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Audrey Tang is available all day to answer staff queries, from 10am until 10pm, once a week.

It’s a level of accessibility would be radical in any workplace — but it’s even more impressive once you realise that Tang is Taiwan’s digital minister.

Tang is not hidden away in an ivory tower or on a ministerial corridor, accessible only to the privileged few, but rather readily available and in plain sight. Civil servants in Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) are empowered to speak to their Minister and take ownership and responsibility over their work.

Citizens and entrepreneurs often join employees in the queue for Tang’s office. Originally a suggestion from social entrepreneurs, the office hours allow Tang a platform to communicate with anyone interested in social innovation, provided they’re willing to speak on the record.

Indeed, when I asked Fang-Jui Chang, a service designer at PDIS, for an example of a successful outcome from her office hours, I was told I could look it up.

Chang explained that Tang publishes all of her conversations online: there’s a permanent written record of every meeting she takes, with conversations varying from meaty policy discussions to small talk.

Groundbreakingly transparent, the move also encourages inquisitiveness. As a citizen or a civil servant, if you want to go looking for what Tang is doing or saying in meetings, you can find it with a cursory search in her digital archives, SayIt.

Contrast this with the UK Public Accounts Committee’s assessment of the Department of Work and Pensions. The department was criticised by the Committee last year for its “fortress mentality”, due to its lack of openness with stakeholders and citizens.

Tang is cracking open the fortress of government for all to see. Her radically transparent agenda for digital leadership is encouraging a new agenda for digital skills along the way.

Understanding personal motivations to serve

Public servants in Tang’s team are pushed to understand their own motivations and place in the organisation by writing their own job descriptions. Staff are bought in with an understanding that they are allowed to be autonomous, and set their own goals.

Employees’ intense personal investment in their job leads to a strong work ethic. Chang said that employees “tend to work around the clock, because we’re working on projects we love”.

Associating with Tang is voluntary. She only meets people who are ready to work with her, encouraging personal motivation to get involved, rather than pushing reticent public servants to change their attitudes. Tang, while speaking to Apolitical last year, said: “I don’t go to the Ministry of Defense and say, ’Tomorrow, you’re going to change your ways.’ There are limits to public servant leadership.”

How to train your public servant

Tang understands that the ways employees learn is not “one size fits all”. Training materials can be found in manga cartoon form, maximising the likelihood that they’ll actually be read. They’re available in six languages for inclusivity: English, Taiwanese Hakka, Tâi-gí, indigenous Pangcah, Mandarin and Japanese.

She’s also an advocate for putting interdepartmental partnership at the heart of training via PDIS-led collaborative meetings. Participants from a variety of ministries and agencies present complex problems to the meeting, designed to provoke debate. Topics are decided by vote to ensure maximum buy-in. Meetings run for 5 hours each, normally twice each month, with 20 public servants involved each time.

Open by design

While not a traditional digital skill, Tang’s main strength lies in removing the fear associated with being a civil servant. Public servants accept that handling sensitive material is one of the key tenants of the job description, as well as holding meetings where discreet information could be discussed.

But when digital records of Tang’s meetings are all held in an online resource, civil servants are liberated from worrying about the public finding out about the inner workings of government. They’re already allowed in.

Tang also demonstrates her openness by design. Her office, the Social Innovation Lab, was co-created with hundreds of social innovators. The result is a flexible space — “a constantly evolving architecture” — that is open to the public.

The office is open late, with a chef on site, to accommodate different working patterns. Tang said breaking bread with her staff and other social innovators helps stymy conflict: “By building safe spaces [and] supportive networks and [holding] useful postmortems, sharing food, we were able to overcome… initial knee-jerk reactions.”

Civil servants in PDIS are encouraged to collaborate and give open feedback, facilitated by their surroundings. Tang calls this “co-evolution.”

Tang roots her understanding of what makes people learn — trust, openness and acceptance of differences — in the country’s national story. “Taiwan’s strength is finding common values despite difference,” she said. It seems like it’s Tang’s strength, too. — Emma Sisk

[Picture credit: Unsplash/Remi Yuan]

This article was updated to reflect a change on Tang's SayIt archive on the languages used in PDIS' training materials.