Public sector reform must be achieved through innovation, writes GERALD FLYNN

PUBLIC SECTOR managers are like lobsters in a box in that as soon as one of them tries to innovate or implement dramatic change, the others claw her back into the box.

This insight is not a direct comment on Ireland’s public service managers, it was an observation made by Michael Bichard, the director of Britain’s Institute of Government, at the Public Service Leadership conference earlier this month. However it may be equally applicable here.

“That’s a bit over-ambitious,” or “the unions will never stomach that” are common retorts within the public sector to managers proposing innovation and change to improve services, reduce costs or boost productivity. It is often well-meant advice, with the suggestion that the manager who rocks the boat and presses for change may have a static career.

A window of opportunity though may be opening now that the sacred urn of social partnership is seen to have some cracks, and the culture in public services organisations may be changing in response to recession and budget cuts.

Bichard’s upbeat message was that leaders who can deliver fresh ideas and drive change using limited resources will be essential to the sector as many organisations face budgets cuts.

“The only way to face the problems we have at the moment is through innovation. There are good examples of people innovating within the public service now, but these examples do not represent the norm.

“We need to challenge the prevailing culture right across the public sector so innovation becomes part of the life-blood of the service. We need people who don’t believe that you need resources to make better public services.”

Alluding to the lobster mentality, he said future public service leaders needed to encourage and pursue new ideas and to welcome challenges.

Of course, in Ireland, this is not easy, given the stop-start restructuring of our health services since 2004 or the tight control imposed by Government departments on agencies and authorities and our multiplicity of local authorities and town councils with small budgets and populations.

A timely thesis was published last month at Dublin City University comparing cultural influences on organisational change in both private and public sector organisations. John Butler’s Implementation of quality management in the public sector versus the private sector: a cultural analysis reviews the Total Quality Management (TQM) literature.

Dr Butler concludes that core to the introduction of TQM in any organisation is a need to be acutely sensitive to the cultural aspects of the organisation.

This thesis also considers the very different and indeed opposing views regarding the development of the public sector and concludes, that irrespective of the strategy used, the human factor is a key area in public sector reform. This people focus requires culture change and time to implement.

The key message at the Public Service Leadership conference was that it is up to human resource managers to provide the vanguard of public sector change.

Unfortunately in Ireland, HR managers have been wedded, whether they liked it or not, to national social partnership. This allowed initiatives to be “parked” and issues of efficiency and performance ignored or sidelined for years, often by referring them to “national talks”.

Some modest aspirations have been outlined in the 2006 Towards 2016 agreement and repeated in the transition agreement signed last November. This week they are again the subject of further discussion between public sector union chiefs and the Government.

We may be seeing the first aspects of local initiatives to tackle reform with the isolated industrial action in Cork and Sligo hospitals and lunchtime stoppages by some clerical staff in the Civil Service responding to the first phases of local changes being implemented outside the discredited national social partnership process.

The first few management “lobsters” who climb out of the box may be the ones to watch as potential leaders of long-overdue public service reforms which have been hidden behind a screen of benchmarking and social dialogue for the past decade.

The dominant theme at the conference was that there is no better place than to begin with their own HR departments, to implement changes closest to home as examples and models for other sections to follow.

If they cannot change the culture and values, they are unlikely to secure efficiency improvements and increased cost-effectiveness.

Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin.

gflynn@alignmanagement.net