In our culture work, we engage with a wide variety of public sector enterprise organizations from utilities to regulated professions, government, crown corporations and healthcare. Each organization is unique in its business and workforce experiences, opportunities and challenges; however, we have observed some patterns across organizations that we were curious to explore with the unique lens of the public sector experience.
We brought together and facilitated a discussion with a group of senior public sector people leaders to reflect on and share their perspectives on topics around culture, the characteristics of and opportunities for a public sector workforce and what it takes to be an agile organization. Here are some of the themes that emerged.
Characteristics of a public sector workforce
Despite each organization's differing mandate, participants shared many common characteristics across the public sector workforce. Understanding and accepting the public sector’s unique strengths and challenges can help these organizations unlock potential and increase momentum.
Strengths
People are drawn to the public sector to be in service to others. It’s a purpose-driven workforce where people are motivated by meaning rather than just profit. They seek overlap in the Venn diagram of what matters to them, their organization and the people they serve. They choose this work over other sectors where they might make more money or take on more risk. This intentional choice, when paired with the support to get work done, can lead to high engagement and performance. Their work can require specialized skills and expertise and focus on essential, high-impact or life-changing work for society. Staff and leaders alike can be highly engaged and enjoy their work, resulting in a level of dedication and care to those they serve that can drive long tenure and commitment.
Challenges
It’s not a surprise that the challenges within the public sector are varied. These large organizations are complex by nature and often siloed, which impacts communication, collaboration and services. Resources and funding can be scarce and uncertain, resulting in a stretched, sometimes over-worked workforce that relies on creativity to work around challenges. Organizations struggle to attract and retain employees and face looming retirements and gaps in leadership capabilities and new skills in both unionized and non-unionized roles.
Opportunities
Many of the leaders around our table are actively working to bring teams together to address these challenges and harness the strengths of their people. We heard examples of:
- Putting extra time into connecting the dots between organizational purpose, strategies and initiatives to light up the workforce
- Leaning into psychological safety, a critical building block of the employee experience
- Being intentional in building cross-functional team capabilities to tackle silos
- Engaging employees in co-creating impactful changes to the employee experience and bringing them along in thoughtful change
- Creating opportunities for young professionals in future leadership in response to succession demands
Creating a shared accountability for culture
Public sector organizations are still navigating the ripple effect of the post-COVID power imbalance between employers and employees. Employers introduced extreme flexibility about when, where and how to work during the COVID response, and employees valued it. This flexibility evolved into an EVP requirement, and organizations that didn’t provide it were less competitive when the labour market was tight. Over the past year, market and economic conditions have changed dramatically. Return-to-office mandates, workforce layoffs and reduced flexibility reflect a stronger position for employers and a parallel rise in the popularity of the organized labour movement.
For participants, an antidote to a potential mis-match between employer and employee expectations lies in establishing a shared accountability for defining, shaping and reinforcing a culture that meets both the performance demands of the organization and the desired experience of the workforce.
Some participants explored their perceptions of the different expectations across generations, wondering if organizations had gone too far with accommodations. As the discussion continued, they acknowledged that the real cultural challenge lies across all generations in the workforce. We need to tackle cultural change holistically rather than expecting it to be provided. One participant shared how their organization was bridging the divide with a “meet me there” approach to culture.
Participants agreed that both leaders and employees contribute to and shape organizational culture; however, when this accountability isn’t explicit, it can result in a “wait and see” pattern, where both employer and employee expectations are unmet and outcomes are unsatisfying for both sides.
Organizations that set an explicit expectation that “we all create the culture” empower individuals and groups to step up instead of waiting for others (whether executive leaders or peers) to “solve” culture challenges.
Opportunities
Based on the experiences our participants shared, as well as our own experience working with public-sector organizations, we’ve learned that getting to the heart of this shared accountability involves:
- Being willing to invest and prioritize employee listening and learning from each other (creating empathy)
- Uncovering cultural beliefs and gaps to challenge assumptions (i.e., generational differences)
- Deciding where to focus (and where not to) to shift the culture
- Creating clarity by sharing priorities and being explicit with how they support broader direction or strategies (this can be overwhelming in public sector)
- Engaging employees in contributing to the design and ownership of culture initiatives
- Communicating authentically and safely, using the right channels for the right task (creating the right space and experience to inform vs. engage)
- Modelling and reinforcing cultural priorities at all levels of the organization, recognizing the compound effect on the workforce when witnessed from leadership
The importance of agility within the public sector
In this era of continued unpredictability and economic upheaval, leaders in the public sector recognize how agility can help them respond to changing conditions. Participant organizations appear to be at various stages in a large cultural shift. Historically, the public sector could be perceived as slow and methodical due to its highly collaborative and consultative leadership and decision-making style; however, our new reality demands a way of being, deciding and leading that can more quickly adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
They’re aware of the gap between the need to become more agile and adaptive and how their organizations are behaving today. To become agile, the concept needs to be well understood in the organization's context, modelled, reinforced and believed at all levels of the organization.
Several participants have made progress in this shift. They’ve empowered teams closest to the work and decision-making to be nimble and responsive to current conditions. However, after several years of this, they’re exhausted by continuous change and want to swing the pendulum back towards some standards and consistency while still embracing adaptive principles. Some see this as a time to reinforce recent changes and slow the pace to rest, recover and build momentum.
Opportunities
Here are some of the ways our participants and other organizations are applying agility principles and the benefits they’re seeing:
- Developing the agility muscle helps organizations refactor their capacity and resource constraints and respond despite limitations.
- Ally-building at the executive level allows questions to be asked and clarified, and leaders to back and support each other, paving the path to smoother, faster decisions.
- Investing in creating and clearly communicating the business strategy and priorities provides the scaffolding for business agility and transformation.
- Modelling and guiding where and when risk is acceptable (critical when working in risk-averse environments), so it doesn't shut down agile decision making, it encourages it.
Takeaways
The roundtable conversation was a positive and encouraging one that surfaced the unique conditions and pressures faced by public sector people leaders. While there is no single issue or silver bullet to address the myriad cultural, economic and performance scenarios influencing these organizations, leaders who actively invite their workforces in and empower them to participate in their own constant evolution are in a better position to adapt and thrive.
