This article is written by Roman Yosif, executive director of Laboratorio de Gobierno, Chile.

These last few months and weeks where we have seen how Covid-19 is radically changing our behaviour as a society.

The positive effects of this pandemic, if we can put it that way, is that it creates room for new debates and opportunities for government to show its worth. The public sector, and by extension us public servants, is being put to the test as the great provider of services that citizens rely on. This, in turn, puts the onus on us to meet certain standards of quality and timeliness.

Today, there is an increasing pressure on governments to transform themselves and be innovative in the services provided to people. This is also true in Chile, where topics such as agility in service delivery, user-centered design and accessibility in digital services and systematic management strategies are on the agenda in the communities of forward-thinking public servants.

The key challenges for governments during this pandemic all share a common root — how policymakers use data to enable governments to make decisions based on evidence

At the Laboratorio de Gobierno, Chile’s national government innovation lab, we see Covid-19 as a great accelerator of deep changes, some of which have the potential to directly benefit people.

During these weeks we have implemented solutions to diverse issues such managing public servants remotely, how to best take care of health personnel, how to prevent violence against women, how to ensure employment protection, and how to support the most vulnerable such as those living in slum camps — just to name a few.

The 5 challenges of the pandemic

From this we have identified five key challenges for governments during this pandemic. They all share a common root — how policymakers use data to enable governments to make decisions based on evidence — which, in turn, connects the dots between public policies and their public value:

  1. Effective communications: Official communications must use clear language and use techniques from behavioural science. The goal should be to generate adherence among citizens but also ensure real access to public policies.
  2. Agile attention: We have to strengthen the new remote ways of working in order to meet the new demand that appeared, as face-to-face procedures became impossible and digital services became even more critical than they were before.
  3. Systemic services: We have to rethink government's programmes from the point of view of the users. That means taking a fresh look at the user journeys for both old and new problems, and really break down silos between government departments. One way to do that is by using new shared data and new technologies.
  4. Productive teleworking: As we all transition to new ways of working, some of which may stay with us beyond the immediate short term, training both public managers and civil servants in new working methods to achieve delivery is a must.
  5. Better public spending: Lastly, we have to change the standards and processes in order to have an impact-focused fiscal budget, and break with the inertia of continuity expenses.

Providing a high-quality service to citizens is an obligation because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who pay their taxes and ensure that the public sector can exist at all.

We believe that this is what the future of government looks like and that the future has been thrust upon us now, making it imperative that laws, institutions, processes and services be co-designed all bearing in mind how to solve a given problem for the citizen. This is what smart bureaucracy means and it may be the biggest thing we gain from this current crisis. — Roman Yosif

(Picture credit: Death to the Stock Photo)

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