How Labour can fix the public sector

Figuring out how to let the workforce do their job

We have an extra bonus guest post this month, due to me being on holiday last week. I will have two pieces in the next week on the US election and the Tory leadership race.

But today’s post is by Dan Honig, an associate professor of public policy at University College London and Georgetown University. I first came across Dan’s work when I was running a small international development charity. His book - “Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn't Work” - was the only one I found that acknowledged how broken the system I was trying to engage with was (that’s a post for another day).

Dan’s new book “Mission Driven Bureaucrats” is based on a huge amount of research into what makes public sector workforces effective across the globe - including examples from developed and developing countries. UCL are hosting a launch next week at which I’ll be speaking (alongside more interesting people) which you can sign up to attend here. In this post Dan explores the key lessons from his book for thr new Labour government.

Those interested in discussing how Dan’s work can speak to the problems their agency faces can contact Dan here.

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Fixing the Public Sector

As I chat with strangers I meet in and around London, they often comment on how things are not going so well in this country (e.g. riots, transit strikes/delays, weather, football). As an American, I feel an irresistible urge to reply by pointing out some of the great things about this (genuinely wonderful) green & pleasant land.

There are plenty of things I can mention to get a smile and a cheerful nod (most effective seem to be National Trust scones, British humour, Richard Osman, and millionaire shortbread). But when I’m searching for an argument, I mention what I think truly is this country’s superpower: its public servants. I include here the Whitehall civil service and the broader universe of public sector employees. The average Brit thinks I’m taking the piss when I say this. I’m not. Labour has the opportunity to unleash an incredibly powerful engine of progress: Mission-Driven Bureaucrats.

A Genuine Strength, Worth Celebrating – But Under Threat

I study bureaucrats around the world, and work with Governments to help improve their performance. The British civil service is rightly the envy of many. An impartial, meritocratic institution with an ethos of public service didn’t come easy. It is the product of long investment. Gordon Brown once said that in establishing the rule of law, “the first 500 years are the hardest.” The same can be said of the civil service. With investment, patience, and time, the UK built a civil service second to none.

There has been an effort in recent decades to diminish this asset. If this had been the intention of the prior administration, I would celebrate their effectiveness. Job satisfaction in the civil service is historically low. The Institute for Government’s most recent Whitehall Monitor paints a picture of declining morale, with increasing numbers of civil servants heading for the exits.

The tools the UK government employed to achieve this behaviour change are what I call “managing for compliance”.  The system is (over)burdened with rules, procedures, sanctions, and incentives. All are attempts to get bureaucrats to do what they otherwise would not. Compliance puts control and authority, those who set the targets and monitor the behaviours, at the top of the pyramid. Those lower down are meant to follow orders and respond to the reporting frameworks, carrots, and sticks dangled from above.

Tools of compliance sometimes fail to generate the behaviour they seek. Often, however, they succeed but only by generating behaviours and actions that can be monitored, measured, rewarded or sanctioned. Using compliance to change behaviours generates good performance where what is to be done is observable and verifiable. This is why fast food restaurants and package delivery companies heavily use the tools of compliance: what can be monitored about a burger or a package on a doorstep is pretty close to all the firm cares about.

Unfortunately, most things Government strives to do are not so easily monitored and measured. A teacher with a student, doctor with a patient, social worker with a vulnerable child can all be monitored. So too can health or education outcomes far down the line. But long-term outcomes are very hard to attribute to the individual teacher, doctor, or social worker. Too many other factors contribute to their individual performances. It is impossible to get those workers to do the right thing through pure compliance.

Indeed, what the ‘right thing’ is also differs. Observably similar patients and student will need different amounts of time and strategies from providers. Those strategies ultimately require the informed judgment of a skilled practitioner.

A heavy reliance on compliance does limit the damage an ill-intentioned employee (e.g. one who otherwise would not show up) can do, but it often does so at the cost of lowering overall performance. If you want systematic evidence that this is the case, in Mission Driven Bureaucrats I document how bureaucracies around the world over-rely on compliance.  

But rather than open with facts and figures, allow me to illustrate what I mean by ‘too much compliance’ via NHS anecdata:

1) My first intensive NHS experience involved the need for an MRI. I was grateful for the care and kindness of the staff throughout. But I found myself waiting just outside the empty room with the equipment for a while. I went to enquire – and discovered three nurses, two techs, and a doctor in the control room. They were deeply apologetic; they couldn’t figure out how to log the MRI in the system, as someone had clicked the wrong button at some point in registering me. They collectively spent about an hour fighting their own IT and compliance systems - time surely better spent on patients. “I’m so sorry”, one of the nurses told me after it had been resolved; “but if we don’t get it right in the computer, there will be hell to pay. We were just about to send you home and ask you to reschedule, so glad we sorted it!”

2)  I was having coffee with the former Chief Executive of a large and well-resourced London NHS trust. He was describing a chronic problem he had been unable to resolve. I asked what steps they’d taken to resolve it. “An escalation meeting”, he replied  – having management convene to try to diagnose the problem. When that didn’t work, I wondered, what had been done next? “Another higher level escalation meeting, and then another.” At each stage of escalation, fewer people who actually understood what was going on in the ward were involved. I asked what had been tried beyond the escalation meetings. “Nothing”, he replied with puzzlement. “What else could we possibly do?”  Control from the top was not only the best way to solve a problem – it was the only way imaginable.

3) A close friend’s wife is undergoing cancer treatment. Over lunch he explained they’d made the decision to shift the care to his private insurance instead of rely on the NHS, as they had been doing. He praised the care and devotion of the staff at the hospital; his complaints were entirely about the system. Each day his wife couldn’t leave for the day until a particular final check was conducted and form signed off on. The wait was often hours for the 2-minute final check exercise. Doctors were required to spend 10 minutes with each patient on rounds. Sometimes this was more time than needed, other days (e.g. just after diagnosis) far too little. “I just want a system that would let the humans in it do reasonable things”, he told me.

I suspect these examples ‘rhyme with’ something almost every resident of the UK has observed in the NHS, or elsewhere in the British administrative state. In different ways each of these examples speak to a managerial logic of compliance as the only way to improve performance. And there are myriad more. For example, the Horizon IT scandal is an example of too much managing for compliance. Perhaps it ought be no surprise that the nation that gave us “Computer says no” is superlative in turning it into an operating modality.

Too often – in Whitehall, in local council offices, in the NHS, in schools, and far beyond – there are systems that keep the humans in them from doing the reasonable, positive things those humans want to do. Luckily, there is another way – managing for empowerment. As it happens, this is also the best (and likely only) way for Labour to deliver on its promise of Mission-Driven Government.

Missions Driven Government Requires Kindling the Mission In the People Who “Are” Government

When we talk about “the Government” doing something – educating children, providing NHS care, repairing roads, etc. – we are engaging in a useful fiction. “The Government” in fact does nothing: people acting in the name of the Government do. For Government to change direction or perform better, individuals need to alter their behaviour. What can lead those people to change? 

One option is changing the people themselves - chucking out the current lot and starting anew. Putting aside the impossibility of doing that (skill loss, civil service protections, etc.) it’s a prescription that doesn’t fit the British public sector very well. The earnest commitment of staff is not the binding constraint on improvement in large parts (indeed, perhaps all) of the British state.

It is conventional wisdom that the public servants of the NHS are good humans who want to do good things – and this is generally (though by no means universally) true according to all available evidence. If it’s the system that’s the problem, there’s no reason to believe that new personnel won’t in turn be demotivated and constrained by that system. The system needs to change, not the people in it, to get better performance.

Far more promising than changing staff themselves is changing the system to alter the behaviour of existing staff. The good news is individuals can and do alter their behaviour all the time. Getting public servants motivated by, and acting in ways aligned to, the mission requires a management system that supports and empowers those actions. My research shows these are practices that allow autonomy, cultivate competence, and help public servants fulfil their purpose.

There are myriad examples of managing for empowerment in practice, from the UK and far beyond:

• In London’s Borough of Camden (until recently led by new Labour MP and cabinet office minister Georgia Gould), Family Group Counselling brings social workers and families with vulnerable children together in long-term relationships. Social workers are empowered to exercise judgment about what these families need, rather than implement a set of policies or achieve particular targets. The result: Camden has seen a substantial reduction in children removed from homes and in care, better outcomes for these children, and happier families.

• In Ghana, a civil service training module “designed to encourage mid-level civil servants to identify potential work process improvements and put them into action,” notably improved performance (the completion rates of projects). As two Oxford academics put it, “most officials do have meaningful ideas for improving performance. However, the overwhelming constraint to voicing these ideas is [psychological threat-based] hostility by supervisors to new ideas from their subordinates.”

• In Pakistan, giving community health workers financial incentives for home visits improved ante-natal care less than an intervention that brought health workers together to discuss what had led them to join the profession and the purpose and importance of their work. Creating connection to peers and purpose cost less, and was much more effective, than a compliance-based approach.

• In transforming the South Africa Revenue Service immediately after the end of apartheid, the Mandela government did not dismiss all the existing staff, or change their behaviour through compliance. Instead, leadership empowered staff – working to win them over and reorient their energies in the process. As Judy Parfitt, then-HR director, puts it: “the majority of the employees started to believe in and identify with this purpose of creating a better life for all.” 

It is fair to ask whether these examples are exceptions – whether empowering management altering the motivation and actions of existing workers is generally effective. To interrogate this I assembled and analysed the world’s largest database of publicly available public sector surveys (over four million individual and two thousand agency observations across five countries). What is true in these (and dozens of other cases in Mission Driven Bureaucrats) is consistent with econometric analysis: when more empowering management is present, so too is greater motivation to fulfil the organization’s mission.

More empowering management practices also decrease employees’ desire to leave the civil service. Give someone who cares about their work the ability to feel they can meaningfully contribute to that work, and they will stay and work hard. Take away the ability of someone who cares deeply to feel they can contribute, and they will be demotivated – or leave entirely, taking their talents and experience with them.

The Front Line Should (Often) Be in Charge – Including in Delivering on Labour’s Grand Missions

Another reason for focusing on the NHS is because “Building an NHS Fit for the Future” is one of Labour’s five Grand Missions. I say “grand” because mission driven bureaucrats can be aligned to a lofty mission like those articulated in Labour’s manifesto. Mission driven bureaucrats can also be focused on the “everyday” mission of the work they do: educating children, ensuring tax is collected, fighting fires.  

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has arguably already put this centre stage. He wrote that in the NHS “More trust must be placed in staff to try new ways of working … Frontline staff will be in the driving seat of the reform agenda — this can’t be done from Whitehall alone.”  So how to do this?  In the “everyday” sense, managers at every level of Government – from Minister to team leader - have the ability to make progress. But of course most of the attention is rightly on Labour’s overarching aspirational goals – and these come with an additional focus on the mechanics of delivery, beginning with the establishment of HMG’s Mission Boards.

The Boards – and indeed, the infrastructure for delivering missions more broadly – offers a great opportunity, but also a risk. The risk, as my colleagues at UCL Policy Lab and the Future Governance Forum put it, is that Mission Boards will constitute a “re-heated Delivery Unit-style approach.” The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit is reputed to have changed its name to the Prime Minister’s Mission Delivery Unit, underscoring the danger that Missions will simply be the old delivery ‘wine’ in new bottles.

Evidence on delivery units suggests they tend to focus on pulling control ‘up’ to the centre and managing for compliance. As a result, delivery units are often very good at accomplishing the narrow set of measurable things they focus on, for as long as the attention from the top persists.

I think many readers will agree that the UK needs right now something broader, deeper, and more fundamental than that. If Mission Boards operate by pulling power ‘up’ to the centre in an effort to use data dashboards, targets, and performance metrics in a management for compliance approach, they will be able to show some successful delivery against targets – but they will ultimately fail in their transformational missions.

This need not be the fate of missions. Mission Boards and the Mission Unit can be powerful tools for transformation, broadening the tools available to achieve the missions by coupling careful attention to how delivery structures need to change with the high-level authority to make necessary changes and study results. Where is more citizen voice and ownership (i.e. the ability to contribute meaningfully to decisions) needed? Where do bureaucrats need more autonomy? Where do accountability structures need to change so that bureaucrats who want to centre citizens’ needs can do so, rather than focusing on delivering to targets unmoored from citizens’ welfare?

Put simply, tools of empowerment, not compliance, are needed to achieve Labour’s missions. The effects of changes in management practice can then be rigorously studied. Moving towards empowerment need not and ought not mean abandoning a focus on outcomes.

There are Many Ways to Move Towards Greater Empowerment

Few readers will find themselves sitting on Mission Boards with the power to drive change, of course. But there is a great deal that people at all levels of the system, and even those of us not employed by the British state, can do to make it better. This is true even for parts of the administrative state not directly affected by Labour’s grand missions, for the millions of public sector employees who will continue to work towards the everyday missions of their agencies and teams in educating children, fighting fires, providing social care, etc.

There are a few very simple questions we can ask systematically:

Are there people, usually public servants but sometimes community groups, citizens, and nonprofits, who want to do good things in support of the mission, but are unable to act?

If yes, what is getting in the way?

Whether yes or no, how can we increase motivation in the workforce and restructure management to generate more value for citizens?

In Mission Driven Bureaucrats I gather and discuss a variety of solutions that have been tried in practice. These include:

Clarifying the mission: Achieving a mission – be it a ‘grand’ or ‘everyday’ mission – requires employees understand that mission. Across countries and agencies, clearer missions are associated with better performance. Judy Parfitt illustrates how leaders might contribute to this in the South Africa case above – it is hard to overestimate the transformative effect of making clear the meaningful goal to which work contributes.

Connecting employees to the impact of their actions: It is not enough for the goal itself to be meaningful, however; employees also need to see how their actions contribute to that meaningful goal. Judy illustrates this, as do Mission Driven Bureaucrats from the USA, Uganda, South Sudan, and well beyond.

Activating the Power of Peers: It takes a team to accomplish big things. My analysis of over four million observations across five countries finds that peers are often a stronger motivator than bosses or paychecks, My findings on Ghanaian and Liberian fast stream civil service programmes and Thai district government echo this, with peer collaboration and connection an important motivator. Peers do more than motivate, however; in the Pakistan health workers case above, they help to clarify judgment. In the US city of Seattle, peer accompaniment for food inspectors lead to more educated judgments, and greater consistency.

Putting Citizens at the Centre of Accountability:  When Camden introduced Family Group Conferences into social care as discussed above, they didn’t just change the ‘delivery model’ – they also allowed social workers to focus the bulk of their attention on different people. My research and that of many others suggests that bureaucrats are more mission motivated, and often more effective, when they can connect to clients.

This is also a retention strategy; I find that when, for example in my hometown of Detroit, rules keep social workers from forming meaningful relationships with the children they are meant to help and instead feel accountable to delivering on targets and completing paperwork, the more mission motivated are the fastest to leave the organization. Analysis of the large dataset I’ve mentioned a couple times above shows this generally holds across all the people, countries, and agencies for which we have data: Management that binds employees in red tape rather than empowers them to feel they are making a meaningful impact are even more likely to exit. Letting bureaucrats serve and respond to citizens is one of the best ways to attract, retain, and motivate the most mission oriented bureaucrats.

These strategies are but the tip of the iceberg; increasing engagement with missions can and does take many forms.  Some forms require intervention from the very top of the organization; others can be initiated by people at many different places in the system. Some forms require changing formal rules and structures; many do not.

I would forgive readers for thinking that at least some of this is blindingly obvious, it’s hardly surprising that when people who care about a job do not have to focus on targets set from above they do better. I agree entirely. It is pretty obvious.  But then why aren’t we doing the things that will make the public sector work better and cost virtually no money, exactly? Why do we manage in ways that demotivate and undermine performance so often?

Accepting a Different Kind of Risk

I often hear concern that this way of managing is ‘risky’, as empowering people means somebody might do bad things. This is more than possible; it is inevitable. People are fallible, sometimes with malice and more often unintentionally. Public servants are people, and some will indeed do bad things. (Also true of the politicians who write the rules).

But the inevitability that if millions are empowered some will use their greater agency to do worse is only one side of the coin. . The risk that something bad will happen because of too little compliance needs to weighed against the risk of a public servant following the rules to the letter yet failing to add value to those citizens they’re meant to serve.   

Acts of fraud and malfeasance occur in every system. When we respond to those acts by saying we will make sure it will “never happen again”, we often add to compliance and reduce bureaucrats’ ability to exercise judgment in ways that undermine the performance of the many to eliminate the bad actions of the few.

Traffic accidents are tragic. But we do not respond to their existence by refusing to allow people to drive cars. Neither should we reduce autonomy and increase compliance in response to all bad actions. The only way to ensure no bad actions ever occur is to ensure that bureaucrats are unable to act – and that will get us precisely nowhere.

“No compliance” is surely usually the wrong answer ; but “less compliance” is very frequently worth considering in a public sector too often obsessed with control from above. Public servants too often face a system that does not treat them like the dedicated professionals they very frequently are. This is bad for public employees; but it is also very bad for the broader public.

Let’s Build a Government as Good as the Public Servants Who Constitute It

Recovery from too much compliance is a long journey, no doubt. But it is not a journey that need be undertaken alone. Georgetown’s Better Government Lab & I, in collaboration with Nesta, will be developing an evaluation framework in the coming months to help teams and agencies assess where they are on the journey towards mission driven ways of working, and where they might need to go. Speaking of Nesta, UK agencies and teams can also employ the services of Nesta & the Behavioural Insights Team to help them adopt mission-driven approaches. 

Many other providers of services offering to help achieve Mission Driven Government already exist, or I suspect soon will. Some will surely offer old wine in new bottles; but others offer the possibility of a genuinely new version. For my part, the Georgetown Better Government Lab can help you partner with academics and roll out new ways of managing in low-risk pilots of new management and empowerment strategies.

I opened with an allusion to Blake’s green & pleasant land; let me double down on that. The full final stanza of And did those feet in ancient time is

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

The fight to build the future we seek in part involves physical “swords”; e.g. money for buildings and salaries and services. If Labour had a better fiscal inheritance there would be many candidates that could benefit from greater investment. But in the absence of excess cash to spend all is not lost. 

Blake gives equal space to the “mental fight” – mentalities, approaches. The mental fight costs little – but requires taking risks in changing the current compliance-based logic that undergirds the relationship between political leadership, senior management, and dedicated front-line staff in Whitehall and in the broader public service.

Concentrating power at the very top of the hierarchy has not yielded the state most Britons want; the recent election makes that abundantly clear. Labour’s grand missions can, implemented correctly, chart a path forward for the entirety of government. More can be accomplished by taking advantage of what I believe to be the government’s most valuable asset: the talents, dedication, and mission motivation of the public sector.

The motivation and dedication of Britain’s many dedicated public servants is part of what has led to this nation’s greatest successes. It can do so again – if leadership is bold enough to let it. I hope for all of our sakes that the Labour government is up for the challenge.