This article is written by Lucas Prado, a civil servant at the Brazilian Labor Court, M&E specialist at the ILO, a data scientist, and co-founder of Meryt, a startup that aligns strategy and culture in the public sector to motivate civil servants to achieve their purposes

The citizen-centric service mindset has been gaining momentum in recent decades and has become even more relevant in the context of the pandemic. The OECD itself highlights citizen-centricity as a core competence for innovation in the public sector. But before a service reaches the citizen it passes through the hands of public servants, and the better their experience, the better the quality of the services provided can be.

Organisational psychology has already shown that employees at all levels are seeking meaning in their work, more than external rewards. According to Kaveh Abhari, meaning drives performance: "It is the personal meaning of work that inspires an employee to go beyond expectations, not the rewards or praise they receive. In the past, companies have benefited from a shift from product-centric to customer-centric strategies. In the future, they would benefit from strategies focused on their employees and the meaning of their work."

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed this very clearly, as we watched public health professionals work themselves to exhaustion, driven by the duty to save lives. But on a day-to-day basis, what motivates an ITU Intensivist doctor may be very different from what motivates an infectious disease specialist or a nurse.

• Want to write for us? Take a look at Apolitical’s guide for contributors

"The combination of user experience and design thinking has already helped many in the federal community realise the vast strategic potential to recruit and develop a stronger, more customer-focused future federal workforce."

This is according to Dr. Bill Brantley, a career civil servant and adjunct public professor of management with a specialisation in federal human resources. Federal agency scores in the US for satisfaction and engagement of public servants meanwhile are stagnant and consistently behind the private sector. These scores have hovered just under 60% over the past five years, according to studies by Best Places to Work.

Simple, low-cost actions such as establishing an integrated digital platform for employees can prevent them from wasting valuable time logging in and switching between different systems. Data management is cited by many employees as one of the most time-consuming tasks, with up to 70% reporting that they need to enter the same data into multiple systems to do their job. In other words, time spent on digital bureaucracy tends not to add value to the public servant experience, but rather distance them from their purpose.

The future of work, and by association citizen-centric public service, will be about strengthening the employee experience.

Poor employee experiences in the public sector meanwhile negatively affect productivity. Around 61% of government employees say they are productive at work most days. This is 10% lower than private sector employees according to Judy Weader, senior analyst at Forrester Research. According to the study, which examines the workplace empowerment of more than a thousand public sector employees, poor employee experience leads to disengagement in government positions. Around 27% of public sector employees reported feeling disengaged, versus 19% who reported feeling highly engaged. By contrast, only 18% of private sector employees reported feeling disengaged, while 29% reported feeling highly engaged.

All indications suggest personnel problems within government are likely to get worse in the coming years. The main factors are an aging workforce, worsening fiscal crises, together with difficulty renewing staff, as well as constant public pressure for better services. The good news is that federal agencies do not need to undergo large-scale, expensive changes to incorporate employee experience.

For example, the UK government's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) recently designed a digital academy to help employees prepare for the kinds of roles within digital forms of governance that will only increase as time moves on. Similarly, in another department, Transport for London (TfL) has developed a crowdsourcing app to report non-urgent problems in the station environment, making work more effective and collaborative with citizen participation.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) in the US meanwhile has, through a combination of observation, listening, and experimentation, moved from the lowest-ranked bodies in the US with regards to employee satisfaction around pay, to among the highest. It has done so by investing in an online subscription-based platform that provides skills training including training seminars. Other resources such as forums and interviews have meanwhile revealed to the FLRA a link between employees’ satisfaction with pay, and trust, recognition, and career opportunities offered at work.

In this sense, the future of work, and by association citizen-centric public service, will be about strengthening the employee experience. This involves several important changes, such as framing the employee experience in the context of work, identifying how employee motivations shape their experience, empowering managers to co-create solutions with staff and setting policies that recognise the human needs of their employees.

Public service promises a unique experience for employees who want to make a meaningful impact on the lives of the people they serve. Government agencies need to realise that their mission, values, and purpose requires first thinking about their employees’ experiences. — Lucas Prado

We want to hear what you think about this article. Pitch an article to us or send your comments to hello@apolitical.co

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)

Make sure to share your own thoughts with the author by leaving a comment below