Our sick public service
The latest bad news from the public service of Canada is an outbreak of incivility on top of widespread depression and illness. It really is a toxic workplace, and it’s time to try genuine reform.
Earlier this year, the triennial Treasury Board survey said nearly one-infive public servants reported harassment at work in the last two years. According to various studies, rudeness and harassment come largely from within, from superiors, co-workers, the public, subordinates and other departments in that order. Even executives, according to a new study by the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX), are increasingly the target of abusive behaviour and increasingly disengaged as a result.
Canadians in the private sector might feel moved to some incivility of their own at such complaints from public servants, who enjoy pay, pensions and job security strongly at odds with their own experience. But man does not live by bread alone, and federal public servants are hurting.
They stay home sick at 2.5 times the private sector rate and nearly twice that of their provincial colleagues. While the federal bureaucracy has among Canada’s most aggressive policies respecting promotion and well-being of women, female public servants take sick leave at nearly twice the male rate, and more frequently for depression.
To be frank, some of the complaining reflects hypersensitivity to the normal friction between human beings anywhere. But the dismal work environment of Canada’s public service fosters both rudeness and hypersensitivity, placing a very real burden on its members and the public, who pay directly for sick leave and overstaffing and indirectly in diminished service.
The problem is not outmoded thinking or structures. Canada’s public service is run according to the latest management theories and dominated by powerful unions. Nor is it mainly hostile interactions with an angry, cynical public or obtuse politicians; this morale crisis is mostly internally generated.
What then is to be done? Naturally the APEX study endorses current management fads like “best practices,” the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s national psychological standard for a healthy workplace across departments, technique-heavy civility policies and guides for dealing with rudeness. And the unions want more money and benefits. But the problem is not a lack of suitable memos or sick leave. It is frustration and futility breeding incivility and depression throughout the public service.
Almost no one could be happy attending endless meetings, quibbling over trite memos, involving dozens of people across departments on boilerplate press releases, writing reports no one reads. Not that the actual work doesn’t matter, from defence to social services. But it is too often done in dismally pointless ways and those involved know it.
Canadian governments are too big. They do too much. And they do far more in-house than they need to, crushing talented idealists under countless layers of management, petty rules and worthless regulations.
It’s a problem for citizens and taxpayers, and governments who desperately need to get a handle on staffing costs, especially looming pension liabilities. But it’s also a problem for public servants.
That’s why privatization, contracting out and the elimination of useless activities need serious consideration. It must be done with due care and attention, of course. But while genuine slimming down of the public service is reflexively opposed by public-sector unions and many management gurus, it would benefit workers who leave to do real meaningful work, and those who stay and find themselves doing urgent tasks that matter.
It would also serve the public, not a trivial consideration when discussing the public service.