How hollow are the clichéd management words said to any officer who has been a victim of organisational restructure, enforced redundancy, cuts to training budgets, forced casualisation or stonewalling in the HR department in response to a grievance! How hypocritical the phrase sounds when entire workgroups are obliged to apply for their own jobs, sometimes repeatedly!
Management is better off not to use the “we value our staff” phrase in corporate planning documents unless and until the staff themselves can confirm they are truly valued.
It is difficult for outsiders to accurately gauge the condition of an organisation’s workforce. Only occasionally does malaise and dysfunction bubble to the surface and be acknowledged as such.
Robodebt is a case where it did, but it took a royal commission to expose the depth of institutional failure. Mostly, public servants suffer in silence as they observe the ethical obstacles preventing their blabbing to the media about disaffection or incompetence in their workgroup.
A cheerful soul at the reception counter can conceal widespread dissatisfaction in the back office. However, hints of widespread disaffection throughout the Australian public services have been accumulating for a couple of decades, a situation that augurs poorly for the implementation of any complex health policy.
In this column describing the elements of a feasible path to effectiveness in public health institutions, we will identify just a few of the preconditions of a healthy personnel administration — that is, a complement of competent people in sufficient numbers within an appropriate organisational structure to discharge the functions required.
Allow some slack
No organisation can be perfectly efficient in terms of matching workload to numbers of personnel. The non-linear, unpredictable nature of public affairs means that governments must always anticipate the unexpected and plan to have sufficient agility in their portfolio departments to meet new obligations, all while maintaining routine functions.
When something like the COVID pandemic strikes, personnel resources have to be mobilised from numerous corners of the public service within weeks, days or hours. Outsourced labour-hire contractors can’t plug all the gaps that are likely to emerge. Departments cannot expect that there are plentiful skilled operatives hanging around in the labour-hire universe waiting for a call.
Climate change by itself is a sufficient reason to build flexible capacity throughout the public services, as extreme weather events, new parasites and heat stress in regional locations create pressures that ripple through society.
In computer language, departments must have backup copies of personnel capacity at all vulnerable points. This could include a corps of retired officers able to be mobilised as advisors or supervisors. Idealistic, one might say, in an era of financial stringency? Every era is one of public financial stringency. Financial stringency is a policy choice of governments.
Go minimalist on performance measurement
In public health, more so than numerous other fields, an investment in staff may not yield any measurable results for years or decades, and it may be quite impossible to attribute well-being in the population to the formative influences.
Well-rounded, well-grounded, healthy adults owe a great deal to their primary school teachers, but their personal success in forging human relationships, sustaining families and establishing careers is never and cannot ever be represented in statistics demanded of teachers by the Department of Education.
Competent staff who have a level of passion for their vocation and are dedicated to public service ought to be entrusted with pursuing their vocation, and their service, without having to repeatedly demonstrate their commitment through arbitrary metrics.
Grant secure tenure
The concept of a technically competent public service, recruited on merit, independent of partisan politics and with secure tenure, can be dated from the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in Britain in 1854. The reforms were a response to incompetence and nepotism (appointment of mates) in the British civil service that had become too great to ignore.
That date is long after civil administration was established in New South Wales, but prior to the separation of Victoria in 1855 and Queensland in 1859. Those states would probably have had the benefit of knowing about Britain’s agenda of public sector reform, a chronology that may have some relevance in explaining the different political cultures in the states to this day.
The nub of the British report, on its first substantive page, reads thus:
It may safely be asserted that, as matters now stand, the Government of the country could not be carried on without the aid of an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a position duly subordinate to that of the Ministers who are directly responsible to the Crown and to Parliament, yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability, and experience to be able to advise, assist, and, to some extent, influence, those who are from time to time set over them. [Emphasis added].
Can you spot the ingredient missing from the “APS Values” and “APS Employment Principles” articulated in the federal Public Service Act 1999? A glimpse can be seen in the euphemism “the usual basis for engagement is as an ongoing APS employee” with no mention of the earlier-era descriptor “permanent” and with “usual” allowing acreages of wriggle room.
To govern sustainably, every administration must earn and retain the trust of the staff it employs. The conditions of employment of staff are a fertile field for cultivating trust, or, conversely, mistrust. In public authorities, security of tenure is a vital tool for cultivating trust.
At the beginning of the era of ‘economic rationalism’, the pro-market policy mindset that has come to dominate public administration in Canberra and all Australian states, Victoria in 1982 announced a policy of contracts (rather than tenure) for senior officers in the ‘senior executive service’, an elitist concept imported from the USA. Victoria was quickly followed in 1983 by the Hawke/Keating government in the federal jurisdiction, even though by that date, detrimental effects in the US civil service were already being reported. Gradually a policy of contract employment filtered down from the senior service into lower ranks and then eventually, security of tenure as a fundamental ‘value’ of the public service was abolished in Commonwealth legislation, and in varying degrees, in the states.
A contract signals that an employee is disposable. It specifies that the loyalty of the employer to the employee and vice versa ends on the date of the contract, with no necessary obligation for the continuing well-being of either the institution (from the viewpoint of the employee) or the career of the employee (from the viewpoint of management). Neither invests in the other, hardly a recipe for sustainable effectiveness.
This is not to deny the legitimacy of engaging contractors or consultants to supplement workload capacity or skill sets for projects. But for ‘ongoing’ roles, there is no substitute for embedded personnel with in-house expertise that is on tap without contract overheads, conflict of interest or start-up hiatus. Nor can any contractor match permanent employees to retain corporate memory or offer disinterested advice.
Admittedly, it is difficult for management to weed out deadwood employees if they are on secure tenure. But sacking so-called underperforming staff avoids confronting underperforming supervisors (which half the time is the real cause of dysfunction) and is a lazy way of managing. It’s called ‘Blame the victim’.
When staff are permanent, the administration is tacitly committed to their training and career development. Employers (government or private sector) naturally refuse any obligation for the professional development of outsourced contractors. It’s no coincidence that since 1983, investment in training of employees in public health has suffered in Australia, which is now trawling around the world to find trained staff to fill certain roles.
Contract employment is poisonous to the capacity of staff to give frank and honest advice to their senior officers. No shades of grey here: it is not possible to have an unbiased public service that is free from political intrigue without security of employment. Exam question: “Abandonment of permanent tenure was a precondition of robodebt. Discuss”.
Conservative politicians in particular take note: in wider society, employees who are confident in their jobs find it easier to form families, purchase houses, finance further education and take on volunteer roles after hours. Also, there used to be a tacit trade-off in remuneration: public servants accepted lower salaries than comparable positions in the private sector in return for the security of tenure. Once security was loosened for senior officials, their salaries jumped, to the detriment of the public purse and erosion of the ethos of service.
There is another personnel-related ingredient essential for competent, effective administration: expertise. Neither the APS values nor employment principles highlight expertise, except indirectly via reference to “best available evidence.” The other items are procedural in nature. We will examine expertise in another column.
Implications for policy
Departments who proclaim the value of staff as a resource, but don’t consider them worthy of appointment as permanent officers, are humbugging.
The analysis leads to a plea for stability in staff structures in the cause of strengthening governance, training a pool of officers ready for the future, reducing the risk of capture by parochial or sectoral interest groups and minimising the cruelty that organisational restructures visit upon trained staff who simply want to fulfil their vocation.
If staff are considered dispensable and their employment insecure, the stage is set for corrosion of trust between the administration and the people who enable it to function; and then the stage is set for unstable, incompetent and ineffective administration.
Public health is aimed at the well-being of the population throughout their lives. It is necessarily a long-term function. Long-term programs necessarily require long-term investment in the staff who are recruited to make them happen.
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