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The workforce is key to driving up the productivity of public services. Enabling the innovative practice of public service workers to spread throughout an organisation is vital to optimising the efficiency and quality of the services it provides.
The Workforce Reform Team is therefore taking forward work to
We think that staff engagement is key to enabling the spread of innovation and increasing productivity. You can find out more about staff engagement, and the Drive for Change engagement tool at the Drive for Change website.
You can find more details of how we are taking forward work on workforce productivity and innovation, and how you can help us, in these web pages. Please get in touch and tell us what you think.
See our Workforce Productivity Resource pack [MS Powerpoint].
On 30 November 2009 the Cabinet Office, in partnership with the Work Foundation, the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and the IDeA, brought together leaders and managers from across the public sector to discuss workforce productivity in public services.
The seminar was designed to start off a piece of work to look at how the public service workforce can deliver ‘more for less’ in these difficult times. It involved people from across the public sector, including local government, the NHS, police, central government, trades unions and employer organisations, who worked through the issues and started to identify best practice.
The seminar successfully helped pinpoint some of the areas where public services are struggling to make progress. How to measure productivity is a particularly thorny issue, and one that is being grappled with all over the public sector where quality is so difficult to measure. The seminar featured a presentation from NHS London, where they are making real progress in developing a benchmarking tool that helps NHS organisations compare their productivity levels against their peers.
The seminar considered how approaches to workforce reform could help productivity, including making sure that public service organisations have the right people with the right skills to deliver value for money. Delegates also discussed how taking a whole systems approach could ensure that productivity did not suffer because of gaps between different services within a single community.
The Workforce Reform Team is now thinking about how to:
If you have any ideas you would like to share with the team or if you’d like to get involved with the discussion group, please contact us at workforcematters@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk.
The Public Service Workforce Reform Team is also working with the Public Services Unit’s Innovation Team to look at how good management practices can create the climate for workforce innovation.
We are interested to hear from those working in public services to help us explore the whether more effective management practices help to foster an environment that promotes innovative practice and the spread of innovation?
If you can help us or you’d like to find out more, contact us on workforcematters@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk.
You can learn more about the work of the Innovation team by clicking on the following links: :