Painting the picture for Europe’s Public Servants in the post-pandemic Renaissance

After a crisis, comes an economic and societal rebirth.  Despite all the challenges, the pandemic has provided Governments, business leaders and citizens the space and time to look at the world through different lenses. The public service is, and will remain, the most people-intensive of any industry sector. 

Working in front-line, service fulfilment and back-office roles, public servants provide key roles across the value chain for the delivery of public services to citizens and businesses.  The opportunity for Government administrations is to plan, design and implement a totally new experience for its workforces.  One that balances the service needs of citizens and businesses with the specifics of the many public servant roles that are required.  And which incorporates new ways of working and the development of new skills and competencies to manage and deliver services effectively in the post-pandemic Renaissance.

The Covid-19 crisis has acted as a catalyst for public service leaders and managers to accelerate digitalisation and new ways of working to improve the experience both of public servants and the citizens and businesses they serve. Even if public service organisations accelerated their transition to new ways of working and flexible organisation models in 2020, this journey is far from finished.

Traditionally, major organisational transformations have often focussed on process or technology-led approaches. While technology has a significant role to play in modernising and automating processes across public services organisations, a skilled, flexible and motivated public sector workforce will continue to be a key requirement for effective service delivery to citizens and businesses. In fact, the public sector is, and will remain, the most people-intensive of all industries. Transformation and modernisation initiatives that are focused predominantly on technology-led approaches without due consideration of the role of the public servants themselves will not achieve the desired outcomes.

So how should public service organisations address the transition to the post-Covid ways of organising service?

The ultimate objective is to provide better, more responsive, and customer-centric services to the citizens and businesses that they serve. To meet this objective, senior leaders should focus first on the key prerequisite: providing public servants with enhanced capability and capacity to manage and run their organisations more effectively and provide them with an enhanced employee experience. For this, they need to adopt people-centric approaches to design and implement the future ways of organising work.

We invite you to explore a collection of essays on new opportunities for public services organisations to redefine and evolve the relationships and engagement mechanisms with its workforce. This series of publications provides senior leaders with practical recommendations for making the transition towards new sustainable work organisation models, optimising both overall organisational performance and the productivity, well-being and overall experience for its workforce.

BearingPoint research on ways of working experience of public servants during pandemic

To understand how public services organisations across Europe could adapt to the new normal, both during and following the pandemic, BearingPoint conducted a major survey across 8 countries in Europe during 2020.  This included collecting and analysing the experiences and insights from 3,500 public servants working across the health, social care, emergency services, education, and government administration sectors.

The combination of BearingPoint’s practical experience of working on over 1,000 public sector engagements with clients across Europe and our extensive research provides a clear perspective on the core challenges to be addressed by public service leaders to manage the transition to the new normal.