Requirement D

Published

(d) Reflecting on and learning from past experience and institutional knowledge, including through robust evaluation, to inform operations, advice, and decisions

As stewards of the APS, we strive to ensure the APS performs at its best and continues to improve over time. To do this well, we need to draw on our individual and collective experience to inform and improve our work; build reflection and evaluation into everyday practice to identify what we are doing well and what we can do better; and adjust our processes as needed to achieve the best outcomes.

Ask yourself:

What do I need to know or find out before starting this task?

What have we done before that can help us now?

What have I learned from doing this task?

What would I do again and what would I do differently next time?

How do I make sure these lessons inform the way we do this task in the future?

Engaging in robust evaluation can help us understand, drive, and demonstrate the performance of government programs and activities; make corrections where needed; ensure ongoing improvement of policy and program design; and deliver better services to people.[1]

For APS employees, demonstrating stewardship can look like:

  • early planning for monitoring and evaluation to support high-quality evaluation and data collection;
  • seeking diverse perspectives to gain a comprehensive understanding of the relevant issues;
  • identifying best practice;
  • using data and evidence;
  • analysing successes and failures;
  • conducting regular evaluations;
  • taking ethical and culturally appropriate approaches in all evaluation activities;
  • using evaluation findings as an evidence base to inform improvements and decision-making;
  • documenting lessons learned;
  • developing and updating guidance materials; and
  • sharing evaluation findings to reflect on and inform policy design.

Additional consideration for leaders

To enable employees to engage constructively in reflection, evaluation, and learning, they need an authorising environment that allows them both to take the time to build it into their work, and a culture of psychological safety to acknowledge and learn from mistakes or failures without fear of ridicule or reprisal.

SES and other managers can demonstrate stewardship by:

  • cultivating and championing psychologically safe workplace cultures, including personally modelling the practice of acknowledging and learning from mistakes;
  • fostering cultures that encourage learning, experimentation, innovation, and reflection;
  • providing training and development opportunities;
  • rectifying or remediating problems when they are identified, without undue delay;
  • drawing on the lived experience of employees and the broader community to achieve good outcomes;
  • recognising that innovation involves active engagement with risk; and
  • building reflection, evaluation, and learning into work planning as a matter of routine.

Agency heads have a further responsibility to comprehensively address systemic and ad hoc issues identified through reflection and evaluation processes—both internal and external, and formal and informal—and create an agency culture of seeking and engaging with constructive feedback, managing risk, learning from failure, and continuous improvement; and embedding evaluation into business planning, performance, risk and program management, and budget prioritisation processes.

Further information

 

Case Studies—Stewardship in Practice

Julia is an SES Band 1 project sponsor leading a team of project officers who work together to deliver complex projects within their agency’s remit. The team is made up of officers from the APS 3 to EL2 classifications.

Julia believes strongly that planning and reflection are as important as completing the work of the project, and makes this clear to the team. She ensures that project planning includes careful and deliberate consideration of the knowledge and resources the team needs to draw upon, and of relevant observations, insights, and lessons from previous projects.

Julia allocates time after each project for the team to reflect on what they did well, what could have been done better, and what changes need to be made in future projects. The lessons from these review processes inform the team’s approach to future projects, including testing their application in the next project, and reflecting on the outcome, to support continuous improvement.

What happens next?

Julia suggests at an SES Forum that the agency could benefit from an evaluation strategy to harness this approach across a wider number of projects to maximise delivery on the agency’s objectives.

Julia explains to her colleagues that she understands that evaluation steps take up additional time in the project delivery cycle—and that if they were not done, her team could take on a larger number of projects—but that skipping evaluation activities would lead to critical insights not being incorporated in a systematic way, and to mistakes and inefficiencies being repeated, impacting the quality of each project delivered.

Julia demonstrates Stewardship of her agency and the APS by ensuring her team has sufficient time in their work plan to undertake reviews and evaluation processes, and an authorising environment to do so safely. Julia also shares her ideas and experiences—including the success she has had with evaluative ways of working, while reflecting on the challenges and opportunity costs which may also come with them—with her colleagues to promote continuous improvement, in the interest of furthering delivery of the agency’s goals and responsibilities.

Three employees lodge a complaint about bullying and harassment by an EL2 director in their business area. A workplace investigation is undertaken by Priya, an investigator in the Conduct team, which establishes that the director had engaged in the behaviour alleged and had breached the APS Code of Conduct. The Director is sanctioned with a deduction of salary, and later resigns from the APS.

However, Priya’s investigation had also revealed broader systemic and cultural issues within the whole business area, including a long-standing culture of gossip, playing favourites, and undermining and excluding others. Priya’s interviews with staff in the area had revealed this culture was not isolated to one EL2’s conduct, but was tolerated and even modelled by Band 1 managers.

In her report to the breach decision-maker, Priya had made targeted recommendations to support the business area with actions to improve workplace culture and ultimately support psychosocial safety of employees. She also recommended that specific messaging be given to senior leaders to ensure they are fulfilling their obligations to not only comply with the APS Code of Conduct and Values, but to model them for others. Priya’s report suggested that these behavioural obligations be highlighted in all Band 1 performance agreements.

The breach decision-maker had passed these findings and recommendations to Nick, the SES Band 2 in charge of the business unit.

What happens next?

Nick feels confronted by Priya’s workplace culture findings and recommendations, and feels that acting on the recommendations would make people think he had not been a good leader, and would make him unpopular with his Band 1 direct reports for calling their behaviour into question. He tells himself that the situation is likely resolved as a misconduct finding has been made and the poorly behaving individual is no longer in the workplace.

Two months later, four other employees raise concerns about bullying and harassment in the same business area. Two of these employees access personal leave following their complaints, and lodge workers’ compensation claims as a result of their experiences. One of the other employees requests a transfer to a new team. The fourth has made a Stop Bullying claim to the Fair Work Commission.

Nick realises that his failure to acknowledge the reality of the findings presented to him in Priya’s investigation report meant that he did not use them to learn and improve the culture of the business area in a timely and appropriate way. His failure to demonstrate Stewardship by learning from the findings of Priya’s investigation and engaging directly with her recommendations resulted in the situation deteriorating further, with serious legal, financial, and cultural consequences for staff, the workplace, and the agency.

Corinne is an experienced EL1 in a central agency. Her team is responsible for collecting HR information to support the delivery of learning and development initiatives across the APS. The team’s work plays a critical role in the continual uplift of APS craft and professional expertise, and fosters a culture of learning that builds core public sector capabilities and drives high performance. Corinne’s team works in collaboration with APS agencies and industry. It coordinates learning and development priorities, roles, and efficiencies across the APS.

Corinne is working with her team to evolve the processes they use to analyse the information they collect. She plans to innovate the use of data driven decision-making by implementing a new data analysis program in their work. This program will enable better sharing of data and knowledge from the central agency as stakeholders in other agencies will be able to self-access the information they need via an online dashboard.However, using the new program will require the team to undertake some formal training.

Most of the team agree that attending training to grow their capability with this new program will help them serve stakeholders better and benefit the service as a whole. However, Sam, an APS 6 who has worked in the team and with Corrine for many years, does not seem to be interested in adapting to Corrine’s proposed new way of working. Sam has said in team meetings he would prefer to continue working the way they have always have. He does not see any reason to change the way they analyse the information they hold, as it works well for him. Sam refuses to attend the training and suggests instead that he works only on the reporting outputs that the team has traditionally produced.

What happens next?

Corrine realises that Sam may not yet understand why a new way of working is necessary for both the team and the agency, and why they cannot continue with their existing analysis methods. Corrine shares with Sam some high level feedback received from stakeholders through a recent capability review of the agency. The feedback suggested that, while the team’s services are highly appreciated by agencies, the team would benefit from uplifting their data analysis capability to inform the quality of the advice they give, and that agencies are looking for more useful and timely analysis to brief their Executives. Corrine explains that using the new program would meet both of these needs. It will also create efficiencies by significantly reducing the time the team, and Sam himself, spends responding to ad-hoc stakeholder requests.

Sam appreciates Corrine sharing these learnings, because he now understands not only why they should improve the way they do things, and why they should use the specific new program, but also how it connects to and benefits his own role. After this conversation, Sam agrees to undertake the further training.

Corrine’s team demonstrates Stewardship of the APS by using the intelligence drawn from data to inform the advice they give to agencies. In the same way, Corrine personally demonstrates Stewardship by learning from evaluative feedback to develop better ways of working, including sharing her knowledge, reasoning, and innovative ideas to help her team improve and stay engaged in their work, and achieve outcomes for their agency and the APS.

Footnote

[1] Adapted from the Australian Centre for Evaluation ‘Evaluation Toolkit’: https://evaluation.treasury.gov.au/toolkit/why-evaluate

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