We all know that the civil service has a people problem . At Reform we speak to civil servants week in week out, all of whom express frustration with some part of the machine. From pay to poor performance, process to prioritisation, there’s a lot of discontent.
And this year’s Civil Service People Survey, published yesterday evening, suggests a new government hasn’t miraculously fixed everything.
Many of the country’s 540,000 civil servants are unhappy in their work. Only 52% agreed with the statement “There are opportunities for me to develop my career in my organisation”. For a set of institutions charged with transforming public services, only 33% of officials feel that “change is managed well in my organisation”. A fifth of civil servants are either actively looking for work, or planning to leave their job in the next 12 months.
As a former civil servant, I filled out the People Survey for seven years in a row, and so I know how easy it is to look at these results with a strong sense of indifference. None of the results are particularly surprising. In many cases, there hasn’t been much change since the survey started collecting data in 2009. The yearly ritual of civil servants sitting in team meetings mulling over their results, and concluding they can’t do much about them, can feel like a charade.
But that isn’t an excuse to do nothing, because it matters how the people we charge with fixing the country feel when they come in to work. As Lee Kuan Yew says, “you need good people to have good government”.
Our own research has consistently shows that many civil servants want to change things, but are frustrated by the culture. As one anonymous official told us, it’s demotivating when you’re working hard to see poor performers simply moved around the machine, rather than out of it. So it is great to see the People Survey include a new question about improving line management skills, even if it only asks how many officials have heard of the right guidance document (just 49% had).
But there are more helpful questions to ask about management practices than that. When we surveyed civil servants for our own paper last year, asking whether they agreed with the statement “the civil service in general manages poor performance well”, 87% disagreed. A majority of civil servants surveyed, 57%, disagreed with the statement that “talented people rise to the top of the civil service”.
If we’re going to help the government in their plan to “rewire the state”, we need to start asking better questions, to find out where the real problems are – that’s the first step towards fixing them. That’s why today, we’re launching The Alternative People Survey, in partnership with Civil Service World. We want to get under the skin of the biggest issues affecting the civil service, so we can help identify what needs to change, and how to do it.
The survey is completely anonymous, and we will be publishing the results, in full, so people can see that they’re being heard across Whitehall.
Civil servants are doing some of the most challenging, complex and important work in the country. They deserve a workplace which supports them to do the best job possible of serving the public. We need to listen to them about the frustrations which risk us losing talented people who want to serve their country, but who are fed up with feeling like they aren’t taken seriously.
You can fill the survey out here in less than ten minutes.