Partnership, Productivity and Public Value: 17-18 July 2008

About the event

This action-focussed event brought together 90 Public Service staff, managers and PSA delegates to work together on practical ways of improving performance and increasing public value, underpinned by high quality employment and effective trade union and employee involvement. 

The key themes were:

• The need to increase public value, particularly in service delivery functions
• Developing high performing workplaces based on high trust relationships
• Citizen engagement with and trust in Public Services

This was a participative event rather than a talkfest.  The emphasis was on the identification of and implementation of change in an active, participative and learning environment. 

The event was jointly sponsored by the Department of Labour, the Public Service Association and the State Services Commission.

The keynote speakers

Two speakers from the London-based Work Foundation (David Coats, Associate Director of Policy and Stephen Bevan, Director of Research) of the UK-based Work Foundation, provided keynote input on public value, service improvement and high performing organisations. 

Rose Ryan of Athena Research and Vance Kerslake, who led the State Services Commission’s work on Kiwis Count, provided a New Zealand perspective.

The conference was officially opened by Hon David Parker, Minister for State Services. You can read his speech here.

The event was a great focus for the launch of the State Services productivity snapshot tool, which was launched by the Minister of Labour, the Hon Trevor Mallard on the Thursday night.  You can read his speech here.

What is public value?

Organisations in the private sector typically have one main objective: to “maximise shareholder value”.  Public Value tries to put forward an equally clear objective for our public services.

The idea is that public services ought to be the best they can be given the resources available. 

It’s based on the idea that public services are different, that democracy matters, that the public are more than consumers, that a more open dialogue with the public can restore faith in public services and that the engagement of unions and their members is a necessary ingredient in this mix. 

Read more here or check out the Work Foundation

Who was there

• Department of Conservation
• Department of Corrections
• Ministry of Education
• Ministry of Health
• Inland Revenue
• Department of Internal Affairs
• Department of Justice
• Department of Labour
• Ministry of Social Development

Each group worked with one of the Department of Labour’s Partnership Resource Centre’s Associates.

How the projects were identified

The focus was on projects or initiatives that

• are delivery focussed – this was a conference for front-end staff, not policy-makers!
• will provide tangible benefits for the public, organisation and staff at workplace, local, regional or national level
• have an element of freshness or new thinking
• involve both unions and employer representatives, willing to work and learn in a partnership way before, during and after the conference
• may involve the potential for cross agency collaboration

How the conference worked

The groups

There were nine different public service agency groups.
Each had group was made up of between 6 and 12 and had at least one manager, a PSA delegate, a PSA organiser and a PRC Associate.
Each group had their own private work area and spent about 35% of the time working on their projects there.

The market place

Each group had a market stall where they could “lay out their wares”.
Around 35% of the time was spent with the groups moving around each others’ stalls sharing information and ideas

The tools and information

The groups had access to:

The keynote speakers who were on-call to give advice or information or to work directly with groups.

The State Services productivity snapshot tool, a productivity resource which has been adapted from the private sector-focused Workplace Productivity Toolkit.

Case studies of four public sector productivity projects – you can see the videos here.

Kiwis Count the first all-of-government national survey to ask New Zealanders about their perceptions and experiences of public services as a whole.

Stephen Bevan

Stephen Bevan is Director of Research at The Work Foundation. He is responsible for the delivery of a programme of both applied and frontier research on the world of work. These include programmes of work on The Knowledge Economy, High Performance Workplaces, Public Value and Labour Market Disadvantage. With a team of 12 researchers, he oversees a programme of over 20 research studies each year, each designed to enhance the UK’s evidence-base and to inform the climate of policy debate in the UK’s Boardrooms and in Whitehall.

David Coats

David Coats has been an associate director of The Work Foundation since 2004. He worked for the British TUC for fifteen years, latterly as Head of the Economic and Social Affairs Department. He was a member of the UK’s Low Pay Commission from 2000 – 2004 and is currently a member of the Central Arbitration Committee. David has written widely on the problems and challenges facing workers and employers in the UK labour market.

Rose Ryan

Rose Ryan is a Director of Research at Athena Research Ltd.  She has been engaged in research related to work and organisations, in NZ and internationally, for the past two decades, as an academic, consultant, and public policy analyst.  Her current research interests are around social and organisational sustainability, high performance workplaces, partnership practices at national and workplace levels, and the interface between work and wellbeing.