hear from our panel. So, these are the conclusions that we came to: Governments can improve their responsiveness and adaptability through actionable data-based strategies. There is a role for technology here, and there is a role for leadership action across these five priorities that we’ve just discussed. This includes transforming traditionally sluggish services into proactive, positive, digitally enabled, citizen-centric, and future-ready solutions.
And yes, that last point: leaders are the key ingredient. It really stood out how much more confident leaders are in their organization, and their confidence can be contagious. Those in leadership positions can help build confident, forward-looking teams that can create those citizen-centric and future-ready services.
So, that is a very brief and whistle-stop coverage of the responsive government survey. You will see there the website where you can view the full survey report. You can also view all the data from the Responsive Government Survey that underpins those findings on the website. There is a lot of data and information to get into there, and I appreciate that I have also just thrown a lot of data and information at you as well. We will make these slides available as part of the report from today’s webinar, so you’ll be able to look at those again as well.
I will now take a breath and ask Greta to come in and share her findings, her thoughts on the report’s research, and some of the findings. Thank you very much, Sir Richard. I will reflect upon some of the findings with some experiences from my home country, Norway. So, please go to the next slide, Raquel.
We just learned that there are five priorities for responsive governments. I will look into a bit about responsiveness, digital and data, and citizen-centric culture. Next slide, please.
As many of you probably experienced during Corona, this is a picture from the Norwegian Medical Association. It exploded with the use of video consultations. I work with digitalization in public health care in the Nordic countries, and I think we have tried for 15 years to start using video consultations. Finally, during Corona in March 2020—not long after the country closed down—80% of the GPs used video consultations. We had a lot of use of video consultations in hospitals across Norway. This was a wanted change in Norway because so many things can be done digitally, and we have a difficult geography. We just clapped our hands.
But next slide, Raquel. What happened after the vaccines came? The video statistics— we have beautiful statistics in the government of Norway—showed that it went down, and not many video consultations anymore, despite having a quite good reimbursement system. Technically, I think we’re quite good in Norway. The patient feedback gathered from the Norwegian newspaper Today’s Medicine was great. The patients said video consultations are just as good or better than physical consultations. But when we started to dig further, we could see why professionals fell back into old methods. They weren’t equipped with enough learning. Information sent to the citizens wasn’t good enough. There were some issues with the infrastructure. Actually, I think our government has done some great measures now—a full system change—so we can see that the statistics are going in the right direction again.
Next slide, please, Raquel. Digital government makes life easier. This is a picture from the login page on health.norway.no where I can log in with my Bank ID using the national ID portal. I enter my birth date and use a security certificate I have on my phone. Then I can access a lot of government services, including my health data. I can ask for new prescriptions from my doctor, look at all the prescriptions, book appointments, and log into pages where I can see data about my children in kindergarten. Digital government in Norway and other Nordic countries has come quite far.
How did we achieve this? An important factor has been to think and act citizen-centered. These things are easy to use from an infrastructure perspective because it’s not just the electricity on paper. It must be fully digitized, not ending up as a PDF that you have to print. It needs to be user-friendly on both sides—for my doctor and for me as an end user. I think we have come quite far in the Nordics to have fully digitized processes that make life easier for both citizens and civil servants. Then we gain benefits.
So, let’s go to the next slide, Raquel. This is a picture of a woman in Oslo who is able to get treatment for her heart condition and also has a severe lung diagnosis from her living room. The government has worked to make healthcare accessible for everyone. This is very important for citizens so they can access our public health care services. It’s also important to free up time because we have many elderly and young adults who need more time for physical care. Citizen centricity has been very important in this work, as well as the government working with legislation, policies, and empowering municipalities and health regions to create change themselves.
Next slide, please, Raquel. What we have learned from this in Norway is that although we traditionally have a lot of money in this country—probably still do—we have had enough money to buy technology. But if we start with technology and try to make it meaningful afterward, we just bring on new challenges and needs, increasing costs. When we start with citizen needs and look at what citizens and civil servants need to make life easier, then we build technology that’s meaningful to users and easier to use. We end up with profitable solutions that are based on citizen needs and yield more benefits.
So, that was some of PA Consulting’s reflections on the results from the report. Thank you. Great, thanks, Greta. Really great insights. I love seeing specific examples of how governments are embracing change and becoming more responsive to their citizens. Some great examples there. Again, we can show these slides as part of the webinar report.
Next, I’m going to ask Alexander for his thoughts on the report findings. Richard, thanks very much, and it’s great to join both Greta and Michael on this call. I very much align myself with Greta’s comments, which I agree with completely.
First off, I think it’s a really informative survey, and it comes at an important time as governments are pulling out of the COVID crisis—sometimes pulling out of that to suddenly face all the other crises that they’re handling. It is a distinctive moment after what was an all-consuming health crisis for all governments around the world. At the same time, I don’t think the figures we’re seeing here and that you’ve presented so well are that shocking.
What do we see? We see that leaders tend to be a bit more optimistic than rank-and-file officials. This probably reflects the fact that leaders are in a better position to understand—not necessarily the micro problems but the combination of analytics of problems and potential solutions that can be applied. It’s a bit like heading off on a country drive where you think it’s going to take five hours. Leaders have the GPS and weather data that tells them the traffic’s going to be bad and the weather’s going to be bad, so it’s going to take seven hours. That information isn’t available to all their colleagues at more junior levels. At the same time, you could say that leaders are sometimes just inclined to a bit more optimism, which infects both political leaders and senior civil servants in thinking about the problems faced by government, both around policy-making and delivery.
I think the PDAP, digital data, and technology figures are really interesting. We know that some things have been true for a while: it’s difficult for governments to recruit and retain experts, and it’s very expensive to buy in consultancy services that can bridge some of those gaps. The pay gap is very striking, whether it’s for technologists, data analytics capabilities, or others. But there’s also a governance gap in terms of making sure that we have senior officials who can be properly intelligent customers of technology investments and services.
That, I think, is something that’s quite visible, particularly at the middle level in government, where you see, if you like, that picture around procurement and oversight. But you’re also seeing some of the challenges faced by the implementation of government technology projects. It is worth, I think, pausing to reflect on the declining confidence scores here, Richard, that you talked about. The experience of and after COVID includes fast adaptations, online and hybrid working, including in public services delivery.
As Greta was setting out, we did see years of change compressed into a couple of years. The question is whether we can bake in some of those behaviors going forward. A lot of those behaviors are about cultural change as much as capabilities in the public sector. We could dig a bit beneath the headline figures here. Money and the scale of investment is clearly a problem, but that’s always going to be a problem. Governments will never have enough, and, as every Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer peering up at their permanent secretary and minister will say, we need 10x in terms of investment, and you’re offering 1x. That I think will remain true.
The question is, what do you do with a quantum of capital and admin budget that you get? User experience and citizen expectations are growing ever higher—a long-standing trend, but also a new trend. It’s been a continuing trend since the 1980s, but it’s been really accentuated and accelerated by the digital customer experience for the digital citizen experience we all have on these devices. We basically expect government to be able to provide the same kind of public services with the same kind of customer and citizen touch that commercial providers offer us on these devices.
I think this provides a bit of context for the fast-falling figures on how confident civil servants are about using citizen and customer feedback. We just haven’t quite wired that into the way in which we do public policy and design public services. Our own responsiveness is a perennial challenge. It’s about what to prioritize in order to surge into new priorities or proactive policy-making.
Perhaps a thing that doesn’t quite surface in this data is the fact that governments, in general, both politicians and senior officials, are very good at saying, “Gosh, we really need to do new work on this. Assemble a new team, assemble a new task force.” Where they are less good is at properly deprioritizing and making sure that choice on deprioritization flows through into a civil service system at large. And again, a comment from my side: this isn’t just about money; it’s about leadership. This is why the central question of leadership is so important and so illuminated by the survey.
Finally, I might sort of suck my teeth a bit about a perma-crisis that suggests a bit of a war footing on all fronts for all governments. But I think we are in an era of perma-crisis. You look at the aftershocks from COVID-19, the continuing shocks of the war in Ukraine, the challenge of high inflation, what is a tight job market, but also a challenge to growth in many of these economies, and more appetite for industrial action by public servants around the world. This is a lot for governments to handle.
So, I think we should expect a bit of a hit. We see it in the figures in terms of both individual and collective resilience in public service organizations. There are more gaps in staffing, and the challenge of immediate problems squeezes out space for adaptive or futures-based thinking. It’s really difficult, in the first place, to get seniors—particularly when you’re talking about political seniors, but also true of senior civil servants—to talk about what-ifs, especially if most of the meetings are about now-what. What’s on our plate now? What have we got to tackle next?
My final comment would be about the fact that wholesale system change still feels really challenging. No great surprise: officials do more on the now than the next, and that feeds into the survey data showing falling confidence in robust contingency plans. Nordic countries, as you said, Richard, have tended to maintain slightly greater contingency capabilities than some other countries, which may reflect what you were saying about the difference that they may see in scores.
So, my thanks again, Richard, to you and the team. I think this is a really valuable survey and it’s fascinating findings. Great, thanks. I think that’s a really useful contribution in terms of different factors that perhaps play into some of the findings and some of the analysis that flows from them. We’ll get into that more in the Q&A portion that follows shortly, so please do keep your questions coming in. But I just want to get some opening thoughts from Michael as well before we do that.
Mate, thank you, Richard, and thank you to the Global Government Forum and its partners for doing this piece of work. First of all, I think it is very useful. I am always intrigued by comparative work across jurisdictions, and I think starting to build a time series where you can follow the trends will pay off in the future, so thank you for doing the work.
I find myself in agreement with my fellow panelists on so many things, so I think I’ll just try to throw in a few extra angles of commentary and hopefully provoke people for the Q&A. If it doesn’t quite hang together, that’s why.
Why do we see the changes between years? I think it’s one of the most intriguing parts of it. It’s the difficulty of getting the right time scale. A historian would be talking now about the transition from the long Elizabethan era to the new Carolinian era. I find myself going back to what life was like in the early and mid-’90s in Canada. The cumulative load of political and economic crisis was probably every bit as much of a challenge as the current one, but obviously in a different environment.
But let’s zoom in on the pandemic years. There are a number of explanations that people have already alluded to. I think part of it may just be cumulative fatigue from two or three years of really being stretched in many parts of the public sector. There’s a certain fatigue factor that I hear a lot about anecdotally and that may start showing up in survey work. Some of it is what was alluded to: the kind of snapback effect. There’s an initial change in enthusiasm and, inevitably, some other factor of Newtonian mechanics kicks in. The enthusiasm for digital government then generates a response from the privacy and cybersecurity communities, who say, “We have to be careful about this,” and so on.
I think what may be going on now, at least in Canada and some other jurisdictions, is that you have so many hotspots simultaneously stretching the system as a system. My experience includes a lot of episodes of crisis or drama in particular parts of government, but they tended to be spaced. While one part of the public sector was going through a crisis, it could get the full attention of the center of government and the political class. Eventually, it would be resolved, but other parts of the public sector would just soldier on, doing their “Keep calm and carry on” routine. Attention would come back to them eventually.
What’s really striking about the last few years is how many parts of the public sector are being stretched simultaneously. It sort of goes to the theme of resilience—systemic resilience, resilience for an individual organization, and resilience for your public service leader. All of these are being tested for sure.
A couple of other comments: The wish for more resources is a permanent feature of the public sector. I think, particularly now, it’s wishful thinking. I think most governments are now in a period of tapping the brakes and fiscal correction.
Certainly, in Canada, a long cycle of growth and expansion is coming abruptly to an end. Uh, you know, we’re already into downsizing of operational budgets over the next few years, and there could be much more dramatic spending reviews in the very near future. So, um, you could wish for more resources, but I certainly agree it’s going to be more about optimizing how you use them and making choices.
Um, I think what jumps out, you know, in a lot of the conversation, and it’s happening again today, is the asymmetry between public services that are outward-facing to citizens, voters, and taxpayers versus the internal workings of government. It’s almost an iron law: it’s always going to be easier to get politicians to rally around fixing or improving externally facing services. They may be slow to come around; it may take a crisis to really trigger it. But if there’s a problem, as we experienced here with passport services or immigration processing, money, resources, and attention will eventually be thrown at it.
What seems to be much, much harder to get attention to are the internal workings of government, which we all know matter so much. Pay systems, human resource systems, finance, record management, I.T. systems, and so on. I think the lived experience of public servants, from what I can tell, really hasn’t changed that much. On things like staffing, it still feels slow and cumbersome. Even external purchasing and procurement doesn’t seem to be that different than it was five or ten years ago.
So, and that’s the world in which a lot of middle managers work and live. I find nothing surprising about a gap between how senior leaders and middle leaders see the world; they live in different worlds, and their daily experience is different.
I do agree there’s a kind of selection bias for resilience and optimism, you know, to get promoted and stay in very senior positions. There’s a different sort of perspective: you’re going to a lot of committees, task forces, and meetings about change initiatives. You’re aware that the system is trying to improve itself, however imperfectly. Whereas if you’re in the middle layer, you’re just trying to deliver your area of responsibility, and you may not have the peripheral vision that gives you some confidence that change is coming or effort is being made.
I think what you may be seeing in the snapback as well is just how work gets done in a lot of organizations. We had this discussion about return to work, and it was a big, big factor in the public sector strike here at the federal level not too long ago. Again, I think it’s the sort of snapback: everybody was very excited to move to very inclusive, you know, Zoom and team-style meetings for getting together all-staff meetings. A lot of very useful innovation accelerated; what might have taken ten years happened in one or two. Now we’re realizing that poorly chaired meetings on Zoom are no better than poorly chaired meetings in a boardroom. Are they actually deliberative? Are they decisive? Or are they just a talk fest where you go around for 45 minutes and nothing gets resolved?
So we’re back to old problems about deliberation and decision-making in bureaucratic systems. And I’m not sure the technology entirely helps. You know, it brings more people into the conversation, it makes geography less important, but does it make the processes more deliberative and more decisive?
Quick notes on Canada, just for those that are watching, and happy to take any more questions. My usual caution on Canada is it is a big federation, and almost anything of any importance in Canada involves alignment of multiple jurisdictions: federal, provincial, and local. I kind of think of our peer group not as the Nordics in Singapore and Estonia, but Germany and Australia, and even to some extent the United States. The alignment of jurisdictions allows for innovation; things can be tried out at one level of government and then replicated and spread elsewhere. But it also can be really, really challenging to get alignment as well.
So, I think, as I said, what you’re going to pick up is a long cycle of growth in the public sector ending. And I now saw a bit of a mood change. It’s very difficult for me to judge, but I think it’s quite palpable in Canada that— and this has to influence the way public servants living in communities see the world—that sort of, you know, banging pots and congratulating frontline workers, that enthusiasm of 2020 and 2021, has given way to a certain snarkiness and negativity. Social media, you know, snark and feedback on the public sector, the strike didn’t help, which affects how people living in communities see themselves and the work they do.
There’s a political phenomenon where we have an aging government at the eight-year mark. It’s showing some signs of fatigue and burnout, and I think that’s different from the startup period of a government. And it’s difficult to figure out why the Canadian data, what you know, was a bit of an outlier. I think there may be some made-in-Canada circumstances.
The value of the report, just to go back to where I started, is now I can go to the public service employment survey, which is a very deep and rich annual set of data for the Canadian public service, and start doing cross-tabs and looking for explanatory variables and whatnot. But I would end on a sort of general note that, both looking at this data and what I’ve seen in the Canadian PSES, I’m much more of the half-full interpretation of things. Given all of what we know about hierarchical systems and bureaucracy, and dispersed decision-making and the interaction with democratic politics, I actually find these are pretty good scores. I’m looking forward to seeing what next year brings. Thank you very much, Michael.
Yes, I think that’s a very good point on which to end. As I said, we’ve titled the webinar about resilience in the face of perma-crisis, and I think that’s a very good point to stress again. Thank you all for your kind of opening reflections. I think that’s fascinating and really helps put the data in a bit of a wider context as well. And thank you to everybody who has submitted some questions. We will, um, got a little bit of time now to answer some of them. Thanks to Mark Matalith—I hope I’m pronouncing that right—for a lot of your questions. We probably won’t get to them all, Mark, but just to let you know that I have read them. I will start with one that I will put to Greta in the first instance and perhaps broaden out a little bit.
Kind of, is there an emerging view that the response from large organizations to COVID-19 was more improvisational than intentional? I mean, I guess to some extent—and feel free to disagree—the response had to be improvisational a bit because it was such an unexpected shock. But I guess if you want to answer that and then perhaps take the particular point that comes out of that from me, which is: Have the lessons from the pandemic been absorbed in a kind of systemic way into how services are going to be delivered?
Hmm, yeah, I think the responses were a bit colored by the pandemic last time because all the governments—or at least very many governments—had a special governance and things that could happen really fast. Looking back in the government where I lived in Norway, maybe some things happened to us as well, and there are some lessons learned in Denmark, for example, about that. In Norway, there has been an official report about the good and bad things, and one thing I remember very well from this report was actually the lack of documentation around taking decisions. Some very important decisions due to the lockdown were maybe not documented more than on a whiteboard, and then it was taking a picture with a mobile phone.
Whereas we have very strict rules for archiving important decisions in Norway; it’s a great deal of transparency. I should be able to track any governmental decision. It was quite a shock to read how some of these decisions went, but it was like in a war: they had to act fast. So, there has been a lot of aftermath in my country, and I know it has been the same with other Nordic countries too. It has been actively deployed to improve processes, and I think we will do that for a long time going forward.
Alexander, I’ll come to you. I mean, just on Grace’s point there, we had the same in the UK. Photographs of whiteboards were shared as evidence. A former advisor to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings, used these photographs to show how decision-making was being done in 10 Downing Street.
To broaden out the question a little bit, Alexander, how do you think public services have dealt with the crisis? And if we can do the counterfactual—and perhaps we can’t—how would it match to what you would have expected? I imagine there was a lot of talk about contingency planning. How do you think the contingency planning has stood up to the crisis when it happened?
Yes, Richard, well look, I’ll probably offer limited views on operations in 10 Downing Street because we still have a public inquiry going on here, for example, on the response to COVID. But what I would draw out a bit more is reflecting on the difference between the 1980s and the experience of the last couple of years. During the tail end of the Cold War, we had a lot more resilience capability in the UK, as was true in many countries. The combination of civil defense planning and supply chains that were not quite so just-in-time, as they’ve become with globalization, and a crisis that didn’t hit with the speed and scale that COVID did. Let’s face it, we probably haven’t had a crisis of that speed and scale for a very long time indeed.
So, my sense is it’s a mixed bag. Some areas where government did well, some areas where government was found wanting. I think a much more interesting question is what we can learn from all of this. As there is this cycle and sequence of a public inquiry, a range of excel reviews, and internal lessons learned exercises, how much can we actually make sure that some of these filter back into the capabilities of government, as well as the planning of government for the longer term? That, I think, is something that most governments—Democratic or authoritarian—are quite poor at. So, the thing that would really interest me is, as we emerge out and learn the lessons, how much can we integrate those into public sector capabilities, planning, and delivery in the future?
And Michael, do you have any thoughts on your reflections on how well everything’s been stood up? You kind of touched on that at the end of your answer, but if you want to expand on it at all.
Sorry, you’re on mute, Michael, as was I for a second—classic pandemic. Change is subject to all sorts of obstacles, well known to everybody on this call: inertia, incrementalism, risk tolerances, and so on. But one of them is resistance. Change always runs into resistance. Somebody benefits from the status quo or is reluctant to let go of it. I think what’s striking about the 2-3 pandemic years is there was a certain force majeure which rolled over resistance. University administrations were able to bring in online instruction and evaluation over the dead bodies of professors and deans. Hospitals were able to make changes over the resistance of doctors and physicians. This is the way I run my practice. The court system had to let go of this is my courtroom and this is how I run it, and so on.
So, I think actually in the extended public sector, what happened in courts, policing, universities and colleges, even primary school instruction, and doctor visits, as Greta mentioned, is really impressive. I think that may have just been the ability to sweep away some of the resistance for a while. It will be interesting to see if those forces snap back and become the usual impediments in the next four or five years.
Yes, indeed. And as you said, one of the great things about the survey is that we hopefully get that kind of time-series data. Just a couple of points I want to touch on. As someone involved in the report itself and from a couple of the questions from Matt Smith: Have you seen any statistically significant change since the start of the Ukraine war and increasing tension between China and Western countries?
The changes we saw that I set out in the presentation were kind of year-on-year changes. That’s the level of granularity that we can go to. I surmise, as I did in my presentation, that the era of “perma-crisis,” as everyone’s calling it—I think we might have to come up with a better phrase—is contributing to that. Those factors you mentioned in your question add to that kind of atmosphere. So, greater uncertainty is having an impact.
Neil Smith asks about looking at the data for the Netherlands. Would there be an explanation or deliberation on the scoring of highest in the disagree section?
I’d have to go back and look into that, Neil. I would love to speak to someone in the Netherlands about why that might be and how their government is standing up to these pressures. Please do get in touch with me if you have any thoughts yourself on why that might be. I don’t know if Greta has any thoughts on the Netherlands from her perspective.
Fair enough. We’ve got a question from Jillian Curtin and the panel. She says, “I am seeing a significant increase in talented people leaving the public service and moving into the private sector. These people are middle management to middle executive level, many of whom expected to spend their entire career in government. Is it normal for top talent to leave mid-career, or does this signal a bigger problem?”
I’ll put that to you, Michael, in the first instance, to see whether you think there’s any change in trend in terms of people leaving government. I know it’s something that the UK government has certainly always encouraged, to try and get people more permeability between the public and private sectors at different stages in careers. I’ll ask Alexander for his reflections in a second, but is it something that’s coming up more, do you think, Michael?
I think it’s certainly a concern. But again, if you zoom out, we’re in, at least in Canada, an incredibly tight and competitive labor market across all kinds of skill sets and disciplines. Chances of getting an attractive offer to do something else are much greater. The compensation gap is always there. You can make more money as an IT manager in the private sector. That wasn’t the case when tech was crashing and people were leaving the big tech firms and coming into government for safety and security.
It’s a little difficult to know whether this is cyclical or long-term. I’m an advocate of having a more porous and open movement between private, not-for-profit, and government sectors. We don’t do enough of it. We should be doing more of the professional exchange programs. We don’t have to do everything with permanent, long-term tenured public servants. People coming in and out and adding their expertise and energy around specific issues would be a good thing. I think more people in the private sector experiencing what it’s like to work in the public sector would be healthy as well. I’d actually like to see more back and forth. If the numbers suggest a net drain from the public sector, then you have to be concerned. But as always, what are you going to do about it? Are you prepared to pay people more? Are you prepared to be more proactive in recruitment? You always have to go to the “so, what is the solution?”
Alexander, do you have any thoughts on that?
Thanks, Richard and Jillian. It’s a great question. I think what we have seen, at least in the data that’s been made publicly available so far, is a slight bump, a slight increase in attrition rates over the past year. I think what’s difficult to do is to determine how much of that was sort of frozen attrition that was held over from the core period of COVID.
So, are we basically seeing sort of delayed data, but then accentuates? Yeah, um, how much is it the result of a cost-of-living crisis and some of those accentuated pressures, in fact, probably most keenly felt for the lowest-paid public workers rather than necessarily for those at middle or middle-senior ranks?
You know, full disclosure, I think it’s kind of desirable to have a bit more porosity and a bit more flow without politicization. But, yeah, attrition rates generally for the public sector run too low rather than too high. AI, I think a really interesting question is about data analytics: how much do public sector organizations, Ministries, Regulators, and arms-length bodies have enough information about business-critical talent in their organizations at mid and senior levels, and have a really granular picture of attrition risk? Because that’s where organizations start to fall down. It’s as you lose not necessarily the quantity of people at mid-level, but the critical assets you need for your organization going forward.
Thank you, Chris. Did you have any thoughts from a Norwegian perspective? I’ve seen statistics for health professionals in Norway, and especially among nurses, post-COVID. These statistics or social living reasons include a workload issue and something about the payment gaps as well.
Overall attrition has been very high, both in the public and private sectors across the Nordic countries right after Corona. Setting aside natural explanations, I’ll put this question to you as well, Greta, in the first instance.
It’s from Melanie Robert, who says: “There’s a lot less time for beautifully crafted policy and a lot more need to understand user needs and technology. There’s a need to manage stakeholders and have the street savvy to implement changes, work collaboratively, and just plain operationalize. This is often seen as plumbing in government, but these are not the skills that have got public servants promoted in the past. Could it be that we require a new breed of Public Service managers and leaders, and that it is hard to find them or grow them?”
I mean, I think that’s a really interesting perspective on the kind of leadership we need to get there—the kind of changes that will help make for more responsive governments. Do you think these are kind of different skills that leaders need to learn, and how can we help them learn them?
Yeah, I saw that question; it’s really interesting. I do a lot of work with integrating healthcare between local governments and specialized healthcare. Traditionally, the healthcare system has promoted people who are the best doctors and the best nurses in medicine and clinical routines. That is important, but it’s also extremely important to be a transformative leader who can change culture and behaviors, to be a collaborative leader, and to work with stakeholders across entire systems.
For example, if you’re rolling out citizen services, it’s not only affecting you and your department or part of the hospital; it’s affecting a range of stakeholders. I think this is a very valid point for a new era of civil servants. We still need those people who are very, very deep-skilled and have expertise in special fields, but I think we need more change enablers and change makers in public services. You can’t only rely on external consultants to do this work; you have to take ownership and be able to drive the bigger transformations.
And Alexander, if I can come to you on that point, and then to Michael. From my perspective, it wouldn’t be that those skills about managing stakeholders and having the street savvy to implement changes are ones that wouldn’t have got public servants promoted in the past, although perhaps you’ll disagree on that. But more that they’re just really difficult to get and to keep in the public service. That’s the reason that they’re lacking, perhaps.
Look, I very much agree that we need to upgrade, if you like, the skills mix for public servants. But I think some of what’s described here in Melanie’s question are classic public service skills. I don’t think they’re necessarily novel. The change-making and leadership part is not novel, but it’s underrepresented, I would argue, in government.
For me, by the way, former colleagues in the Whitehall system in the UK don’t like me when I say this, but I will say it: I think it reflects the challenge we have with an East Wing-West Wing split in government. People who like to do policy and strategy are West Wingers, buzzing around ministers and the center of government, doing exciting things and being on the news agenda. An awful lot of government is done by the East Wing—it’s a bit of a “get stuff done” approach. This picks up on Michael’s point earlier about citizen-facing services.
I think part of the real challenge of 21st-century governance is how we better connect the plumbing between the West Wing and the East Wing. It’s not asking East Wingers to become West Wingers or vice versa, but we do need people who can integrate. And that actually, I would argue, is another argument for porosity. If you have people stepping out, having some experience in consulting or in local government or in the health service, and then stepping back in, they bring with them different perspectives, different skills, and different organizational intelligence about how cultures work and don’t work.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’ve stepped out four times now. I always come back for the glamour and the money, or so I tell myself. I’m sure that’s true. Michael, what do you tell your students in terms of what skills they need to prioritize to help them get on in a career in the public service?
Well, you know, I like the metaphor. So much of the public sector is operations, services, transactions, and internal services. There’s a tendency to talk about the policy community and the policy process, which is important, but I’d actually like to see more attention paid to slogging through the operational parts of government, which don’t always get the kind of attention and resources they should.
The skill set issue—I’d like to throw in another point. I’ve written pieces and spoken to parliamentary committees about this. Part of it will take care of itself with an 8 percent churn; we will bring in new people with new skills and mindsets and turn over half the management community in five years. But there’s a stock and flow issue here, and I’ve called for a doubling of investment in training and leadership development. If you’re worried about excessive dependency on management consultants, then you have to make an offsetting investment in leadership development within the public sector.
In Canada, I can only speak for us, we don’t do nearly enough. If the governing and delivering in the 2020s and 2030s is going to have this kind of pace and short cycle time, we have to really double or redouble our effort on learning, training, and leadership development.
And just one final question, as we’re coming very quickly to the end of our webinar today: thank you, everybody, for joining us, and thanks to all our panel for joining. Just one final question I want to touch on is the kind of digital side. The report found that or the survey found less confidence in the use of how digital is being embedded in public services, but it also found that the pandemic had made a difference. People thought that technology was one of the things that had been bolstered in terms of the pandemic response and how governments use it.
I think it’s very interesting that digital transformation seems to be one of those things that perhaps is always on the horizon and never quite, perhaps for a rank-and-file civil servant, never quite comes to their desk, does it? I wanted to get Greta’s thoughts on how far along digital transformation is in the organizations you work on.
The examples on the slides were very, uh, very, very good ones that you shared. But would that be the case across all of the, you know, government organizations in Norway that they’re that up to speed with digital?
I think, yeah, you’ll be the experienced. Norway is quite far compared to many other countries in the Western world. How come? I think, uh, we have a penetration of use of broadband and smartphones that is really, um, at the top in European countries. I think our geography also has forced us to use digital solutions in all aspects. We were very early adopters of internet banking. So, when they still used checks in the US, we had internet banking Monday morning years ago. I never used anything else.
So, both the private sector and public sector have been digital for quite a long time. We are not putting electricity on paper anymore. It’s more like the second or third round of digitization we are having, where we are really starting to utilize the data and make proactive citizen services. Perhaps you don’t need to apply for it; you get a Kindergarten space if you move to a new town, and you get a school for your children if you move into a city. The doctor can also see when he should approach you because there is data that is not good for you.
Not all departments or sectors in the public sector are asking. I think the Justice sector in Norway is now jumping into a big digital transformation. They’re a little bit behind the health sector and central government, but I’d say that we are fairly digital. We still have a lot to do, and we also have this literacy problem. There are elderly people and others who do not have the bank ID, and that creates problems because you can’t do anything without using your national ID. That has created some problems in the health system as well. But I think most have taken the approach that if we can serve 70-80% digitally, we have enough resources to serve the latter 20% with physical, traditional services.
Thanks very much. Alexander, you held up your phone to indicate the point of the services on your phone kind of outstripping a lot of government ones. What should we be thinking about if we rerun the survey next year or look in the medium term? Should we be thinking about a world where government services match private sector services, or is that kind of unobtainable? And if that is unobtainable, what are the consequences for governments and what their citizens think?
Thanks, Richard. I mean, I will never be able to match some of the investment that’s made, and that’s okay. So, I want to channel my public sector optimism here. I think there is something to celebrate. Three things I’d celebrate:
The sense that government can be at its best a really effective fast follower. It can take adaptation and adoption from elsewhere and bring it into the public sector and make it work.
There are successful examples of digital services being offered by a range of governments around the world, both in terms of G2G (government to government) services and G2C (government to citizen) services. More of what we need to do in the education agenda, as Michael mentioned, which I think is so important. We need to be growing our case deck of successful case studies—how they worked, why they worked, and what could be replicable or learnable elsewhere.
Recognizing the strong appetite from public servants themselves to find new ways to use technology and engage technology in what they do, either on a policy or operational front. How do we unleash some of that innovation within government?To that end, I would just say that, you know, I’m certainly representative of a dying generation. What do I mean by that? I’m 49 years old. I was the last generation of people who transitioned from an analog to a digital world. Almost all public servants now have been operating in a digital world by default. So, how do we engage that, make use of that, and accelerate that in government, recognizing we will never have as much money as we might want?
Michael, do you want to make any closing remarks, either optimistic or otherwise?
Well, I think being much, much older than Alexander actually makes me more optimistic because you can see, looking back, waves of innovation—the first-generation internet, the second-generation internet, the arrival of smartphones and apps. You can see the progress and the rising expectations that come with it. What you can do now in transactional services was impossible to contemplate 10 years ago.
But I would close on, and perhaps the theme, looking forward, is where the public sector interacts with democratic politics and supporting a democracy. I don’t really want to trust my future to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the autocrats. I think supporting democratic government and democratic society is really a key part of working in the public sector in the 2020s. The standards on cybersecurity and privacy, on racial and gender bias, on equity and inclusion, are very different than those on the tech platforms. I think rightly so; they make life more complicated. You have to provide services in two official languages at a minimum. You have to have formats available for persons with all kinds of disabilities, and I could go on and on. You cannot, governments cannot leave people out and choose their customers the way that a private sector firm can.
So, the analogies only stretch so far. The important thing about the public sector is public interest and the stewardship and trusteeship that goes with that.
Great, thank you very much, Michael. And thank you, everybody, for joining this webinar today. I’m going to have to bring the session to a close here. Thank you, as I say, to all of our panel for joining us, and thank you to everyone who has been watching along. Many thanks to our knowledge partner, PA Consulting, for supporting the Responsive Government Survey throughout and this webinar.
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We’ve run a range of webinars here at GGF, and one upcoming one that might be of interest is “Diverse and Thrive: How Building More Inclusive and Diverse Organizations Can Improve Delivery,” that’s on the 16th of May. I did see a question related to diversity that we didn’t get to, so please do come along to that and ask your question to that panel. That will be a great discussion as well.
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