The best proposals to improve the public sector will originate from front-line staff and not from senior managers or ministers. Staff need to be given the space and financial incentives to put forward good ideas
The wife of one of my friends works for a record company. She came round for mince pies and sherry during the holidays and told us that their workforce is formally divided along the lines of ‘The Talent’ and ‘Everybody Else’. I understand the beleaguered BBC does something similar and I know a couple of law firms who divide their workforce between ‘Fee Earners’ and ‘Overheads’. I am not sure all this demarcation does a lot for team building in these times of austerity.
Helen’s anecdotes made me think about creativity and how we tend to assume this is the preserve of a chosen few. For most organisations, the prevailing orthodoxy remains that if you are not part of ‘The Talent’ or senior management, you either don’t have any creative spark or your ideas are rubbish.
This attitude underpinned the no doubt well meant but astonishingly banal advice from Eric Pickles on how councils could save money. Reading the document, I was struck by the general tone of lofty ideas being passed down from on high to an astounded and cheering audience of chief executives. No bottled water in meetings! Who else but King Eric could have thought of such an innovation?
This attitude is, of course, nonsensical but remains depressingly familiar in both the public and private sector. With the New Year upon us, it’s a good time to take a look around and ask what mechanisms exist in your workplace to foster creativity? You may have the odd suggestion box dotted around the place but what else? In my experience, there is generally very little else and whilst we can poke fun at Pickles’ attempt to mimic Moses, ask yourselves how do the people on the front line of this council or hospital get their own ideas heard?
In the course of a 40-year career, people will spend about 65,000 hours at work and will spend quite a lot of that time either on Facebook, arguing about whose turn it is to make the tea or thinking about how to improve things. The challenge for you is how to tap into this pool of creativity in ways that can improve the public sector.
I think there are four aspects to fostering creativity. Firstly, senior management has to provide focus. Your role is to define the problems facing the organisation and to allow others to develop solutions. Now at this point, you are going to have to don your trunks and swim against the tide of popular opinion. There is a prevailing orthodoxy that says the public sector has done all it can reasonably do and any remaining problems are the fault of nasty Mr Pickles, Mr Osborne or the perennial standby of faceless bankers.
However, you and I know both know that this is nonsense and any organisation in either the public or private sector can always be improved despite the wider economic climate. Burying your head in the sand and blaming your woes on other people is lazy, defeatist and the preserve of truculent five-year-olds.
Your role as a leader is to lift heads out of the sand and to articulate the ten solvable challenges facing your organisation this year. The key here is to stay focused. You want proper implementable ideas not ranty polemics about austerity cuts, so phrase the ten questions accordingly. ‘How do we save money without cutting services?’ or ‘how do we make our customer service better?’ are more useful and catalytic questions than ‘how do we resist Tory cuts?’. Start off with a few along these lines then ramp it up to the harder ones are of ‘what do we actually waste money on?’ and, even harder, ‘what should the management do differently this year?’.
Secondly, having articulated your ten big questions, you have to create structures and mechanisms that foster and drive creativity. This could be simple things like a web forum to post and discuss suggestions or more involving techniques such as your newly formed Big Ideas Panel that meets once a month and is chaired by the chief executive.
Thirdly, I think you are going to have to be brave and provide a financial incentive to people to be creative. The staff may feel, quite reasonably, that you are paid to have the big ideas and it their job to implement them. However, you are self-aware enough to know that most of the good ideas originate at the coalface so you have to provide a way of encouraging people to bring these nuggets to the surface.
A simple but devastatingly effective technique is a payment, say £1,000, for ‘Idea of the month’. This is agreed by the Big Ideas Panel and is paid without fail every month for the best idea submitted even if it is not quite the best idea you have ever seen. In the first few months, you will have to be brave enough to pay out against rubbish ideas but once people catch on that there is a nice handy monthly bonus to be had for good ideas, you will be astonished by the quality of what comes up to the surface.
If you limit yourself to grand a month, you are going to pay out £12K per annum. Now you may snort and splutter at this point and claim that you cannot afford to do this or HR won’t allow you etc etc. They are just excuses. I would bet at least that amount that somebody somewhere in your organisation has paid a lot more for management consultants in the last few years.
Finally, you need to give people the space to be creative. Google are the best example of this, although tediously they do tell everybody all the time about how creative they are. As we all know by now, engineers are given one day a week to work on ideas, their offices are full of white boards to write stuff down and they provide little meetings rooms with comfy bean bags in primary colours.
All laudable well-rehearsed stuff but it becomes more effective if you couple these practicalities with an expectation of your managers that their staff will come up with ideas and this is competitive amongst the management team. Track which people in which department are coming up with ideas and ask tough questions of the managers whose staff don’t ever seem to come up with anything. Why not?
All of the ideas you need to improve your organisation probably already exist in the heads of your employees. You and your management team should be self aware enough to realise that you don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. You are not ‘The Talent’. Furthermore, you really don’t need to spend any more money on management consultants or blue-sky thinkers.
The best ideas on how to improve the public sector will mainly originate from the people at the coalface, not rotund ministers in ivory towers. Most of the people in the public sector are creative, funny and believe in their jobs. Your task is to give them the space, the time and the incentive to express this.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO
