My thoughts on a new report - "Civil Unrest"
Listening to insiders talk about the need to reform organisational processes within the civil service
Slightly different post from me to start November off. I wanted to write about my thoughts on an excellent new report on employee experiences from inside the civil service. The report came out on Monday and you can read it in full here.
On Monday I went to the launch event for a new report on the experiences of civil servants (and those who recently left the civil service) which was authored by Amy Gandon, a self declared “recovering civil servant”, and Reform, a Westminster think-tank.
The report, which you can find here, is excellent and before you go any further I suggest you give it a read.
Amy interviewed 50 current and former civil servants by initially prompting them to reflect on their experiences of working in the civil service and allowed participants to raise any topics they wanted to discuss.
Testimony from the COVID inquiry process this week has drawn public attention towards the machinery of government, an area which often goes under-discussed despite it’s influence on all of our lives. This report offers an additional set of internal perspectives on the processes and the people at the heart of Whitehall.
Research approach
The research approach taken in this report is really similar to the style of work I do with many of my technology clients - long form, open-ended, naturalistic interviews and followed by thematic analysis on the transcripts of these interviews.
The aim of this approach is to avoid the leading nature of many surveys or other structured interview formats; it allows participants to highlight whatever topics are most salient to them and offer much more rich detail about their particular experiences.
After the interviews, Amy and her team identified a set of themes and coded transcripts to understand how frequently these themes were raised by participants. Higher percentages don’t necessarily indicate alignment of views across participants, but instead just indicate a higher prevalence of that theme across the full set of interviews.
In later parts of this post, when I use direct quotes from the report, I have included participant numbers to help you find the relevant passage more easily in the full report.
Note: the interview pool is not representative of the civil service as a whole, so you shouldn’t treat the themes as representative of the entire civil service either.
Key themes from the report
The 5 most prevalent themes identified by the team who worked on the report were:
An ambition to serve the public and deliver impact but frustration with how difficult this was in practice
A feeling that government had become more reactive and short-termist in recent years
A noticeable shift in the relationship between ministers and civil servants
Lack of admiration for civil service leadership
Further decline in the civil service’s ability to manage and retain talent
I don’t have a policy or politics background, so I will refrain from commenting on the parts of the report which discuss the policy decisions or issues around political bias. However, I do have experience in understanding how organisational processes impact the behaviour of people within those organisations. And when I was reading the report three things really stood out to me as particularly stark about the way the civil service operates as an organisation.
1. “You just keep running into blocks” (participant 9)
First, throughout the report it becomes clear that many of the civil service’s processes are seen as obstructive or actively negative. This came out in two ways:
Delivery: The processes in place are clearly getting in the way of delivering impact.
One participant described how the processes lead to a feeling of inertia: “the sheer bureaucracy and ‘computer says no’ attitude” (participant 15).
Others described the layers of “clearance” approval required from their managers : “This clearance nonsense is just ridiculous…‘check with somebody who checks with their manager who checks with their manager’ – you know, four or five lines of checking” (participant 4).
These barriers unsurprisingly lead to frustration and result in many contemplating leaving the civil service: “some days I absolutely love it and other days you will be crying thinking like ‘what is the point?’” (also from participant 15 mentioned above).
Performance & promotion processes: Several aspects of the career development processes have rather perverse incentives.
It appears to be common knowledge within the civil service that career progression can only really be achieved through moving from one job to another: “Career structures are made so that you get rewarded for moving – it's very hard to stay in an area or a team and then get a promotion… so how do you reward people for staying in an area and specialising?” (participant 17).
The hiring process, which outlines “success profiles” isn’t a particularly effective way of finding the best talent: “Candidates who don't already understand the ‘Success Profile’ system really stand to fall afoul of the recruitment process… You only have a chance of succeeding if you're a civil servant” (participant 34).
Failures in these HR systems lead to people trying to skirt around the formal processes using things like “temporary promotions” and ad-hoc team structures: “I can see that the proper HR processes aren’t working for people, so there's a shadow system that’s being set up, which is one that I have benefited from. Temporary teams are stood up, and people are TP-ed into them or within them” (participant 43).
2. “I don’t look up the food chain and dream of being that DD or that Director” (participant 45)
The second thing I noted was how participants felt when they looked at the cohort of senior civil servants above them (raised by 39% of participants). Many of them described the roles as getting less appealing the higher up you go: “I don't have any major aspirations in terms of the SCS or anything like that, because the more you get into that machine, the less attractive that becomes” (participant 15, a Grade 7). Finding these roles unappealing has a dual cause-and-effect result.
In terms of cause, some participants found the roles unappealing because of the inherent difficulties of these senior roles: “Sometimes I see people progress through the ranks and then suddenly you realise, actually, ‘why are you not as competent as you used to be?’. For me, the pressure on DDs [deputy directors] and directors is what often makes them look less competent – they are placed in a system that doesn’t support the kind of work they have previously done” (participant 47). If these roles are set up to fail, it’s no wonder that perceived performance of senior civil servants is poor.
In terms of effect, finding the job unappealing and difficult likely means many of the most talented people leave. Some participants explicitly argued that the quality of senior civil servants had declined in recent times: “I think overall, junior civil servants are quite good. And a lot of the criticisms that are made of them… I think are unfair. But I think senior levels of the SCS are quite poor (participant 16)”. While I should note that some did express an interest in staying in the civil service long term - but this was far from a consensus view.
Regardless of the direction of cause an effect, it seems difficult to develop an effective talent structure when many of the people (especially in the middle of your organisation) don’t want to hold the senior roles you expect them to progress into. When these talented people leave this worsens perceptions of senior leadership, resulting in a potential talent-related doom loop. This is further exacerbated by widely-held views about how the civil service struggles to attract specialists or compete with the private sector on pay covered in other parts of the report.
3. “It shouldn’t be like that” (participant 43)
Now, while this post may not have served as not particularly positive reading - my third takeaway is more optimistic. The level of frustration with the status quo appeared to be matched by the appetite of civil servants to reform the organisation:
Participants expressed a desire to change the way the civil service operates: “Now, I couldn't stand Dominic Cummings, but I did think he was right that the civil service sometimes lacks that ability to think outside the box, think creatively, and really problem solve… And I think as much as I didn't agree with the way he went about it, I do think he was right that I think it needs a shake up really, as a whole” (participant 28).
They argued that the civil service should change its recruitment & career progression processes: “it would be good if we recruited more people based on expertise, and it would also be good if we could promote them without expectations of line management responsibilities” (participant 16).
Many wanted more stable priorities: “What I think everyone really wants to do is to find a team with motivated people working on a stable priority, where they can really throw themselves into it, work hard, and see some results… And that just hasn’t been possible” (participant 43).
Final thoughts
Despite all the challenges participants were overwhelmingly proud of their role in serving the country: “it’s a real privilege to work… at the heart of government and make decisions that affect millions of people” (participant 38). While this should not be taken lightly, the importance of these roles only further highlights the need for reflection and reform.
The report from Reform outlines some proposals including scrapping the “Success profile” recruitment approach and suggests a “civil service assembly” to support the design, communication and implementation of reforms.
My view is that many of the reforms suggested make sense, but it’s important to start making changes sooner rather than later. Organisational inertia is a difficult force to fight against and waiting for a big programme of reform may take a worryingly long time to design and implement. Instead choosing small pockets to focus on, designing pilots and creating a culture of experimentation can help “normalise” changes in how people work. The added benefit is you can show results quickly which will help get buy in along the way. It requires buy in only from leadership and those in the initial pilot groups, and you can learn about what works while you are delivering. If aspects of the reform don’t work, you haven’t committed to rolling them out elsewhere so you can adapt and change your solutions.
It’s not going to be easy to make changes in how the civil service works, but it’s important and it sounds like people within the organisation are up for it. I guess we will see within the next few years if that is enough to drive real change.
As a recap this post is my thoughts on a new report by Reform, authored by Amy Gandon. You can find the full report here, which contains much more detail on their work and the interview themes raised by participants.