Partnership Resource Centre
Partnership And Productivity In The Public Sector – Summary Report
Introduction
Public sector productivity, and the need to improve it, has become a hot political issue worldwide, and New Zealand is no exception. While the heat may sometimes be uncomfortable for governments, it must be right for citizens that more light is shed on how their tax dollars are spent. The trouble is that the issue tends to generate more heat than light, which can sometimes lead to the wrong decisions being made for the wrong reasons. If public sector employees are set the wrong targets, the public can be short-changed, even if those targets are hit; the value of what the public sector produces can fall, even if its employees' productivity seems to be rising. Therefore, understanding what we mean by public sector productivity and how it can be increased is crucial.
In 2006, the Partnership Resource Centre decided to study the problem by examining the evidence for the idea that, if public sector employers and unions work more cooperatively towards shared goals, productivity can be increased. Anecdotal evidence, particularly from overseas, suggested strong links between union-employer partnership approaches and productivity gains. But most of the evidence came from the private sector, and there was a need to draw out lessons on how partnership approaches can impact on productivity in the different environment of the public sector. Therefore, we commissioned a comprehensive review of the existing literature on workplace partnerships and productivity to try to find out whether union-employer cooperation really can be a driver of productivity in the public sector and, if so, how.
The review was carried out by Brendan Martin and Conor Cradden of Public World in London and Geneva, assisted by Public World associate Christof Schiller. It drew on literature from both international and New Zealand sources, and the following is a summary of their report.
The report starts by exploring what productivity means in the public sector. Is it the same as productivity in the private sector, and if not, in what ways is it different? The report shows how our understanding of what public sector productivity means depends on what we want government to do and how we want it done. It goes on to look at how productivity is measured and how performance measurement can affect what the public sector produces and how it produces it.
Then the report explores the various forms of workplace partnership and discusses how the attitudes of participants are just as important as how partnerships are organised. As with productivity, what we understand by "partnership" and what it can achieve are strongly influenced by changing public sector reform models.
The report then brings the two strands together by looking at what the literature tells us about how employers and unionised workers can cooperate to produce better outcomes in more cost-effective ways. It does this by considering the impact both on organisations and on their individual employees.
The conclusion reached by the report is that partnership can indeed improve productivity, provided the right conditions are in place and both employers and employees can place their trust in their relationship. This is achieved, the report argues, through what it calls "procedural and substantive guarantees", which, in plain English, are binding agreements about what is done and the way it is done.
Based on that analysis, the report makes suggestions about how relationships between government, citizens and employees need to change if the public sector is to improve its ability to produce the right outcomes in the most cost-effective ways.