Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic required dramatic changes and new ways of working from civil services around the world. Within this, the immediate pandemic response and shift to remote work have captured most attention, but there has been less dialogue on the other ways in which civil services adapted, or on how these changes have shaped the post-pandemic reform agenda.

To gain insight on these questions, this year the People in Government Lab worked in collaboration with Red de Estudios para el Desarollo: REDES to produce a policy report. We interviewed 14 heads of civil service (or other similarly senior officials) from countries on all six continents to understand how they interpret the transformations that have occurred, what they are doing to institutionalise and deepen them, and what they perceive as the next frontiers for change. The following video explains the objective of the project:

Some agenda items raised by Heads of Civil Services and senior officials include:

As much of the world moves out of the emergency phase of the pandemic, civil service leaders now face the challenge of institutionalising these new practices and transforming organisational management structures.

For further information, we encourage you to consult our policy report Questioning hierarchies: Senior leaders’ views on how global civil services changed during the pandemic.

The People in Government Lab is a research programme at the Blavatnik School of Government.

The People in Government Lab share the key findings and conclusions of the article 'Management, Organizational Performance, and Task Clarity: Evidence from Ghana’s Civil Service' which has been released by the Blavatnik School of Government. 

Ghana is a lower-middle income country home to 28 million individuals, with a central government bureaucracy that is structured along lines reflecting both its British colonial origins and more presidentialist post-independence reforms. 

The study involved 45 ministries and departments which are overseen by the Office of the Head of Civil Service. Core civil servants located in the capital of Ghana across a range of departments undertook 3,620 tasks from Procurement, IT, to Policy, HR along with others. The analysis focuses on the professional grades of technical and administrative officers within these areas.

The study considered the relationship between organisational performance and the way in which civil servants operate under different management practices. Particularly, how monitoring/incentives and autonomy/discretion impact on civil servants' task completion.

In this context, autonomy/discretion refers to job roles and flexibility – the extent of discretion and professional judgement civil servants can use when undertaking tasks and also the extent to which they can be flexible in responding to new and improved work practices. 

Incentives/monitoring are referred to as the extent to which the performance of individual officers is tracked using performance, targets, or indicators and rewarded (financially or non-financially).

Key findings

Some departments use autonomy/discretion more heavily, whereas others are more prone to using incentives/monitoring. In practice, those that score highly for one style of management practice, also tend to score highly on the other. For example, if they score highly on autonomy/discretion they also score highly on incentives/monitoring (likewise the other way around). Higher overall management scores are observed to increase levels of task completion. The challenge being to achieve the right balance of both management practices.

Management practices relationships vary strongly with task clarity: the positive relationship between task completion and autonomy/incentives (relative to incentives/monitoring) is far stronger for tasks with low ex ante clarity and high ex post clarity.

Although ‘top down’ approaches may be appropriate for tasks which are clearly defined, for tasks that are difficult to define in advance (but for which performance can be measured afterwards) there is a need to find ways to allow discretion and autonomy. 

The findings within the study are consistent with theories (such as the theory of incentives) that highlight that monitoring/incentive approaches can fail in areas of work which are dynamic (such as core Civil Service policymaking) and rely heavily on skills such as multitasking and coordination.

Clearly defining outcomes and the outputs for individuals and teams can lead to higher levels of task completion and increased performance. 

In the context of the Ghanaian Civil Service, findings provide support for the potential effectiveness of autonomy/discretion approaches to management, possibly suggesting that autonomy could be intrinsically motivating.

This blog results from the partnership between the People in Government Lab and the UK Cabinet Office's Civil Service HR team and focuses on the study, Management, Organizational Performance, and Task Clarity: Evidence from Ghana’s Civil Service (Nov. 2020), co-authored by Martin Williams. It was published internally in the Cabinet Office Civil Service as part of a series from the People Strategy, Innovation and Insight team and linked to their Civil Service future people propositions project.

Late last year, the People in Government Lab and the University of Chile joined together to host a seminar on the future of remote work in public organisations. The first session – covered in an article published by Global Government Forum last week – focused on research into public servants’ appetite for flexible working post-pandemic and best practice for managing remote teams, including the need to rebuild social capital.

The seminar‘s second session brought together five civil servants from agencies in the UK, Brazil and Chile to discuss the lessons learned from remote working so far, the current challenges, and how to prepare for a future in which working practices will continue to evolve.   

Solange Garreaud, former director of the general directorate of the civil service and president of the Senior Executive Service (SES) council, Government of Chile, began by drawing a distinction between positions and functions. She argued that when transitioning to remote work, it is important first to consider the functions executed within the organisation, rather than relying on current structures which are assimilated to individual positions.

Coupled with the difficulties of transferring certain services online, this may mean significant transformation for some teams. In starting teleworking at the onset of the pandemic, the government of Chile found huge disparity in the ease of transition for different services, with some needing only a few adjustments, while others had to be completely reinvented. One of the current challenges in Chile, she explained, is to establish a regulatory framework for these transitions, while acknowledging that some functions and services will need to be redefined.

Garreaud also spoke of the resources needed to advance remote working – investment in management, economic and physical provisions – and highlighted the need for improved internet access. A government survey in Chile found that a low percentage of the population had sufficient internet access for remote work, especially in rural areas. One of the lessons for her, then, was the need to promote realistic expectations of future work arrangements, accepting that not all people will be able to work from home.

Shift from crisis mode to a future focus  

Focusing more on the social impact of remote working, Suzanne Semedo, head of culture, diversity and wellbeing at UK communications regulator Ofcom and her colleague, senior people data and insight lead Timmy Cheung, shared their experience of a shift from crisis mode to a future focus as restrictions have relaxed. This change, which involved an emphasis on culture and wellbeing, has enabled Ofcom to build successful remote working practices. The challenge now is to establish a vision for the organisation in which hybrid working is seen as part of a competitive advantage.

Semedo and Cheung found great benefit in appointing HR leads to spearhead the change to remote work, while focus groups and data analysis have helped them to understand how to improve. Ultimately though, when it comes to understanding whether a remote work system is effective, their approach has been to ask two simple questions: Does it ensure that people are looked after? And does it deliver the work promised?

Building on this focus on organisational culture, Luana Faria, the founder and head of LA-BORA! Gov, the innovation and human capital lab at the Ministry of Economy in Brazil, explored how to encourage and motivate remote working employees. She highlighted the need for a trusting environment, giving employees greater autonomy and recognising excellence. To enable this trust, Faria urged organisations to develop human competencies and soft skills, to show vulnerability and to be authentic, and to view remote working as an opportunity to change and to build relationships. Since it is impossible to separate professional and personal lives when working from home, creating a safe place at work is essential to increasing performance and productivity. This can be difficult if remote work is still seen as a benefit rather than an alternative working model, with pressure on remote workers to show better results or constantly prove they are really working – despite the evidence we now have that a hybrid model tends to be more effective than purely office-based work. For Faria, therefore, the main challenge is to normalise flexible working patterns and for leaders to view public servants as partners in creating solutions for the future of work.

Governments leading by example  

Sam Nutt, digital & data innovation researcher at the London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI), brought practical examples of how the needs of individual organisations can affect the nature of hybrid work. Working on a local government scale, he has seen a strong connection between citizens and civil servants which needs to be maintained via in-person contact through touchpoints in the local area. This connection means that local government cannot work remotely in the same way that central government does, though the former has nonetheless become much more effective through hybrid working.

For Nutt, the priority moving forward is to develop new strategies for evaluating performance and understanding staff, rather than relying on pre-COVID habits. This will require more varied means than just surveys, for instance through focus groups, workshops, and researching the end-user experiences of people from different backgrounds, to make government the best it can be for citizens and civil servants alike. Nutt urged government departments and agencies to be as deliberate as possible about moving towards their aspirations for the workplace and to aim to be inclusive and equitable organisations by design. If governments can take a leading role on flexible working models, they could have a transformational effect on the world of work, extending to the private sector – an ambition not to be feared as a challenge, but embraced as an exciting opportunity, he said.

In his closing remarks, Richard Weber, director of the Industrial Engineering Department and professor of operations research at the University of Chile, reflected on the wealth of knowledge built up around teleworking in the public sector, both through collaboration between Oxford University and the University of Chile and through the experience of public sector workers that had been demonstrated in the seminar’s earlier sessions. There were two challenges, he said: first, to share these findings with the public sector in other countries to create a global knowledge base; and second, to extend that knowledge to other sectors of the market.

Weber also saw several opportunities in the future of hybrid working. One is the opportunity to include those for whom typical nine-to-five jobs had been difficult – those with disabilities or care responsibilities, for example, who benefit from working flexibly at home – though support is still needed to ensure that these groups are not marginalised in hybrid settings. A fresh approach to the organisation of offices is also possible, with new concepts and designs being born. And then there are opportunities to enrich teleworking through digital technology and artificial intelligence. Imagine, for example, the possibility of automatic translation, through which you could converse online with someone speaking another language without the need for a middleman. This and more will soon be possible through AI to expand the experience of remote work, Weber said.  

A global shock and its impact on government-contracted work

Diogo Costa, president of the National School of Public Administration (ENAP) for the Federal Government of Brazil, considered the impact of remote work as a global phenomenon, with a focus on contract working and public administration. Last year, ENAP hired international contract workers for the first time to redesign its academic management system. The work was organised through a contract with a Brazilian company and outsourced to India. The benefit of this arrangement was greater productivity at lower cost, however the new experience also brought significant shocks to ENAP. Over the course of the contract, the demand for such workers increased globally, while the value of Brazilian currency decreased; the contracted company was unable to keep the workers and the contract was eventually suspended, causing a disruption to ENAP’s development. This story, Costa explained, is an example of new competitive pressures being experienced across the world – and they are here to stay. In the same way that globalisation brought a shock to the world’s economies, so the shift to remote working is having a global economic and structural impact. This in particularly noticeable in the public sector in areas where skills are more universal, such as business analysis and code writing.     

The consequences of this shock are, firstly, an increased demand to legally protect certain sectors and, in some countries, a continued shift to a two-tiered system of public employment, balancing nation-specific bureaucratic positions at the core of government with contracted, remote working positions requiring universal skills and knowledge, Costa said. Governments, especially English-speaking ones, or organisations with experience in international working relationships, stand to profit from this change. Managers, too, may benefit, if they are skilled at managing remote work, as they are able to choose from a pool of the world’s best talent. On the other hand, areas such as Latin America, in which English language skills are less prominent, are more likely to struggle with these changes.

Costa concluded that remote work has created a new world, with a remarkable boost to both competitive pressures and opportunities. It is one of the shocks that will define economic development in the 21st century, both in the public sector and the broader economy – and its long-term impact around the world is yet to be seen.

This article originally appeared on Global Government Forum on 20 March 2022.