Image Courtesy of CBCTV
Lytton was decimated by wildfire two years ago. The image above was taken from a CBC article this week. What has been done? Basically, nothing. And this inability to take action permeates all levels of government:
- Inability to get drinking water to First Nations communities
2. Inability to change the toxic work environments in police, military and firefighting
3. Inability to attract and retain medical staff at all levels
And the list goes on. These problems are all systemic, and the biggest systemic problem of all is…
4. The inability to change the system.
The Civil Service Contradiction: Neither Civil nor Servicing
Nobody feels any urgency to serve the public any better. At all levels of government, from the lowest filing clerk up the ranks to Members of Parliament, the order of the day is to play the game, follow the rules, and control…everything. Always control. But whatever you do, don’t go out of your way to provide good service. There’s no benefit in doing that.
And you can’t lay the blame on the civil servants. They’re merely doing the best they can with the system they were hired into. Nothing motivates them to make improvements.
Motivation
Civil servants themselves are motivated to keep their work the same. They have attained their present positions by learning this system. Any change has the potential to upset their comfy situation.
There is no motivation for the politicians to improve the civil service. They’re too busy playing their own little “get-me-reelected” games. Perhaps a more representational voting system would respond to the needs of the electorate better.
Lack of competition
I believe our biggest procedural gap is that we have a society where all the models of success are based on winning some kind of competition. But in the civil service, there is no competition to provide better services. The government is based on a reward system where the only competition is to climb the bureaucratic ladder. So that’s where civil servants put their efforts.
Compete with the Private Sector?
And competition with private providers doesn’t work because they, too, have other objectives, including the extra money taken off the top to give the shareholders their profit. It seems on the surface that private industry can do better than government bureaucracy, but in the end, it always costs the taxpayer more.
Positive Models
How does the civil service differ from teachers and nurses, who are also part of the services the government provides for Canadians, but don’t have the same terrible reputation for wasting people’s time?
The only difference I can see is that teachers and nurses get daily feedback from the public they serve. People are grateful for what they do, which motivates them to do more. Competition against other workers is frowned upon.
A New Form of Competition
Governments need to concentrate on the deliverables: customer service, economy, efficiency, communication, cooperation. (Ironically, this is also the list of areas where bureaucracies are renowned for their failures.)
I have written a lot about competition in earlier posts, and my conclusion is that the most useful competition is against yourself. The question is not, “Who can I beat?” It is “How have I improved since last year?”
“How many people have I helped?”
“How many satisfied customers have I achieved?”
“How have I contributed to the efficiency of the service?
Review Your Government
It seems that every internet interaction I have with a business, whether it is a call centre, a hotel or a tour company, I am immediately plagued for the next two weeks with requests for a review. Do we see that from government departments? Perhaps we should.
The Bottom Line
The systemic flaw in our civil service is that we are a society that only rewards winners of competitions. We need to find other ways to motivate our civil servants to serve.
The picture below is a demonstration of what can happen when a bureaucracy is motivated: Notre Dame de Paris, one year after the fire. Anyone taking bets on which restoration finishes first?
