This piece was written by Amanda Bernardo, Senior Advisor, Next Generation HR and Pay — Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. For more like this, see our government innovation newsfeed.
User engagement across the public service is used to develop more effective programs, policies and services. It serves as an opportunity to raise awareness, obtain feedback and course correct as needed in order to transform user needs into tangible results.
When is the right time to start your engagement efforts? One small government team in Canada believes that engagement should occur at all stages. To prove it, they set out to engage with public servants on a new HR and pay solution at the very start of their initiative. Here’s their story.
• Want to write for us? Take a look at Apolitical’s guide for contributors
On January 14, 2019, the Next Generation HR and Pay Team (NextGen) — established under the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada — set out to raise awareness, obtain feedback and conduct user research through a series of hands-on User Expos. The Team held 15 engagement sessions across seven cities, including Ottawa, Gatineau, Montreal, Dartmouth, Victoria, Edmonton and Winnipeg.
Since establishment in 2018, the NextGen Team has committed to putting the user at the centre of its work towards identifying options for a next generation HR and pay solution for Canada’s federal public service. The team understood the importance of leveraging feedback from users and stakeholders alike in order to apply lessons learned and best practices at all stages of the work, including the very onset.
The User Expos, which concluded on February 14, 2019, proved why early engagement is so important. Here’s what they learned.
- Users value early engagement
As the NextGen Team met with public servants across Canada, one thing came across loud and clear: public servants valued the opportunity to be engaged, and to be engaged early.
Early engagement allowed public servants to learn about who the NextGen Team is, their mandate, and how they planned on achieving results. It allowed them to be directly involved in an initiative that directly impacts them, rather than accepting an end product without input.
On the other end, it allowed the Team to gain early insights into the work they are advancing, including a sentiment analysis of user feedback, as well as an understanding of whether potential solutions were fit for purpose from an end-user perspective.
- Engagement develops empathy
They say that empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another. Through the NextGen User Expos, the Team was able to meet with public servants, hear first-hand their feedback and feel what hundreds of public servants have experienced in terms of their HR and pay.
The Clerk of the Privy Council once said: “You cannot sit in a boardroom in Ottawa and come up with a solution for Canadians.” This couldn’t be truer.
Early engagement, whether online or in-person, enables and empowers people’s voices to be heard. It helps to breakdown silos and allows us to develop an end product, program, service or policy with empathy. Engagement is what allows us to put the user at the centre, but empathy is what helps to keep it there.
- If it’s about the optics, you’ve failed before you’ve started
Engagement should not be for the sake of appearances. If you are engaging for the sake of appearances then your engagement has failed before it’s even started. The results of your engagement should be driven by purpose rather than optics.
At all stages of your engagement, you should be clear on how your efforts will serve a purpose. If you’re trying to raise awareness, then your results should inform your communications strategy on who you have and have not reached. If you’re gathering feedback, then you should be clear on how that feedback will be leveraged. For NextGen, feedback on possible solutions was leveraged to understand user needs and preferences when it came to the solution’s interface and functionality.
If the basis of your engagement is optics not purpose, it will lack the empathy and transparency for it to succeed.
After five weeks of meaningful engagement, the NextGen Team was able to hear from over 2,000 public servants. Not only were they able to engage in-person but they were also able to bring the conversation online using their hashtag (#NextGenHRPay).
Early engagement helps us to ask the question early on: why? This is an important question we should continue to ask ourselves at all stages, with ongoing engagement that reminds us why we’ve developed, launched, or even funded a project, service or program.
From our initiative in Canada to yours, keep engaging! — Amanda Bernardo
(Picture credit: NextGenHRPay)
Log in or sign up to continue the conversation