This article is written by Inbar Almagor, Head of Digital Transformation Division, Joint – Elka, Israel and Noa Miller, Development and Research Manager at the Digital Transformation Division, Joint – Elka, Israel and Apolitical Insider Fellow. This article was edited by Tanyah Hameed, Research and Policy Associate, Oxford University, United Kingdom and Apolitical Insider Fellow.

As the world adjusted to the Covid-19 pandemic, public organisations had to continue to provide essential services remotely.

Workers who had previously toiled at the office now needed to work from home. This introduced both new challenges regarding work and management routines, as well as new opportunities for growth. At Joint-Elka, we develop solutions to deep-seated public service challenges, such as digitalisation of the public sector, cross-sector collaboration and quality assurance — which limit the ability to provide effective and efficient social services.

Adaptation to remote work also provides opportunities to change work practices within the public sector

During Covid-19, we dedicated ourselves to helping the public sector adjust to the many aspects of remote working. Along with our partners from the government, our efforts included establishing a professional community to support public employees' transition to remote work, mapping the readiness of local authorities around infrastructure and computer applications, and organising professional webinars on productivity and remote management issues.

Common challenges in remote working

Our work identified six common challenges that the public sector in Israel has faced due to remote working. These include:

  1. Calculation of work hours is difficult: In the public sector, the week's work schedule is based on the calculation of work hours. The move to remote work has disrupted this method, as employees needed to work while simultaneously managing their family commitments, guiding their children's remote learning, and fulfilling other personal tasks. On top of everything else, they lost the familiar “visibility” of work hours. The result was an unpredictable work schedule, which made it difficult to accurately gauge work hours.
  2. Regulation can be restrictive: In both local and central authorities, current regulation does not permit purely working from home. Among other constraints, you need to schedule and attend face-to-face council meetings, and physically submit tenders. There are also issues regarding privacy and the digital encoding of data, which limit public servants' ability to access and update sensitive data remotely.
  3. Local authorities face more complex issues than the central government: Due to different and more limiting regulations as well as infrastructural barriers, local authorities have to work through more challenges than central governments. Among the infrastructural difficulties, we identified a lack of end devices, such as laptop computers, and insufficient Internet infrastructures. Some workers couldn't even connect to their organisation's core-systems remotely.
  4. Organisational culture is challenging to adapt overnight: Remote working is simply not common in the public sector. During the first weeks of lockdown, managers and employees experienced a mindset shift as they realised the potential productivity inherent in remote work, but also its difficulties.
  5. Providing services remotely is not always possible: Covid-19 presented public organisations with the challenge of providing remote services. Although a huge effort was made to transfer services to digital mediums, services that had to shift from zero to 100 during the Corona crisis, just didn't make it. Crucial services, such as payments to governmental bodies, kindergarten registration, and grant applications are only partly digitalised or not digitalised at all.
  6. Social services need to take into account additional considerations: It's particularly complex extending remote aid to communities with special needs, or those who rely on welfare. People who deliver and receive social services find it difficult to interact virtually and retain the same quality of services for various reasons such as lack of human connection, inadequate digital literacy reasons or insufficient availability of devices.

Opportunities from remote working

On the other hand, adaptation to remote work also provides opportunities to change work practices within the public sector, and to adapt them to both the unique current situation and to future work environments:

  1. Developing digital services wherever possible could free up human resources: Incorporating more digital services would allow workers to concentrate on frontline services where in-person interaction is essential. This presents an opportunity for adopting a new focus in the public sector. We can provide a simple, accessible, and convenient digital response where suitable, and focus our efforts on customised services for citizens and residents with complex needs.
  2. Opportunity to switch to measuring outputs instead of inputs: In an era where people can virtually work whenever or wherever they choose, calculating hours is becoming less and less relevant. In the private sector, work processes are now often based on performance indicators such as measuring output rather than hours, leading to increased employee efficiency.
  3. Improved occupational flexibility: Remote work has increased flexibility in work locations and schedules. The public sector could potentially employ residents living in the geographical periphery. Remote employment enhances work-life balance, reorganises structures from a gender perspective, and relieves traffic on the roads. In the long run, it could also lead to reduced needs for office space and fewer real estate constraints.
  4. Digital literacy for public employees: The lockdown has showed us that public sector employees adapt well to digital work. It has also demonstrated the importance of the right training and guidance. It's a lot better to provide hands-on training, with emphasis on digital tools and work processes used daily at work, than to give workers general lessons in digital literacy.

Covid-19 has led the public sector to a critical junction

The pandemic has led the public sector to a crossroads. It can choose to either bravely move forward or go back to the traditional work processes used before Covid-19.

We cannot completely forgo the in-person format

We at Joint-Elka believe that the public sector should continue to encourage remote work while providing employees with better logistical and managerial support to do so. We must learn to calculate outputs accurately and efficiently and develop specific protocols to replace current frontline services with remote solutions.

We cannot completely forgo the in-person format —  a digital-only environment is sterile and lacks the unique advantages of community, fellowship, and teamwork. However, a weekly schedule could be based partly on remote work, while still complying with work requirements and organisational needs. Striking this balance and capitalising on the above opportunities can help citizens benefit from even better public services, and help the public sector turn the Coronavirus “lemon” into lemonade. — Noa Miller and Inbar Almagor

(Picture credit: Unsplash)