The Australian Public Service Commission has quietly released the 2023 Trust in Public Service report.
Seventeen public services, including the Australian Tax Office, Services Australia, the Department of Agriculture and the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, were courageous enough to seek feedback from the Australian public on their services. The leaders of these departments and agencies should be commended for their commitment to openness and learning.
Similarly, the team behind the design of the Survey of Trust, on which the report is based, should be congratulated for its methodological rigour in attempting to measure the unmeasurable.
The model that underpins the survey reduces trust to a function of satisfaction and expectation that forms a feedback loop from which trust in public service can be deduced. There is nothing wrong with the model or its assumptions, but it is not a solid measure of trust in public service.
The flight to measurement
Government and business leaders have embraced the idea of measurement to the point of obsession.
The PGPA Act is strong on the need for robust agency performance measures. The recent Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) Audit Opinion Insight reinforces the importance of measurement. It helpfully identifies ‘enterprise-wide performance frameworks’ as an area for improvement across the APS.
The ANAO seeks the whole truth of agency performance through independent and objective measures. The limit to measuring enterprise performance is the complexity of human organisations.
There are no performance measures free of the choices, perceptions and judgements of people in the agency or the environment to which it is constantly adapting. Measurement necessarily involves solidifying the paths of probabilities and possibilities into a number that represents performance at a point in time. The number could be meaningful or meaningless.
However, the ANAO is focused on embedding measures into agency culture to improve managerial accountability and not the philosophical challenges of measurement. So, inevitably, the focus will be on identifying measurable and concrete performance indicators that can be traced to clean and accurate data.
And while qualitative measures are permitted, agencies and their risk and audit committees will fly quickly to quantitative measures — a flight hastened by the spectre of an independent audit by the ANAO.
Learning the lessons of incentives and incomplete measures
A small few might recall the Enron corporate disaster of 2001. At the heart of the disaster was the focus on the share price as a measure of success and, when given as stock options to senior executives, leading to failures in leadership, ethics, and integrity. A disaster that also led to the rapid demise of the global professional services firm Arthur Andersen. Incentives and measures shape behaviour, and they are challenging to get right.
The Hayne royal commission into banking and the more recent inquiries into PwC and EY have highlighted the clear link between incentives, measures of success and behaviours. Incentives that elevated profit over customers and ethics led to devastating consequences beyond the banking and consulting industries to impact employees and customers.
The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme highlighted the explicit and implicit incentives built into the scheme and its administration that contributed to reducing the quality of advice provided by the APS.
The recent Pink Floyd-inspired title of the APS Integrity Taskforce, Louder than Words, identifies the role of incentives in improving integrity across the APS.
Inevitably, talk of incentives leads to a recommendation for measuring and reporting on integrity to ‘track progress and identify opportunities for improvement’.
Measuring integrity has similar philosophical and methodological problems as measuring trust.
If public service is a ‘craft’, then the measures should follow
In 2020, the idea of craft was proposed as a way to define a career in the APS. It was a good idea, that artisanal nature of learning the art of good public service.
In everyday terms, craft is associated with customisation, care, and attention to detail. A craftsperson is part of a vocation that draws on technical skills and specialised knowledge learned through practice and exposure to more experienced practitioners.
Craft is valued because it is unique, authentic and different. Integrity is implicit in the practice of the craft.
Public servants make policy and deliver services based on choices and judgements about accessibility, openness, fairness, impartiality, legitimacy and participation.
Consequently, trust and integrity are central to the choices and judgements that public servants make every day. They are the outcomes of a craft practised well.
But, how do you measure a craft?
A craft done well fits. It meets the utility requirement and how well the parts fit together.
We can measure utility. For example, does it meet the requirements of purpose and function? But good policy and service delivery are also designed to be seamlessly arranged and elegant as much as functional. Elegance and functionality are both central to craft.
The managerialism that has come to dominate government and business delivery prizes functionality and sees elegance as a cost. The measures associated with performance indicators and incentives reflect this.
Relying on functional measures can distract from what is expressed in a vision and strategy. It, often unintentionally, discounts aspiration in favour of practicality.
The concreteness of numbers overwhelms the seemingly amorphous considerations of elegance in design and delivery. But in good public administration, fit is an essential determinant of trust. A policy or service works because it fits not only the government’s intent but there is harmony in how the parts work together to deliver the vision and strategy.
Some important things are not measurable
The quality of a craft is hard to judge. It requires knowledge, experience, and a clear-eyed sense of intent and circumstances. Functional measures remain important, but the data they are based on will always be limited and narrow the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis. When linked to incentives and behavioural outcomes, overdependence on these measures is a recipe for consequences experienced by Enron, PwC, EY, and the APS.
Trust in Public Service is a good report that provides some insights into satisfaction with and expectations of public service delivery, but it is a narrow measure of trust in public services. Those tasked with implementing the recommendations of the Louder than Words report to measure integrity will face similar challenges.
The first question might be, is integrity measurable?
Want to know more about measuring integrity?
Join leaders including NACC Commissioner Paul Le Gay Brereton and they openly discuss integrity and the issues facing the APS. Learn more about the Mandarin’s ‘Rebuilding trust and integrity in the Australian Public Service’ conference here.
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