Performance Management meets the Public Service Employee Survey

by Tariq Piracha

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My daughter starts kindergarten this fall. As a parent, I obviously want my children to succeed. I want them to be taught by great teachers and have access to the latest and greatest tools and resources that they may need to succeed in the classroom. However, time spent in the classroom is no guarantee for success. The level of support at home, the stability of a household, the kind friends and family who surround us, and many more factors can contribute to, or undermine, the success of a student. So, I have a responsibility to ensure that my daughter has as much support outside school as she does within the school system. That’s the advantage my daughter has: someone (me) is looking out for her.

Last year, a new performance management system was implemented across government. (There was always a system, but last year it went through some significant changes.) Its objectives include making managers and employees more accountable for what they are supposed to deliver each year, and supporting employees who either are exhibiting potential or perhaps those who may need some, well, tender loving care.

It’s not difficult to draw a comparison between the system of performance in the public service and the education system. Both have systems that are designed to achieve specific public interest objectives, and support individual success.

There are also similarities in their limitations: as I pointed out above, standards within the school system only go so far. As a parent I might research the schools in my neighbourhood, talk to other parents, perhaps even structure home-buying and transit decisions around getting our daughters into good schools.

As employees in the public service, we don't necessarily have anyone looking out for us—we are lucky if we find ourselves working for a supportive manager, but it's on us to set ourselves up for success. Yes, the performance management system may help get public servants on track with setting objectives and identifying potential areas for improvement and training, but a course on project management isn't going to magically solve things for a team that is short-staffed and overworked. Signing up for French training may not help a public servant improve their French if English is the only language they are exposed to on a daily basis. Some employees may not have supportive managers. Or a large training budget. Or an environment that fosters improvement or creativity.

This is where the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) comes in. The Survey comes out every three years, surveying public servants on a number of topics including work-life balance, harassment in the workplace, overtime, and more. And the latest results are in.

In the past, I never gave the Survey much thought.  Some years I’d fill it out, sometimes I couldn’t be bothered. The results seemed little more than an academic exercise that confirmed what I already thought: the public service is good in some areas and poor in others.

Well, now the survey results are providing public servants with an opportunity to be a little more strategic with their careers.

While the Survey is not a rating system, nor does it get into specifics about the positive (or negative) reputation of particular managers, the Survey does provide indicators about which environments *may* be be most conducive to development. Or, hell, which sectors within particular departments would simply be more stable and supportive so that one doesn’t dread getting up in the morning to go to work. It could be something as simple as percentages that show where one might find lower instances of harassment, or higher levels of job satisfaction.

The point is that the survey results may provide a rough measure of which organizations better align with your own values and goals. It is essentially another tool that is at our disposal. Little pearls of information just waiting for you to take a look and say, “Huh. That’s interesting", pointing you to something more rewarding.

Moving into those more supportive positions or organizations? Well, that's on you.

Rearranging the Briefing Room Chairs on the Bonaventure

by Kent Aitken

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Yesterday, my colleague joked on Twitter that his son had agreed to make the family lunches as part of his allowance, but the bread, mustard, and cheese sandwich from day one wasn't exactly up to snuff. I joked back that he should institute a sandwich accountability framework and make a portion of his son's allowance at-risk, contingent upon results.

Er, it's just something bureaucrats do.

Sorry.

And Speaking of Segues

My colleague responded – as any normal person should – that in fact, he was just going to teach his son how to be a better sandwich maker. And then simply let said sandwich maker, well, make sandwiches.

My colleague is accidentally following the advice from the 1962/1963 Glassco Report. This report, formally the Royal Commission on Government Organization, published recommendations for the management of the public service of Canada. The most memorable of which was this lasting soundbite: “Let the manager manage.”

How'd that work out?

Shortly thereafter, the Canadian House of Commons spent a considerable amount of time debating the minutia of contracts for the retrofitting of the aircraft carrier Bonaventure. As Donald Savoie explains in Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher:

“During the debate, opposition members from all parties hurled accusations at the government and concluded with pleas to introduce 'administrative integrity.' Specific details were brought up, including the awarding of two separate contracts – for different amounts – to remove fifty-two chairs from the Bonaventure's briefing room.”

That was 1970. Despite it being less than a decade after the Glassco Report, the resounding call was for increased oversight, rather then letting managers figure out the underlying issues and manage on. Increased oversight may protect the public purse in the short term, but it may also lead to important questions going unanswered, or worse, unasked.

Did decision-makers have the information they needed to make solid decisions?

Were they generally well-equipped to do their jobs?

Asking Tough Questions

I suspect Glassco would prefer the story of Tom Watson Jr., former CEO of IBM. As legend would have it, a young executive once walked into Watson's office after making a decision that cost the company millions, expecting to be fired. Watson's response was that firing was out of the question because, as he put it, he had “just spent a couple of million dollars educating” the executive.

No kneejerk reaction, no changes to accountability regimes. Watson recognized the difference between structural deficiencies and management issues. In that case, the issue was an ill-prepared executive. In my colleague's, it was an inexperienced sandwich maker.

Asking tough questions about the why behind events is the sustainable approach. And it leads to good results. For sandwiches and management.

The Changing Relationship Between Accountability and Responsibility

Collaborative technologies apply flattening pressure to hierarchical organizational structures by diffusing the ability to publish, share and disseminate information. For example consider the action of publishing something to the corporate intranet compared to an enterprise wiki.


Intranet Publishing is a Linear Process

This linear process is designed to ensure compliance with a broad set of interrelated policy frameworks, such as official languages, access to information and privacy, information management directives, values and ethics, etc. It does so by making people along the chain responsible for formally approving the content. These people are gatekeepers, key decision making nodes along the pipeline. While this type of system may ultimately produce compliance, it does so at the cost of expediency and thus perhaps even relevancy. In short, when it comes to internal communication models, many hands don’t always make light work, sometimes they make long work.


Wikis are Different (or at least they can be)

In an open enterprise wiki environment, publishing is unfettered. It can be instantly achieved by anyone in the organization. This means that formalized structures (e.g. linear approval processes) are incredibly difficult to maintain. Since there is no formal chain of command that ensures policy compliance, there are no nodes of decision-making that act as gatekeepers. In this model publishers are not only responsible for production but for policy-compliant production. In short, wikis make for quick publication but at the cost of ensured policy compliance.


How Does This Affect the Relationship Between Accountability And Responsibility?

In an enterprise wiki, publishers may have new found responsibility but the traditional accountability chain (i.e. the hierarchy) remains intact. I can't say for certain what the exact impact of this is on the organization other than it is largely seen as an erosion of power of gatekeepers. Gatekeepers rely on the bureaucratic tradition of:

Power = Knowledge

Where:

Knowledge = Position within the hierarchy x # of direct reports x Information / relative importance vis-a-vis other areas

The reason this equation works is simple: the information/action/work must be routed through the established process. The minute that process changes, say by implementing an enterprise wiki in parallel to a corporate intranet, the power structure implodes. Ask anyone working in these spaces right now and they will tell you that corporate intranets are losing ground quickly to enterprise wikis.


These will be difficult times

This shift – enabled by changes to the relationship between responsibility and accountability – is playing out in the culture right now. It is creating confusion inside organizations, people are unsure where to put information, where to find it, and in some cases which source of competing information is the most accurate.

The underlying question isn't really whether or not we should replace our intranets with wikis but rather what type of culture do we want our institutions to support? The reason there is so much tension around these issues is that the institution isn't designed to work in the ways that new collaborative technologies now enable us to.

We are slowly moving into a way of working, a way of thinking – perhaps even a way of being – that is not conducive with our way of managing, how we create incentives and/or how we create disincentives.

Maybe it is time for a redesign.


[Image credit: chelseagirl]