You (and I) Are Here (Maybe)
The efforts to reform the Canadian Public Service live as far back in my memory as the beginning of my public service career (over 15 years at this point) but they can be found in various forms and under various names much earlier than that. One of the first major renewal initiatives was the PS 2000 process, which “sought to update the public service by making it less complex, cheaper, more flexible, and efficient by removing red tape and implementing new management philosophies while decentralizing decision-making to better empower public servants to deliver services through personnel decision-making.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? It sounds exactly like what I have been hearing throughout my entire career. Except PS 2000 started in 1989 and eventually led to the enactment of the Public Service Reform Act of 1992. So quite a bit of time before me.
The ongoing reform efforts, recently collected under the Blueprint 2020 Vision, nowadays known as Destination 2020, are being revived across the Public Service in Canada under the guise of digital transformation, which in many departments is also supported by customized change management tactics (often based on the PROSCI model of organizational change, but methodologies are often dedicated to specific needs of each government organizations).
Accelerated by Covid, public services are moving into a future where the demand for digital delivery will be a given, as will be the expectation of resilience ensuring seamless functioning of government operations even under unpredictable future systemic or global calamity scenarios. Today, more than ever, we need to build a strong community of practitioners that embraces the adoption of digital mindsets and behaviours. And engagement is the key to this future’s success.
While we recognize there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to improving employee engagement in the Public Service, our goals of engaging Public Service employees to focus on Prosci’s model of individual change known as ADKAR:
- AWARENESS: Helping employees become more aware and paying attention to the changes in their working environment
- DESIRE: Having leaders at all levels model good digital behaviours to awaken a desire for excellence in employees, to motivate them to continuously be learning and growing professionally
- KNOWLEDGE: Building a positive work culture that encourages respect and embraces diversity for enhanced knowledge, understanding, and mutual support
- ABILITY: Providing training and development opportunities to enhance the abilities of staff that empower them to accomplish their tasks with confidence
- REINFORCEMENT: Providing meaning to help employees develop stronger connections with the work they do, their colleagues, and their professional sense of pride: by learning from our mistakes and celebrating our success to reinforce the importance of a continuous growth mindset
Additionally, behavioural science empowered by informative data can help ensure transitional efforts are based on evidence about the reality of needs and unique factors that contribute to long-term success in digital transformation at the Public Service.
Where HERE is: Public Service in an environment of significant change
The following is an excerpt from the 2018 OECD review of The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada, that I worked on with the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation team. It speaks to why adaptability to rapid change is essential for government institutions:
“In a slow-changing environment, expectations are also likely to stay relatively static. However, a high rate of change provides opportunities to revisit long-standing practices and assumptions. New technologies, new operating models and new practices allow for new types of understanding, new ways of working, new ways of relating and interacting, and new forms of collaboration.
For instance, in a world where information about nearly any topic can be accessed almost instantly through a smartphone, a requirement to access information in person becomes burdensome, whereas previously it may have been normal. The ability of a multinational company to offer highly tailored services drawing on a person’s own information, may mean that users have less patience with a taxation system that requires laborious data entry and expects them to respond to questions they have already answered. What is known to be possible will shape and change expectations of what government should be. The needs and wants of citizens will adjust rapidly in a world where what is possible is also changing quickly.
Change can thus provoke questions from those working in government, as well as citizens and observers, about how things are being done. It provides an opportunity to ask, “Why isn’t this done differently, now that we know there are other, possibly better, alternatives?” Once the question is asked, there is, arguably, a democratic responsibility to try and do better, to undertake innovation in order to achieve the best outcomes and results for citizens — results that are both possible and feasible.
This too, then, suggests that public sector innovation is not simply a “nice to have”, but rather a prerequisite for governments.”
And now that the Covid pandemic has confirmed that other (sometimes better) ways of doing what we’ve always done are possible, a crucial question emerges:
