Instilling a high performance culture in the Civil Service

Discussion paper

The Government’s Declaration on Reform sets out a bold objective: “We will have the best people leading and working in government to deliver better outcomes for citizens”.  The ability to have the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, with the right incentives goes beyond effective recruitment and training.  It is about having coherent mechanisms for planning and deploying people and capability, incentive and performance management structures and systems of authority and accountability that are all attuned to the overall needs of the organisation. 

Civil Service reform initiatives have come and gone for decades. Yet, on fundamentals, far too little has changed.  Now we need an altogether different level of ambition and impetus.  Organisations’ success rests on their people. So transforming how people are managed is critical to the success of the reform programme as a whole– from digitisation through to devolution.   

In this paper we have looked at how the most effective organisations in the corporate sector manage their people, as well as exploring approaches in other governments and the wider public sector in the UK.  The larger tech companies feature prominently in this analysis. They have led much current innovation in talent management, which corporates around the world have then adopted.  Google offers some of the most striking lessons.  This global conglomerate of over 200,000 people owes much of its success to the systematic way in which it has deployed its scale and engineering-driven culture in extensive research-grade study of management and the rigorous application of its findings. 

We have examined what underpins the culture of excellence in Singapore’s public service, consistently ranked the best in the world.  In the wider UK public sector, we have looked at how the police and military build their delivery cultures.