Public servants' accountability

 It’s really amazingly disgraceful, but public servants can usually get away with anything. The situation probably varies, and in some countries it may be better or worse than in others, but this really can be a silent killer.

Mostly when people talk about accountability they are referring to being accountable for doing naughty things, stealing and misconduct, for example. But what I’m talking about is public servants being accountable for delivering outcomes on projects they are paid to do within a reasonable period of time.

Peter never did anything that was illegal or against the code of conduct. In fact, he really was a nice guy. He probably didn’t even steal stationery. But although we don’t need to keep people like Peter accountable to prevent them from being corrupt or stealing, he still should be kept accountable for actually doing his job.

Public servants are not held accountable in a meaningful way,

for following policies or delivering outcomes, because appointments to positions are no longer based on merit, and no-one follows up to see if policies are ever implemented. Crazily, public servants set and monitor their own objectives and deliverables.

One of the lame attempts that’s very popular with corporate types these days is the ‘deliverables’ method. Big spread sheets and Microsoft Word tables are drawn up with more columns than you can count, and pretty-looking colours. This is meant to keep track of who is responsible for delivering what projects and within what timeline. Each team or unit in an organisation is meant to report against their progress with meeting their commitments on a quarterly or monthly basis. It’s one of the many types of reporting and administrative tracking that goes on in the public service, and every team usually has an admin person whose time is wasted by having to do all of them. They might look something like this.

 

Strategy	Deliverable	Actions	Team	Date due	On track?	Comments
1. Work effectively with stakeholders	1.1 Seek regular input from stakeholders	1.1.1 Email survey   1.1.2 Informal feedback sought	Communications   Audit/operations	30 Apr   Ongoing	J J
	1.2 Keep stakeholders informed	1.2.1 Hold update information session   1.2.2 Keep website updated   1.2.3 Newsletter distributed	Policy     Communications     Policy/ communications	26 Jun     Ongoing     31 Mar 30 June 30 Sept	J   J   K	This item may be delayed if necessary     Not distributed last quarter

 

Of course, in practice, the tables are much bigger, with more columns and hundreds and hundreds of rows. Each team reports on their deliverables every month.

Sound good? Well, there’s a catch. Who do you think actually allocates these responsibilities? The department’s minister? Parliament? No. Peter does. To answer this question in more detail we’ll have to go back a step.

 

One of the most widespread myths about the public service is that it is accountable to and controlled by a minister in the government. In Westminster systems it’s known as the Westminster system of responsible government. Other governmental systems around the world, even non-democratic ones, also have chain-of-accountability processes. In the Westminster system, the minister is accountable to parliament, and both are accountable to the people at election time. Back the other way in the accountability chain, individual public servants are accountable to their managers, who are accountable to more senior managers, who are accountable to the minister.

But ask this question: does it really work? It sounds good in theory, but how does a high-level manager actually do it? How does a minister actually do it? You see, they are busy people, and often they don’t know as much about the daily minutiae of the department. The main way that a government minister actually knows if their department is delivering  is that they will ask the senior executive whether it is or not. There are simply thousands of things going on each day in these huge organisations. The minister, being human, can’t keep a track of all of them, because they’re far too busy. And you’ve seen how many media interviews they do and how many committee meetings. The truth is they take advice.

The senior executive has too much on their plate, too. Too many high-level meetings with people. Including the minister, whom they will have to advise. How do they know what’s happening? They take advice from their staff, who take advice from others, who take advice from others. It’s a chain of advice, not a chain of accountability. Everyone in this chain provides advice to their superiors, but does it in a sucking-up way. That is, they don’t ever provide advice that they think will not be appreciated.

 

 

 

Public servant worker bee

Middle manager

Senior executive

Gov’ment minister

Voters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take another look at the table of deliverables example. Who do you think dreams up all of these deliverables? Bear in mind that for a big organisation there will be thousands of them in massive tables, with thousands of rows. The minister? The senior executives? They just sit at their desk for a week or two and start typing into an Excel spread sheet, do they?

‘Ahh!’ you say. There are special people assigned the task for the minister. But the trouble is, to the small extent that this is true, the people who are responsible for maintaining the spread sheets haven’t got more than the foggiest idea what each team in the department does. In fact, Peter makes sure they don’t actually know what his team does. So they take advice.

The actual answer to this series of questions is that the individual rank-and-file policy officer like me, working with low-level managers like Peter, are usually responsible for establishing their own deliverables. They also set the timing. They provide advice on how much it is possible to get done in a set amount of time.

There is a real art to avoiding work or, when things don’t go the way you planned, for providing excuses. Peter was the master of it; his peaceful, stress-free existence depended on it. He had a great grab-bag of excuses in his artillery for why things hadn’t been done. The trouble is that a lot of the excuses were valid, so it was impossible for more senior bureaucrats to know when they were valid and when Peter just wasn’t getting work done like he should.

If you’ve never worked in a government organisation, you might be getting the sense of just how much of a game the whole situation is. If not, keep reading and you soon will. The senior managers above Peter are doing exactly the same thing. They are playing the same game.

Of course this doesn’t apply to all government workers. Some are unlucky enough to work in operational areas on the front line, where you have actual customers or patients or students or fires to respond to. But for office workers, we can start to get a picture of why government workers have a reputation for being so slow.

 

Have you ever seen a government sign alongside a road or other infrastructure project saying ‘Completion date: September 2012’, or another given date? Ask yourself this: who conjures up that date? I vacillate between amusement and frustration when I see governments claiming things like ‘Ipswich Motorway, delivered six months ahead of schedule and on budget’.

It’s very dishonest. The scheduled date is only a date that someone like Peter dreamed up. The budget figure is only a figure that someone like me dreamed up. They aren’t objective measures. What public servants and project managers do is predict how long they think it will really take, and then, just to be safe, add a year or two, or a month or two (depending on the size of the project). As a rough guide, a five-year project that’s finished ‘six months ahead of schedule’ has probably had a lot of unnecessary delays that caused it to take six months longer than expected. But you can bet your last lolly that there’ll be a press release celebrating the fact that it was finished ‘six months early’.

When I started working as a publicity officer in an office that was responsible for delivering small boating projects, it was commonplace to state in publicity materials, ‘Expected completion date: late June’, or something of that nature. After I while, my manager — a Peter equivalent — learned to add a couple of months to whatever the estimate was. Eventually, we stopped using months and she requested that I wrote ‘late next year’. So a project that we initially thought should be finished in about April or May would be listed in publicity brochures as expected by ‘later  that year’. Not even that stopped the occasional overrun, as Peters all over the organisation, according to their individual processes, adjusted their expectations and timeframes. And bear in mind that originally these were our own dates and expectations that we estimated ourselves. No such thing as objective or standard timeframes exists.

Hypothetically, if you ever find yourself as a public servant having to dream up project deliverables and timeframes for your team, here’s my top five tips.

•       Always add about three months onto the initial timeframe you set down.

•       If you suddenly realise a due date is getting away from you, don’t worry. Senior managers are always on your back asking if you can take some new amazing and vital task on. Of course, how can you say no to that? It provides a handy little opportunity to ‘re-prioritise’ (ie. shift all your other dates back)!

•       Don’t fall for the trap of thinking you only need to put your broad, main tasks down on your deliverables table. No task is too little to include: the more you list the busier it makes you look. The only real limit to how small and insignificant a task you can include is what you can get away with. Also, if it looks like you’re busier, it gives you plausible excuses when you have to ‘revise dates back’. Also, having lots of tasks listed makes it much more difficult for senior managers to stay across all of the detail; they’ll never be able to pin you down!

•       Don’t forget to pad your list out with tasks that have a due date of ‘ongoing’. Strictly speaking, these don’t actually have a due date, which is great news!

•       Don’t be embarrassed about adding new tasks to the sheet when you update it, even if the task has already been done, or nearly done!

 

Peter would probably add a sixth: whatever happens, don’t stress — she’ll be right, mate.

Sadly, the higher the manager, the less knowledge about and control over the workplace they actually have. When you get all the way up to the top you find senior bureaucrats who become little more than figureheads. Real work planning is done from the bottom up, and there’s no end to the tricks and excuses people like Peter have for why something isn’t done.

For example, in Queensland in 2011 major flooding and a cyclone were devastating for some communities. However, in the public service it was a huge boon. Under point 2 above, you’ll notice the word ‘re-prioritise’. Well, there was lots of re-prioritisation happening that year! In the department I was in, we used ‘the floods and cyclone’ as a default excuse for not getting work finished — for a whole year afterwards. Imagine this conversation:

 

Senior manager: You haven’t finished your auditing schedule yet?

  Peter:                   The floods (resists temptation to smile).

  Manager:   I see (Nods).

  Peter:                  Also, the cyclone.

  Manager:   Ahh, sounds reasonable (keeps nodding).

Peter:         How’s that report coming along from the operations team?

  Manager:   The floods have pushed it back a bit.

Peter:         Yeah the floods have made it a tough year! We deserve lots of sympathy for working so hard.

 

Usually the public servants involved would carry on such a conversation in a serious manner, with a straight face and no hint of irony. Peter was a bit unusual though. He was irreverent, and close enough to retirement not to care anymore. In 2011 he pushed back lots of things and used the floods as an excuse, but he even used a joking or sarcastic tone some of the time. It was mainly with the more serious delays in projects, when he was most at risk of getting in trouble, that he maintained the pretence of seriousness.

And what about the millions wasted on major projects that get cancelled before they are finished, which were mentioned in chapter 1? New managers come and go, and make arbitrary decisions, on a whim, to cancel projects that are years into implementation. Who is accountable for them?

Jess can’t stand Peter. She has only met him twice, although she has seen him three times. But I talk about him with her a lot, and she knows people just like him in departments she has worked in. She met him once at a barbeque, and once at a work Christmas function. The other time she saw him was when she came to visit me at our work office. She arrived at about ten o’clock. I walked her across to Peter’s desk to reacquaint them. But Peter was reclining back in his chair, mouth open, asleep.

Sleeping at the desk at work … during the middle of the day … is not an unheard of occurrence in the public service.

What Jess is most outraged at is how little is actually achieved sometimes, and how much money is spent. I’ve told her about lengthy week-long work trips to Cairns where very little work actually gets done, and where overtime is regularly claimed. I’ve told her about the endless meetings where it is agreed to ‘look into the matter a bit more before next month’s meeting and make a decision then’.

Public servants can be terribly unprepared for meetings. I’ve told her about how I have had to wait for months for approval for simple draft reports, briefs or documents. It’s all in a day’s work in the public service, and I’ve almost admitted defeat and forgotten about the Jade from years ago that used to care. All Jess can think about is how much taxpayers’ money is spent on public servants, on hourly rates of about $45 per hour or more, who sleep at their desk.

Now, we’ve only scratched the surface here. You can pretty much say that although I’ve mostly only referred to timeframes, the same applies to the quality of work, and controlling the costs of projects and tasks. The same accountability issues exist. It’s impossible for a senior manager to assess the quality of the work they are getting because they’re often not subject matter experts. They take advice from people lower than them, and all they can do is trust them. Peter was able to deflect any questions easily, it was all part of the game.

Scott Adams’s book The Dilbert Principle applies to how government organisations that I have seen work. The fact that people like Peter do any work at all is a miracle. I’m sure he would’ve wanted to do less, but he probably figured his sense of ethics could only be stretched so far.

The truth is that not all government workers are diligent. Many spend more time chatting to co-workers in the staff kitchen than actually working. There’s not anyone around to police it, and certainly the culture in many big government organisations encourages slow progress with projects. If you do things too quickly, you make others look bad.

If Peter was guilty of this, and he was, then there is one sense in which you can excuse him. I often put in a big effort and tried hard to produce quality work in the small projects that I worked on. Almost always they went nowhere, because the senior managers above us changed their mind about the project or were otherwise occupied, or required them to do something which they simply weren’t interested in doing. Even if they ended up leading somewhere, the content or substance of the work was often watered down to the point where it wasn’t effective. Peter, on the other hand, was a flawless perfectionist in the art of doing the least amount that you could possibly get away with. For both my approach and Peter’s approach the result was often the same: projects that went nowhere or which had modest, token effectiveness.

So then why did I bother putting in the effort? Was I young and naïve, contrasting with Peter’s jaded experience? No, I knew from very early on that most of things I was doing would amount to little or nothing. I resigned myself to the fact that managers above me, even senior ones, weren’t as serious as I was about working hard. The difference was that by the time I got into the public service and into a policy advisory role, I had been studying public policy studies for five or six years. I had a passion for it.

Peter didn’t have the passion for it. Like many public servants, their job is little more than a job to them. Even worse, many are in it just for themselves, with little or no altruistic tendencies, and no pride taken in their work. Their job is little more than a game to them.

My passion came from a different place. I had democracy on my mind, and I wanted my working life to be actually useful. I cared. I knew, as a lower-level policy officer, that ultimately I had no real influence on outcomes and that little would come of my work. But I wanted to go through the motions because I was ambitious. I wanted to develop my skills anyway. I accepted the state of the game, which helped me stop getting frustrated every time a project came to nothing. I focused on making the best of a bad situation and developing my policy skills. If I didn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t have the knowledge behind me to write this book.

If you’ve ever wondered why a government policy has failed, why it has taken too long or been too expensive, why it sometimes seems inadequately delivered, just remember who it is that is actually responsible for getting it done: Peter, and all the other Peters out there.

Consider the likelihood that a lack of accountability for timeliness, efficient use of resources and quality might have had an impact on a project outcome or service you receive. Or don’t receive. Even if something’s delivered in a reasonable timeframe, you can bet that Peter’s lack of passion, and the lack of interest of all the other Peters out there, will mean that the outcomes are of average quality or have taken more money than they should have.

Just don’t accept, uncritically, the news stories that you read which celebrate the successes of a government policy or project: it will have been written by some spin doctor to make things sound good. Unfortunately, this further undermines accountability for public servants, by hiding when there have been problems, inefficiencies and wasted money.

 

What can be done to increase the accountability of public servants? Another interesting angle to look at this is from the politicians’ perspective.

The most senior politicians, the ministers in cabinet, are asked as part of the political process to consider programs and spending proposed by public servants. For example, they might be asked to approve the budget of a department, or they might be asked to approve spending for a particular road or bridge project. They might be asked to approve starting a new government program to help unemployed people who can’t read and write to improve their literacy skills. Politicians are making these sorts of decisions almost constantly – hundreds of them every week. Public servants of one sort or another push little briefing notes under their noses and hand them a pen waiting for them to sign off. It is a tough job, and politicians don’t have the time to really consider these properly. They do the best they can, they use their judgement, and sometimes they ask their staff to do background checks. Usually they will approve most things pretty easily, except on the rare 1-in-100 occasion that they see something that looks controversial.

Sam, a minister in a former government in Australia, was in this position. I encountered her many times, but I was never an acquaintance. I heard her give interviews and make speeches, and I attended panel discussions and forums that she was involved in. In my view, she was quite intelligent, and certainly a determined woman.

She was a former lawyer, who joined a political party at a young age. You might say she had a fire in the belly, that she got into politics for the right reasons. In person, she seemed to be warm and caring. But, of course, that was her job. I can’t vouch for her sense of personal ethics, but I have no reason to question them, and she often used moral arguments in speeches to justify government decisions. I didn’t always agree with everything she said, but I mostly did.

If politicians like Sam don’t have much time to make decisions, they have virtually no time to check that the decisions are carried out, or carried out efficiently and effectively. Sam spent most of her time running around and trying to catch her breath.

If you’ve ever seen Yes, minister on television you’ll have a head start on this one. Imagine you’ve got elected to parliament. Before parliament you were a businessman, or a farmer, or a lawyer, or a teacher. Now you’ve just been made a minister. Like Sam, if you’ve been made a minster of the department of, say, health, you might be a smart person, but you could be totally unknowledgeable about the subject of health policy.

Imagine that on one day you are Sam. You have 13 routine briefing notes to read from your own department. You also have another 8 briefing notes to read from other departments that will be discussed at cabinet tomorrow morning. Tomorrow you have to be in cabinet, which will last for three or four hours. Your staff will have questions for you when you get into the office in the morning, about your travel arrangements, or whatever the case may be. You might need to make a phone call to someone at some stage, when you can get onto them, about, say, party political matters. You have the opening of a new school to go to in the afternoon, in your electorate, which you need to think about and plan for.

The day comes and goes smoothly. You and your staff are well practised at this: you do this every day. By the end of the day you have been to cabinet and you, along with all the other ministers, have approved a couple of dozen things of note. You have also been given a few extra things to do as a result of cabinet, which must be done before a bill is debated in parliament at the end of the week.

You have personally made 20 or 30 minor approvals for things of different shapes and sizes. It might be just a signature on the bottom of a ‘for decision’ briefing note, or an oral approval to one of your staff members to organise expenditure for an event in the distant future.

Now stop and think for a minute. Have you made a note of all those decisions you have made? Have you even made a note of all the important ones? In a year’s time, will you go back to check that the money that you approved for a bridge-building project is being spent and that the project is on track? Let’s just say nobody ever mentions the bridge project ever again. What will happen? Will you follow it up? Will you remember who to follow it up with and when might be an appropriate time to do that. April? May?

Interestingly, this doesn’t happen, not even for important decisions. Ministers make decisions, and then they rely on government bureaucrats who are in charge of implementing those decisions to take the initiative to give them an update on the project. Essentially, the idea that Sam or you might have any real control over this process is a delusion and a myth.

You might think that major government decisions that are made by the full cabinet of government ministers might fare better. Surely, there is a cabinet secretary or cabinet minutes and some bureaucrats or ministerial staff have been delegated responsibility. Interestingly, there are always cabinet minutes, but that doesn’t mean there is someone who follows up all the thousands of decisions that are made. The responsibility falls back to Peter, or maybe Peter’s boss. Sam doesn’t have the time, and neither do her staff. They are all working long and hard, and just barely managing their workload.

Anne Tiernan from Griffith University has written about the relationship between ministers, their personal staff, and government departments, including about the Queensland Government’s Cabinet Implementation Unit, which was formed in 2004.³ It was intended to keep a track of all of the decisions made by the ministers in cabinet, and then report on the progress of implementing those decisions.

It sounds like a good idea, and I think it is. However, even thinking about the idea for more than a few minutes should be enough to make us ask how it would work. How would a group of bureaucrats sitting in a central office keep a track of the implementation of projects and decisions? How would they know if something has been done? The only way they would know is if they made a phone call to the relevant Peter responsible to ask them. If something hasn’t been done, what would happen? Would they know the difference between a valid excuse for why it didn’t happen and an invalid excuse? The whole exercise, if applied this way, would surely turn into a process that looks good but isn’t actually meaningful. Some central bureaucrat would probably have a big list of things to follow up, and a column to write in updates. Big deal.

Rumour has it that the Queensland Cabinet Implementation Unit turned out to be a small office with a few staff, and which ended up having a manager leading it who was shunted there, away from some other area of the department because they weren’t performing well. It became like one of those ‘special projects’ roles.

The truth is that, on the whole, politicians are mostly passive. There are simply too many decisions and actions required of them.

One day I met with one of Sam’s senior advisors, and we discussed the possibility of my doing work experience with her office. This didn’t eventuate because of the circumstances. But the advisor told me that Sam had decided that she had a small range of pet issues that she had decided to try to pursue during her time as a minister. The range of her influence, and the number of things she could actually hope to meaningfully intervene in, was small. That was the reality.

 

Another interesting attempt to encourage public servants to perform occurred was tried in Australia under Prime Minister John Howard. The government introduced an industrial relations system that allowed a form of individual contracts for employees called Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs).

At the time I thought this was terrible government policy, and in most aspects it was. AWAs allowed employers to force employees to sign contracts, and employers were allowed to cut certain types of wage benefits or employment conditions below levels that were legally subject to minimum standards, which in Australia are called industrial awards. The AWAs were also used to undermine any standards and conditions that had been bargained for between the employer and any organised union at the workplace level, in what are known in Australia as Enterprise Bargaining Agreements.

In parts of the Australian public service, AWAs were introduced that weren’t allowed to cut minimum pay benefits or employment conditions, but which could be used to introduce performance pay. If an employee was judged as having performed at a satisfactory level, they would get a pay rise. In general in Australia, public service employees automatically get a ‘pay increment increase’ each year. All of a sudden, AWAs meant that public servants were not guaranteed to get that small pay increase. They only got it if their manager judged that they had performed well.

Without exaggerating how significant a difference this might make to the work ethic of public servants, it sounds like a good first step to me. There may be difficulties, such as determining how to fairly judge if someone has performed well. However, like all experiments, first steps are required. In my opinion, AWAs, or individual contracts, are a good idea, as long as they don’t lower any of the minimum wages or conditions that would otherwise apply, and as long as employees aren’t forced to be a part of them.

I’m afraid Sam might be hesitant to support such arrangements, because they are simply too controversial and therefore politically risky. In Australia, at least, individual contracts are viewed sceptically. This is probably fair enough.

Jess is very rationally minded, and looks at things in logical terms. I discussed the idea with her and she, like me, thinks it’s a good one, as long as minimum standards cannot be cut.

Peter thinks individual contracts are an ideological obsession of free-market politicians who value quantity over quality, and efficiency over efficacy.

 

 

 

 

Key points: ·         In theory, public servants are accountable to government ministers. In practice, there is no-one watching over bureaucrats effectively. Public servants play all sorts of games to make sure they are never responsible for bad outcomes. ·         Project delivery is treated like a game by public servants.

Possible reforms: ·         Implementation reporting and follow-up could be taken much more seriously, and managed by officers outside of the public service itself, such as in an independent organisation. ·         Politicians should pressure the public service for outcomes, and take a more active role in setting standards and priorities. ·         Journalists should research and cover project development more often, rather than just focusing on the conflict between opposing political parties. ·         Politicians could be given more personal staff to increase the effectiveness of the ministers in keeping public servants accountable, as long as these staff are not used for political or campaigning tasks. ·         Performance pay should be trialled for all public servants in policy development or project management roles.