For the third year in a row, Apolitical is proud to celebrate innovative, groundbreaking teams that get the job done through our Global Public Service Team of the Year Awards. Though their work often goes unnoticed, we know that teams are at the heart of every effective government and are working hard every day to make people’s lives better.

This year, we recognised teams in four different categories, to reflect the huge breadth of work public servants do across governments. 2020 was a challenging year, and public servants have been pushed to be more creative, innovative, and flexible than ever before — and we want to celebrate their work.

After receiving hundreds of nominations from all over the world, a team of judges at Apolitical selected a shortlist of 24 finalists across the four categories. Apolitical’s members were then given the chance to vote for the team they thought had the biggest impact in their category. Thousands voted and selected the following teams for recognition of their outstanding work.

Category: Covid Rapid Responders

Covid-19 has affected every area of the public service; this award is to recognise teams that have quickly responded to Covid-19, through policy innovations or internal team policies.

The Winner: City of Cape Town Covid-19 Crisis Coordinating Team, South Africa

The team coordinated the City of Cape Town's whole-system response to the pandemic in a truly transversal effort, led by impressive data products, world class project management capabilities, and innovative risk and resilience tools. As a result the team were able to develop 39 clinic overflow facilities to improve social distancing. They also created and deployed a vulnerability viewer, which overlaid live Covid-19 case data with a vulnerability index to direct targeted interventions into areas of high transmission. Another initiative included a bespoke online data tool to track staff availability through the pandemic, which was used across 15,000 staff.

The Runner-up: NSW Department of Customer Service Digital Channels Unit, Australia

The NSW Department of Customer Service Digital Channels Unit (DCU) has led New South Wales Government agencies from all nine government clusters, dissolving traditional silos to work together on nsw.gov.au. This central digital channel was set up to inform and guide citizens and has helped over 9 million users so far. Citizens and businesses have benefited from real-time content which aligned with government announcements, as well as new and innovative features such as an online Covid Safe Business registration. Streamlined processes with the Public Information Functional Area Coordinator (PIFAC) reduced the time it normally took for content to be developed, approved and published – critical in the rapidly changing Covid-19 environment.

Category: Remote Working Heroes

As countries around the world have gone into lockdown, developing new ways of working has never been more important. From quickly pivoting to working from home, to developing ways to keep hybrid teams connected, this award celebrates teams that have gone above and beyond in developing new ways of working.

The Winner: Brazilian National School of Public Administration (ENAP), Brazil

Enap has carried out a wide range of working from home initiatives to enable government to continue working throughout the pandemic. They were part of a team that gathered more than 36,000 responses from federal workers on remote work which will help refine government teleworking policies. They also helped to collect 46,000 responses on a survey to help inform more effective design of policies for returning to face-to-face work. The school also made distance learning courses available in their Virtual School of Government catalog with over 80,000 people enrolled. They also undertook a rapid upskilling of public servants with their “Coffee with Technology” initiative to minimise the difficulties faced by some public servants in adapting to the new way of working.

The Runner-up: Southwark Council’s Smart Working Programme Team, UK

The Smart Working Technology Team at Southwark Council has embarked on an expedited laptop rollout to deliver over 4,000 laptops to staff over the last four months. The team also introduced Microsoft Teams for the first time. To support staff with the rapid deployment of technology, video learning was created and made available for staff on the council’s Digital Skills Learning Portal – which has been viewed over 2,000 times by staff. The Smart Working Team are now working on defining what Southwark’s long term, post-pandemic future of work will look like and have facilitated a pan-London workshop to gain insights for other London boroughs on what the new ways of working will look like

Category: Championing Equality

This year has been a remarkable time of recognising historic inequalities and seeking to rectify them. This award recognises teams tackling equality broadly defined, from gender equality to racial equality to generational equity: these teams are helping level the playing field for others.

The Winner: Connect Ontario, Canada

Connect Ontario is a professional development networking group, which centres the experiences of Black public servants. It began as a lunch group for public servants to meet and talk, but then grew to a formalised programme with 200 full-time members. It has an all Black leadership team and admits members from all ethnic backgrounds. The group holds monthly ‘power chats,’ where members discuss a pre-prepared topic on the phone together, as well as smaller coffee chats, and operates on a points-based system, so members can monitor how much they’re giving to the group, as well as how much they’re getting out of it.

The Runner-up: MERIT Project’s Community of Practice for Gender Experts and Champions, Mongolia

Funded by Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian government’s department that manages the country’s diplomatic and consular relations, the seven-year MERIT (Mongolia Enhancing Resource Management through Institutional Transformation) project provides technical expertise to public servants working in Mongolia’s natural resource management agency. They created a Community of Practice around gender issues, bringing together people who were interested in the topic. From what was once five people, MERIT has created a group of over 50 advocates for gender mainstreaming throughout the Mongolian government.

Category: Citizen-Centred Innovation

This award celebrates teams with a focus on innovative policy putting citizens’ needs at the heart of their work. It recognises teams that have trialled or implemented policy that can deliver citizen-centric innovation in the public sector and ultimately make people’s lives better.

The Winner: The Emerging Stronger Conversations, Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth (MCCY), Singapore

Singapore’s Ministry of Culture, Community & Youth set up the ‘Emerging Stronger Conversations’, as a way for citizens to come together, talk about how they have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and discuss the vision they see for post-Covid Singapore. Fifty participants at a time can join these conversations via video chat, and they’re held in multiple languages so the voices of those who don’t speak English as a first language can still be heard. The Conversations give government the chance to hear citizens’ top concerns and respond accordingly.

The Runner-up: Still Here Campaign, Department of Justice, Ireland

With stay at home orders put in place across the globe, reports of domestic violence have been on the rise. The ‘Still Here Campaign,’ a collaborative approach between the Criminal Justice Policy, Transparency and Funds Administration teams in Ireland’s Department of Justice, seeks to adapt and increase support available to those experiencing domestic abuse. It also increases awareness of the support available to people who find themselves in a situation of domestic abuse.

Congratulations to our winners, runners up, and everyone who took part in this year’s award. We hope 2021 brings you further success.