If we want to improve digital services in government, we need to stop treating permanent staff as a headcount burden, rather than our most valuable asset. While I still consider myself relatively junior, I thought my perspective as a civil servant product manager who used to teach in the early years, famously one of the hardest fields to keep staff, might be interesting.
The problem 😢
In 2023, less than 20% of public sector digital spend was on permanent public sector staff, compared to 55% on contractors. This is unsurprising, given ’the average contractor in the central government cost(s) 3 times as much per year as the average civil servant.’ This is exacerbated by civil servant headcount restrictions that ignore the cost spent sustaining digital teams and instead focus on number of civil servants per department. Simply, it is not an efficient use of taxpayer money.
This actually is only one aspect of the problem of the lack of civil servants in digital teams. Others I’ve observed:
- a high rate of churn for digital civil servants, which can be disruptive
- a decrease in organisational memory, which is already notoriously difficult
- sometimes, a lack of connection to greater department strategy and objectives - though this very much depends on who is hired instead!
- as observed in the Horizon Post Office Scandal, sometimes a knowledge and accountability gap between the digital service and the organisation responsible for it
This is not to say that I haven’t worked with many amazing contractors in digital teams. Many of the best professionals I have worked with, and continue to work with, are contractors. However, I’m also pretty sure most of them would agree with me.
I’m only going to touch on retention here, but given I got into government digital via a fairly niche recruitment pathway, you can bet I’ll write about that at some point, too.
How we can fix it 🔨
To be blunt, I don’t know. It’s not an easy problem. It’s a systemic issue in the civil service, that people with far more expertise have investigated than me. But here are some ideas of how government digital can move its focus from headcount to value.
Pay civil servants more 💰
This feels obvious, so I’m going to get it out of the way quickly. ‘Compensation is below the private sector - ‘a typical central government cyber specialist earns 35% less than private sector counterparts’.
I actually think this is sometimes overstated. While I definitely think it’s a key, and somewhat hard to fix part of the problem, I don’t think it is as simple as that.
Similarly, I didn’t leave teaching due to the pay. Around 92% of state sector teachers that are considering leaving report it is due to workload, as opposed to 57% as a result of pay. Anecdotally, many teachers I know left because the workload for the pay felt disproportionate.
Sure, money helps, but I think for many that work in the public sector, it is a conscious choice to try and have a career that motivates them and they feel good about. In pretty much every field, this comes at a price of a lower salary. Particularly in digital, where there other options folks can go into, this has to be a main contender for why civil servants in digital stay. They likely went into it knowing the pay wouldn’t be as high.
The fact so many civil servants leave only to end up working as contractors or consultants in the public sector emphasises that - they want their work to contribute to society. I suppose having experience in this area helps as well, but stick with me!
Prioritise work for civil servants that help meets those ambitions 💫
So, given my hypothesis that the majority of digital civil servants are at least somewhat motivated to do work for public good, what can we do to keep them in the civil service?
I think it’s important line managers and senior leaders in government digital prioritise the interest and progression of civil servants. Typically, we get scared to move people that have been here longer due to their accumulated expertise - but this often means they think the only solution is to leave completely.
More exciting, innovative and impactful work should go to civil servants. Line managers should be aware of and have discussions with who they line manage on what they want to work on, and how they can get there. Work can’t always be exciting, but where we can, we should be making use of the motivation that likely got our colleagues into their role in the first place.
I also think treating the different digital disciplines in government as less concrete and separate would help with this. Greater movement between disciplines can let people can take on more of a variety of work, upskill and maybe even have more fun. But that’s something I’ll touch on in more detail another time.
Make roles available for civil servants to advance in ⬆️
I’ve line managed some really great civil servants who have sadly left because their skills exceeded their grade and salary. It is completely understandable that people do want to advance and receive more pay, particularly when they see others around them performing similar roles at much greater salaries. Similarly, it’s unrealistic to expect that professionals are happy to just stop progressing for the rest of their career once they’ve hit a certain grade.
It is very, very hard to make new roles available in the civil service, due to headcount restrictions. But what that often means is we get contractors in, at three times the cost.
We need to make more roles available for people that are in post to apply to, as soon as we can, given how long we know it takes to make these roles available. This is not controversial. But this is much easier said than done, and requires a more strategic and realistic take than simply headcount restrictions on government teams.
Allow for progression that keeps civil servants working in digital 🤖
So, here’s my next wild hypothesis - people that work in digital like working in digital.
I’ve come to a point in my career where any meaningful progression feels like it would mean taking a massive step back from actually working to build digital services. The two choices seem to either typically be becoming a manager of a digital discipline or organising and managing a group of services from further away, often also being responsible for policy teams.
But the thing is, I like my job. I like diagnosing bugs, learning about codey stuff and building services to make things better.
This reminds me of how teachers similarly complain that advancing to senior leadership roles typically means taking steps out of the classroom, the aspect that is usually the most fulfilling and important to them. Again, this is not a wholly solved issue, but genuine advancement up the upper pay scale is one potential solution to this. Another is an expert teacher role, as called for here.
We should think about how we can maintain a feeling of progression for civil servants, particularly those that are developing much needed technical expertise, without taking them away from what they’re actually good at. Genuine progression up the paybands, which some departments already allow for, or more tailored digital roles at higher grades could help here.
Raise the profile of government digital 🕶️
I think many folks I talk to about my work aren’t even aware that there are government digital teams filled with civil servants. Which, to be fair, is not that surprising, given how many jobs there are out there.
But I do think raising the profile of government digital work is important, if done for the right reasons. Some amazing things have been accomplished in the last twenty years, but there’s often a perception that government digital is past its heyday. As a result, this can sometimes link to an assumption that civil servants in digital are also outdated or less skilled.
One way I think we can do that is being more public and transparent about our work, which is good for all sorts of reasons. When I briefly worked in private sector digital, we spent a lot more time going out into schools, events and the wider sector to talk about and show our work. Not only did this raise our company’s profile - which is a marketing aspect less typically essential for the civil service - but it helped me feel proud of what we’d done, learn more about the sector I was working in and gain respect with our users. This is particularly vital given that, well, I can reliably say as a former teacher that the Department for Education isn’t typically well-trusted by their users.
For how large government digital is, it can often feel quite isolated. Getting out more, increasing transparency and spending more time in person with our users could help.
Appreciate digital expertise and upskill civil servants 📚
I’m not the best example of this. I have avoided product manager books or podcasts like the plague (sorry). But there must be more we can do to help digital civil servants stay on top of their game. In particular, we need to do this acknowledging that working in government digital is often very different to working in the private sector.
When I first started as a junior, there were more opportunities available for training in government digital, but sadly these seem to all have been defunded.
I’ve not been too interested in further training in product management (because it’s kinda vibesy), but I’d love more time and opportunities to upskill in Ruby, SQL queries, making the most of some of our tooling and prototyping. There’s definitely more I could do to make this happen, but it’s also difficult to find the time and opportunities (that are free, or nearly free) to do this.
Compare this to teaching. Regularly, there were new initiatives to try and improve professional development. It’s seen as continuous. While I won’t pretend this is always successful or subject to its own flaws or trends, the mindset of constantly upskilling to stay at the top of your game and up to date with modern research felt far more present.
One of the ways I’ve seen how to do this best in government digital, is where communities of learning aren’t just based around what discipline you are, but exactly what you want to learn, and how it can pragmatically apply to your work. For example, how to learn how to use dashboarding tooling to better understand how your users use your service, so you can build stuff that better meets their needs. Often our time for development just focuses on what your current job role is, meeting with others with that same job role, but we often have a lot more to learn from others with different expertise!
Similarly, rather than carving out days for training, expertise can be developed in more subtle ways. I’ve found on my current team that changing our tooling to Github - and therefore moving our ways of working closer to the actual development going on - has really helped to upskill myself and other members of the team. Anyone can create a pull request to update documentation or fix a typo.
Better balance teams with contractors and civil servants ⚖️
As a civil servant that has worked in several teams where everyone else has been contractors, this one is particularly important to me.
It is quite difficult to work a job where you know you are getting paid less than the rest of the team, when the quality and quantity of your work output is similar. While of course this doesn’t surprise me compared to developers, it can apply to all roles in digital teams.
If you are working daily surrounded by others who seem happy to be contractors and are paid more for the same work, why wouldn’t you leave?
Even worse, there can sometimes be a bizarre assumption from a few folks that to not go into contracting would suggest you perhaps do not have the ability required, as I’ve mentioned earlier. Overall, balancing teams with a blend of civil servants and contractors is positive for many reasons, including organisational memory and team culture as well. It can also make it less lonely in office, which believe it or not can really impact a person’s enjoyment of work, too.
Increase accountability and performance management ☑️
There are sometimes problems with managing performance in the civil service, like in any other workforce.
I think this partially comes down to size, but also a lack of clear hierarchy of responsibilities for who is always responsible for making the decisions and calls for staff. In my last primary school, it was lot harder to get lost in the noise when you’re only working with around 20 members of staff.
Nobody likes handling performance. But it is important for morale.
I think as a civil servant it can be particularly frustrating to see civil servants, or contractors, earning the same or more than you whilst delivering very little value. Typically, those seen as excelling are given more responsibilities and work to do with no reward, whilst others can coast by earning an identical salary.
Reward civil servants for picking up additional responsibilities 🏆
It’s always seemed pretty strange to me that salaries are public and fairly universal in the civil service, but the folks earning the same salary can have such a wide range of workload, experience and responsibilities.
When I first became a product manager at the typical grade, I had about three months experience in role, but I was earning the same as product managers with years of experience. While I was working really hard and full of enthusiasm, I don’t doubt that was annoying to some of my colleagues.
Similarly, I now product manage on much larger teams responsible for more technical and larger services, but that hasn’t altered my salary at all. I’ve also line managed 5 different, luckily fabulous, people, led courses or training to upskill others, run the recruitment scheme that got me into government digital and had a fairly full-time role helping work experience students… But none of those had any reward for me beyond a fuzzy feeling in my heart and potentially a bullet point on the CV (which, y’know, hopefully I’m not updating if I’m staying).
We need to think of ways to better reward civil servants when they are putting in additional effort, that incentivises them to stay, not go.
Get digital and policy working closer together ✨
Sometimes when I’ve seen civil servants get demotivated it’s because they’ve felt that they’re at the mercy of policy teams, as opposed to being equal partners working together. Both can view the others as ‘blockers’ or simply not understanding their perspective. This can make individuals feel undermined, or that their work is being dictated to them rather than their professional expertise being trusted. For individuals that I’ve suggested want to make a positive impact on society, feeling like their autonomy has been taken away does not make them want to stay.
Thankfully, I’ve been on teams where the relationship between policy and digital tends to be much better. There are many great reasons to make policy and digital work in teams together, and one is to give each more of a sense of purpose and ownership.
Emphasise the benefits of working in government digital 💙
There are many benefits. After all, there are reasons I’ve stayed, and they’re not just the pension.
The flexibility is massively helpful. While there are many things I still miss about teaching - there is nothing like teaching a kid to read their first words - it felt far more restrictive to how I lived my life.
Stability, particularly in a somewhat chaotic AI-bubbley tech job market, is a massive plus. I feel relatively safe in my job.
But more than that, I do feel well appreciated and respected in my role. I’ve been lucky to work in teams that shout their thanks loudly and when things go wrong, take the blame collectively.
The care and support I’ve received in my current role has also been a large reason I’ve wanted to stay. Particularly at the start of my career to help me develop, but also more recently during health difficulties. I struggle to see how this would happen to the same extent in other jobs I’ve had. While this largely may depend on your line manager, my experiences of management have been much more positive here than elsewhere.
I want to work on digital services to help make things simpler for schools and other educational organisations. It’s vital, and something I really care about, far more than making roadmaps or prioritisation matrixes. Some of my most talented and enthusiastic colleagues are former teachers who just want to stay in an area they’re passionate about.
Perhaps most importantly, you get the opportunity to work with usually like-minded people who want to serve society by building cool stuff. And that’s pretty awesome.