Reform’s Will Tanner argues that we need to look more critically at the employment culture of the public sector workforce in order to reduce absenteeism and increase productivity and morale.
Today thousands of union members will meet for the 143rd annual TUC Congress in London amid increasing threats of industrial action and civil disobedience from union leaders. Over the next three days, they will discuss an agenda that opposes virtually any reform of public sector employment, including job losses, local autonomy over pay and conditions in schools, and the targeting of sick leave and absenteeism as “soft targets to save money”. While this agenda is not surprising, it does stand in direct opposition to the notion of better public services, for both the taxpayers that use them and the public servants that work within them.
As Reform’s new report on the public sector workforce, Reformers and wreckers, shows, many public services are currently handicapped by an outdated employment culture where what matters is how long you have been in the job, rather than how you perform in it, and where local managers are prevented from making the most from their staff. Just 40 per cent of public sector organisations use bonus schemes to encourage higher staff performance, compared to over 80 per cent in the private sector. 60 per cent of public sector organisations continue to pay by length of service, irrespective of performance, against just 8 per cent of private sector organisations.
The result of this culture is a poorly incentivised workforce where low productivity and low morale prevails. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has found that public sector employees are often disengaged with their organisations and managers, while private and voluntary sector employees consistently register net approval ratings for their employment. Public servants are also far more likely to be absent from work, averaging just under ten days each a year, compared to under seven for their private sector counterparts.
However, a number of leading public service organisations are already tackling these issues and demonstrating that, even in times of straitened finances, transforming the workforce can have a marked effect on the quality of the service itself. At Denbigh High School, situated in one of the most deprived areas of Luton, the introduction of a comprehensive continuous professional development for teachers has helped take pupil attainment of five A* to C grade GCSEs from less than 20 per cent in 1993 to 100 per cent last year. In Salford, the implementation of greater community policing and more efficient management has helped Greater Manchester Police to drastically improve response times to incidents and reduce the crime backlog by more than two-thirds in less than a year.
Furthermore, these visionary organisations show that improvements can be made with less staff. Merseyside Fire and Rescue, for instance, reduced the number of firefighters by nearly 40 per cent, from 1,500 to fewer than 900, in the decade to 2007. However, by shifting to a preventative service model, in which firefighters conducted home fire safety checks, installed smoke alarms and toured local communities to raise awareness among residents, Merseyside halved the number of domestic fires in the area. At the same time, Merseyside reduced the sickness absence among firefighters from 18 shifts a year to less than 5, saving approximately £2 million a year.
We all want better schools, like Denbigh High, more responsive policing, like Greater Manchester, and safer communities, like those served by Merseyside Fire and Rescue. If these are to become the rule rather than the exception, the Government, and the unions, must accept that the employment culture within services needs to radically change.
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Public services are incommensurable with private commercial undertakings whether the latter are small businesses or large transnational Corporations, the latter organized around maximizing profit margins the latter organized around the meeting of human need. Obviously the relationships in public services should be based on co-operation
not rivalry or competition. Tanner’s suggestion that a bonus culture should be introduced
into public service work in order to incentivise seems to me just another miserable attempt to individualise the remaining sectors where collective action is pre-eminent.
Extending the market into every workplace and sector is thoroughly destructive for it sets worker against worker, worker against ‘client’, public sector against private sector,
hospital against hospital, university against university and, most nauseating of all, it even enters personal relationships setting husband against wife.
As Richard Sennett of LSE has amply pointed out career structure is basic to social and political stability, so that inevitably seniority and experience count against juvenility and opportunism. The public services need to abandon all bonus schemes and to de-individualise invidious competition where a human need is being met. Underlying Tanner’s argument is the usual minimal State entrepreneurial mythology of neo-liberalism. In fact the State and private business worked far better in the Welfare State period prior to the imposition of managerial neo-liberalism in the 1980s, employers accepted their responsibility to limit their profitability by accepting a high tax levy on their income in order to compensate through Welfare income those who did not benefit from the system. Productivity targets, performance appraisal, league tables
did not exist for there still remained a widespread view that people were human beings with needs that required objective satisfaction before the recent more decadent view that people were productive functionaries who are exploitable and degradable. Obviously in my life I treat people as human beings who are dependent on each other and therefore need to co-operate to meet that dependence, I never treat people as
productive functionaries who serve a system that robotically abuses them.
We need to abolish all the hideous neo-liberal tricks such as bonus schemes, performance appraisal, productive targets etc plus all the degraded language of managerialism which is an opaque language game and serves nobody but these under-age managerial upstarts themselves.
Oh yes the UK had better atart to leave the last 30 years behind, if only because globalism is dead, the banks and bourses are crippled and the enthusiasm for a
vacuous inane practical materialism is no longer there.
While there is nothing wrong with these suggestions, there is nothing right either. Many of the examples are “one-off” depending upon special circumstances that may be generalizable but probably aren’t. Incentives are dubious because frequently they are not based on actual performance. One measure that has been shown to improve performance is to make it easier to fire poor performers. Another is to improve the quality of supervision-a very difficult task. Another, where possible,, is to develop quantitative productivity targets and reward those who achieve them.