Verona Burgess: motherhood reports a poor reflection of rich APS capability

The annual State of the Service report lobbed this week and was something of a let-down.

Just 50 pages long it was, as it has been for the previous couple of years, short, not particularly sweet and skimmed over areas to which it could have done greater justice, especially since it is the signature report of the Australian Public Service Commission.

The short format does mean it is more likely to be read in its entirety than a longer document in this digital world.  It is written and constructed clearly, which is refreshing – some past reports have been convoluted and jargon-ridden. Yet it provides little more than tantalising glimpses of deep-seated and largely ongoing problems that bedevil the Australian Public Service.

Take one – the fact that a staggering 38% of staff still do not consider their senior executive manager to be of high quality.

Surely this needs to be rectified urgently. Talking about leadership programs doesn’t quite cut it in terms of finding solutions. It might be better to grasp the nettle of what outgoing Environment secretary Gordon de Brouwer suggested in his valedictory oration ­– to cut Senior Executive Service ranks from four to three.

Then there is staff mobility, or lack of it. ‘Mobility allows employees to acquire new skills and receiving agencies benefit from a broader range of knowledge and expertise,’ says the report. Yet just 2.5% of ongoing staff moved between agencies last year, even though 40%  expressed an interest in a temporary transfer.

‘Employee mobility is expected to take on greater importance and become more common,’ says the report. Really? How do we know? Every employer hates losing talent.

Then there is the attendant problem of poor performance management which, to be fair, most agencies are trying to rectify – but not with evident success. ‘The results of the 2017 APS employee census confirm that satisfaction with and confidence in approaches to performance management is low across the APS.’

Hand in hand goes the continuing saga of underperformance, despite many efforts to fix it: ‘Overall, 41 per cent of respondents to the 2017 APS employee census do not believe their agency deals with underperformance effectively. In some agencies, more than half of respondents hold this view. In other agencies, it is less than five per cent.’

As usual, the report recapped on some of the demographic findings released in September in its companion publication, the APS Statistical Bulletin 2016-17, but carried them forward.

For instance, in noting that 90% of the workforce in 2016-17 was employed on an ongoing basis (up from the previous year), the SOSR report observed, ‘The APS will continue to engage most of its workforce as ongoing personnel. This will guarantee continuity of knowledge, skills and experience. At the same time, non-ongoing employees will be required for specialised roles and tasks. Access to a flexible workforce of ongoing, non-ongoing and casual employees will be of growing importance as many dimensions of work become more complex.’

This appeared to be a polite attempt to rebut fears that the APS workforce is heading for mass casualisation yet it somehow side-stepped the loss of core skills – not to mention admitting there was anything wrong with the running sore of workplace bargaining as it limps to the finishing line.

On the plus side, the SOSR report has tried to cast forward to the approaches being taken to shape the public service of the future.

It covers a range of things, including flatter management structures and broader spans of control; continued emphasis on innovation; the expanding use of augmented intelligence including the use of ‘digital assistants’ (such as the Australian Taxation Office’s ‘Alex’ and Human Services’ ‘Sam’ and ‘Oliver’); getting human and digital labour to work together better, including using machine learning and analytical systems; digital transformation more broadly, including in record keeping; better collaboration (through initiatives like ‘community of practice’) and better cross-agency communications; flexible work times and locations (‘working anytime and anywhere’); improved data literacy; citizen engagement; and the use of new information channels.

If you didn’t know the report represents the tip of the iceberg of the powerful weight of data and analysis that the commission holds about its workforce, it might be easy to discount much of it as motherhood.

As usual, the APS Census and agency surveys that underpin the findings were not published in their entirety, either as appendices or downloadable data files.

Yet the census is quite a tour-de-force – it had a 71% response rate over 98 agencies in 2016-17. The APSC did provide the occasional ‘thematic online update’ during the year, for the third year in a row, but this approach is scattergun.

In addition, the APS Statistical Bulletin 2016-17 had a new format. The introduction was expanded to a 48-page report covering the major statistics, but the tables were not included. They were only available separately as browser-unfriendly Excel files – useful of course, but a pity for what has always been an elegant self-contained document.

This year’s SOSR report is largely a wasted opportunity. Never has it been more important for the public service to demonstrate the depth of its own thinking about the direction of public administration – after all, it is not the parliament that is holding everything together right now.