Agency culture and capabilities

The MAC report on whole of government found that organisational culture and capabilities critically shape the success of both informal and formal whole of government interactions. By their nature such activities require both a willingness and a capacity to focus beyond agency-specific outcomes and priorities and on the Government’s overall policy agenda and priorities. This means that both organisational culture and individual capabilities need to be oriented to support collaboration in order for whole of government interactions to be given practical shape through intra-organisational structures and management and accountability frameworks.

Whole of government working is, in part, about how public servants see themselves and the work they do: whether they consider themselves as agency employees or part of a broader public service; whether they see themselves as simply delivering outputs or resolving national or international problems; and whether their first impulse when confronted with an issue is to see processes or to see possibilities. The sort of organisational characteristics that support a whole of government culture include:

• readiness to think and act across agency boundaries
• effective teamwork
• organisational flexibility
• openness to innovation and creativity
• the ability to capitalise on windows of opportunity, to tolerate mistakes and to manage risk
• the capacity to build strategic alliances, collaboration and trust and to negotiate to achieve joint outcomes
• adaptability to changing circumstances
• persistence and resilience
• encouragement of the expression of diverse views, and awareness of different cultures and appreciation of their strengths
• a capacity to balance the tension between short-term and long-term goals
• effective knowledge management.

Building a Whole of Government Culture

The degree to which the APS is cohesive and has a sense of broad identity depends largely on the extent to which individuals appreciate the broader context of their employment. Accordingly, one of the cultural change questions associated with whole of government activity is whether employees see themselves primarily as agency employees operating in a devolved framework or primarily as APS employees.

When asked for the first time this year to choose between these alternatives, the majority of respondents (60%) indicated that they considered themselves to be primarily agency employees. Given the immediate and continuing connection between employees and their workplace, the fact that 40% of employees identified primarily as APS employees is important. Equally important from a whole of government perspective is the fact that more employees (71%) agreed that they were proud to work in the APS than agreed that they were proud to work in their current agency (65%). On balance, these questions provide positive indicators of APS employees’ willingness to focus beyond agency- specific outcomes and priorities and on the Government’s overall policy agenda and priorities.

Most agencies have been active in providing support and guidance to employees for collaborative activity. The great majority of the SES (83%) agreed that their agency head had communicated to them the importance of working collaboratively with other agencies. Thirty-eight per cent of agencies reported having placed Working Together on their Intranet. That publication provides broad guidance on the handling of whole of government communication, organisation, standards of behaviour and interagency working arrangements. There has also been across-the-board growth in agency guidelines or policies to guide employees’ participation in formal, multi-agency decision-making forums such as interdepartmental committees or task forces, as Table 11.1 below indicates.

Table 11.1: Proportion of agencies with guidelines/policies in place to guide employees’ participation in formal, multi-agency decision-making forums, 2003–04 and 2004–05

Source: Agency survey

These initiatives indicate that agencies have been making changes to their internal guidance to support collaborative work; whether these changes have been in place long enough to support broad cultural change is unclear. When asked to evaluate the extent to which their agency’s culture encouraged a constructive approach to collaboration with other agencies, as Figure 11.1 shows, relevant SES and EL employees responded less positively this year than last year.

Figure 11.1: Relevant SES and EL employees’ views on whether their agency’s culture encouraged a constructive approach to collaboration, 2003–04 and 2004–05

Source: Employee survey

Rather than indicating a deterioration in collaborative approaches among agency employees, this drift downward in cultural indicators since last year might be indicative of a higher level of awareness of the importance and ramifications of collaboration. Again this year, there was considerable variation between large agencies in employee perceptions of the agency’s cultural bias towards whole of government work. Agencies with the highest proportion of relevant employees who reported that their agency’s culture always or usually encouraged collaboration were DFAT (94%) and Customs (93%).

Employees were also asked to comment on their direct experience of whole of government interactions. SES and EL respondents to the employee survey were asked whether, during 2004–05, their job required them to deal directly with people from other public service agencies, including at different levels of government. Seventy-four per cent reported dealing directly with employees in other Commonwealth agencies, 42% with state and/or territory agencies, and 14% with local government agencies while 24% had none of these interactions.

When SES and EL employees who had dealt directly with other agencies were asked to report on their involvement in more structured whole of government activities over the previous 12 months, numbers reporting involvement in more formalised whole of government interactions were markedly below those reporting ongoing interagency dealings. Twelve per cent of this group reported having been a member of a task force, 25% reported having been part of an interdepartmental committee, 16% reported having been a member of a joint team, and 60% had had no involvement in such arrangements.

Those employees who had been involved in structured whole of government activities over the previous 12 months were then asked how collaborative and how well supported those structures had been in practice. The responses to these questions need to be contextualised: it may, for example, be perfectly appropriate to focus primarily on agency-specific objectives in some multi-agency forums, depending on the role of the forum and whether employees continue to have the bigger picture in mind and collaborate regularly. Nevertheless, given the relatively senior nature of these respondents, overall responses were not encouraging, as Table 11.2 indicates.

Table 11.2: Relevant EL and SES employees’ experience of multi-agency forums, 2004–05

Source: Employee survey

A number of factors have the potential to detract from the success of collaborative structures. Comments from employees involved in such structures indicate that these include insufficient clarity and specificity in the upfront setting of shared outcomes and objectives, with what this means articulated in practical, implementation terms. These include who is responsible and accountable for what, and translation of that to agency action. Problems are most likely to arise where high-level agreement reached is not sufficiently robust—in the sense of involving fundamental rather than aspirational agreement and carrying with it acceptance of responsibility and follow-through by all agencies concerned.

Employees have also stressed the need for:

• driving imperatives and incentives to ensure traction for initiatives
• capability—getting the right people with the right skills and authority in place
• a positive environment, where senior people in agencies understand the context and intent of initiatives and champion their implementation.

Employees engaged in collaborative service delivery were much more positive about what had been achieved. Thirty-five per cent of employees involved in service delivery reported an improvement in cooperation between their agency and other APS agencies over the last 12 months that had improved their work area’s capacity to tailor service delivery to the needs of their clients.

Nevertheless, when asked whether their clients were satisfied that the service they delivered was effectively coordinated with services provided by other APS agencies, more respondents (48%) were unsure than agreed (33%). Despite the level of uncertainty about clients’ views, more than 42% of APS service delivery employees identified collaboration with other APS agencies as an action that would best improve services provided by their work area. Other strategies for improving provision of services (in order) were:

• more training and development activities (44%)
• more collaboration with stakeholders (e.g. industry bodies) (37%)
• more collaboration with community groups (32%)
• more feedback and/or consultation with clients (31%)
• more responsibility for decision-making devolved to action officers (27%)
• more collaboration with other jurisdictions (e.g. state or local government agencies) (24%).

While employees were positive about efforts being made by their own agencies, they identified a number of remaining barriers to effective whole of government work. In addition to legislative constraints on information sharing, the most common barriers identified were resource allocation, assumed Ministerial expectations, and some central agency behaviours.

Building Whole of Government Capability

Capabilities are critical to effective whole of government work. What is required is the skill to provide leadership in a collaborative environment and the range of technical and implementation skills called for to address complex policy and service delivery issues. This is a consistent message from experience overseas as well as in Australia.

Training

In response to Connecting Government, the Commission is developing a new suite of development programmes for SES employees. These programmes will address the capabilities necessary at each level to contribute to whole of government outcomes, with particular focus on programme management, policy development, regulation and collaborative behaviours. SES Orientation programmes provide new SES employees with a broad perspective on the legislative and operational framework of their role in the APS leadership cadre. LAFIA programmes currently introduce SES officers to the cultures, ways of doing business and public administration in Asia and the Pacific. More broadly, part of the endowment fund established by the Government’s recent $10 million grant to ANZSOG will be used to support activities aimed at improving the relationship between public service leaders across jurisdictions, and building a whole of government culture.

The Commission’s Ministerial Conversations series started in August 2005 with the inaugural address by the Prime Minister. The series provides the SES with the opportunity to hear Ministers speak on high-level strategic issues on behalf of government, and to set out their expectations of the public service in responding to these issues. SES breakfasts and seminars aim to address national and global matters.

Agencies have also responded to the training issues identified in Connecting Government. In their responses to the agency survey, 38% of agencies reported having redesigned or refocused training objectives specifically to improve capability in building whole of government activities. These changes occurred mainly in the areas of project, programme, and contract management, and communications and ICT.

Mobility

Connecting Government emphasised the value for collaborative work of having a pool of employees whose exposure to different perspectives and organisational cultures has given them a better understanding of the complex environment in which they work.

As noted in Chapter 8, interagency mobility rates APS-wide have varied over the past decade, declining overall from 2.9% in 1995–96 to 1.9% in 2004–05. The key concern raised by this trend is not that employees are denied opportunities for lateral movement, but that flatter structures and accelerated rates of promotion limit their ability to access experience in other agencies before they advance to the leadership levels in their own agencies. On the other hand, as Chapter 8 also notes, engagements of people from outside the APS at higher level classifications have increased significantly over the period, and these people have brought with them a wider range of experience and skills (as well as a requirement for more sophisticated induction and orientation strategies).

In Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce, MAC pointed to the need for both improved APS orientation training and new arrangements to support APS employees who seek opportunities to broaden their experience and exposure by working in different environments across different agencies, the private sector, Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) or in other parts of their agency.⁷

Rewards

Connecting Government also saw a role for the performance management process in supporting the development of a collaborative mindset. Against this background it is disappointing that employees did not see their agencies’ performance pay arrangements as having that effect: in 2004–05, only 20% of relevant employees agreed that the performance pay processes in which they were involved contributed to a workplace culture in which individuals work together effectively. This marks a fall from 26% in 2003–04.

Experience

Capability building through direct experience is critical to whole of government effectiveness. While there are a number of whole of government initiatives in place— particularly in the areas of security, welfare-to-work, Indigenous service delivery and the environment—the response to the tragic Asian tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 offers a particularly edifying case study of effective whole of government responsiveness.

7 Management Advisory Committee 2005, Managing and Sustaining the APS Workforce, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, p. 74.

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