Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Competencies for Success
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: How Should Executives Adapt to the Digital Era? Part 1]
David Eaves: Hi. My name's David Eaves.
I'm an associate professor of digital government at University College London.
[00:00:12 A title card appears on the screen: What are the competencies and skills that our EXs need in this modern, digital era?]
[00:00:23 A text appears on the screen: David Eaves, Associate Professor in Digital Government at the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose]
David Eaves: A few things are actually different.
So one is, in a digital era, we're actually more distant from our users than we were in previous eras. They don't come in an office to engage with us. They don't even get on the phone necessarily to talk to us.
As a result, previously there was a lot of tacit learning that happened on the front lines about how people were experiencing our services, and how they were experiencing the Government of Canada, that gets lost. We may have a lot more data that we're tracking around how people are moving through a website which is enormously valuable, but we're losing some of the kind of the experience that they're having.
And that's why so much about what digital government is about focuses on what the user experience is. And the need to do user research.
It's because the distance that digital creates now must be explicitly closed. Whereas in previous periods that learning happened simply because people were showing up in our offices or we were getting on the phone with them.
So as a federal executive, you can't presume that your staff or even yourselves are getting information about how your users are experiencing your service. You have to explicitly ask and charter and ask people to go out and do that research and find that out. This is maybe the single most important thing that a federal executive needs to know.
Another core competence in a digital era is the ways in which we need to adapt how we're managing our employees. Both because they may be working remotely, but also because they're using new tools.
One of the things that I'm deeply worried about is that the tools and competencies used by public servants are not the same that are increasingly being used by the private sector. So in the private sector, people are using more and more tools that allow them to collaborate in real time on documents. They're using tools that allow them to engage in chats online, and they're using wikis allow them to kind of collaboratively build knowledge databases, allow them to transmit information over time and space.
And if public sector employees aren't allowed to use those tools, two things happen.
One is they actually become deskilled in the workplace. And so their ability to go find other types of work becomes harder and harder.
And I think it creates barriers for people to even enter because actually worrying out by coming into the public sector, they are going to be reducing their options for where they might be able to work in the future.
One of the core things that I think is as a manager of public servants is, how are we enabling people to capitalize on the enormous productive potential of these tools that allow people to collaborate over time and space and work on documents collectively, to quickly get on phone calls together or to chat synchronously or asynchronously to solve problems and really push work down to the workers and let them figure out how to solve things themselves.
That is, for me, a profoundly core skill set that managers need to develop.
A sub piece of that is how do you create culture and motivate people when they're working remotely and working online? And this, it's the same goal and objective that you have when you're working in an office, but you have to in some ways be more explicit and more proactive in doing that and creating the space and the time and the energy in the online domains to make people feel they're part of a team, that they have a sense of mission, and are connected to one another.
I managed the software team composed of 50 people who all worked remotely for ten years before COVID hit us. And so this is something that is like lived personal experience. As leaders, we need to create a shared sense of identity and a shared space and provide people with motivation and a sense of belonging and connectedness.
And you have to be explicit in doing that because you're not rubbing shoulders. My CTO used to talk about the need for us to work together remotely, but also find time to connect physically and what we call “quantum entangle”.
So to meet each other, not to necessarily solve problems, but to learn how we can solve problems together and how to read each other so we become in-sync so that when we get separated, we're still in-sync and able to work together.
Digital is enabling all sorts of new possibilities, and those capacities can be used in ways that can empower people to do more or overwhelm them so that they can't do more, or even constrain them.
And so I think of something like even like collaboration tools where we can jointly work on a document. That can be used to really empower the most junior people in your team to come edit and compose and work on something. Or they can be used to surveil people and figure out, you know, who's making ineffective contributions or to kind of push back and really end up silencing your team.
So I think that the key thing is, are you thinking about digital tools and how to use them not just as something that is passive that can be used, but are you making explicit choices about how they're used in ways that will empower your teams and actually push decision making down to the people who are who are equipped to make those decisions and should be empowered to make those decisions?
Because technology, because it's networked can allow all decisions and all information to flow back to a hub, if you choose to build your network and decision making that way.
And so I think a lot of organizations that are more hierarchical can actually find technology reinforces hierarchy and actually centralizes decision making.
But those are cultural choices. They're not technology choices.
[00:05:45 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
