Pay and Workforce Reform
Customer focus is about public service organisations treating service users with dignity and respect, and ensuring that the services they receive represent value for money. It is also about optimising choice for users, and giving them a stronger voice in designing services. This is imperative to achieving the Government's aims for a society in which there is universality of opportunity, in which every child and every adult is enabled to achieve their full potential.
Effective public sector leadership is critical to service transformation and critical to customer focus.
While Government must provide leadership at national level, customer needs are best identified and met locally, not centrally. Leaders need to create a positive environment for reform, creating the right organisational conditions and empowering staff. They need to display qualities including customer empathy, the ability to focus leadership attention throughout the organisation, capacity to influence wider service delivery systems, and encouragement for co-development of services.
To be most effective, leaders need to find ways of providing choice and harnessing the energies of all their service users, including those who need help the most. And inherent in meeting customer needs is co-operation between leaders across sectors, often engaging with multiple partners to ensure that complex requirements can be delivered, seamlessly, to the customer.
The Public Services Leadership Consortium, established in 2005, identified customer focus as one of its opening priorities, and sponsored research into the qualities required for customer focused leadership, and the learning required to develop these qualities. The project has culminated in the development of a learning framework incorporating a suite of customer focused leadership learning resources.