The stigma of working in public service
Private sector prejudice
With every week that passes and every new declaration from New Zealand Public Service minister against the backdrop a further restructuring and cuts, working in, or studying, the public service feels more depressing. Nicola Willis is attempting to inspire public servants by asking them to “be bold”… at the same time as 1500 more jobs are to be cut from Health New Zealand.
Bold, indeed.
Perhaps developing some kind of tunnel vision, disconnecting from reality, and ignoring adverse reactions (including evidence) is something that ministers have to do to hold onto their vision and their own intrinsic beliefs. There really isn't anything sensible one could say that doesn't sound cynical given what public servants have been through this year.
It's never been glamorous to work in the public sector.
But in my time, I fully underestimated the stigma that comes with being a public servant, in fact.
I began my career and user research in small agencies, first in Berlin and later in Wellington. For years I ran hundreds of lab tests with participants to figure out how websites can be made easier to understand and use. When I found myself getting frustrated with my clients whenever they told me they needed to get some internal sign-offs and disappeared for weeks at a time - I decided it was time to switch sides. I needed to see what being an internal specialist is all about.
What the heck was so hard about that whole “stakeholder management” stuff, and all the “governance” blah?
I became a customer expert inside a bank – and, boy howdy, did I learn about stakeholder management and governance! Career-wise that was good, healthy, necessary. So when I was offered a more senior position in the public sector (in Better Public Services), it felt like another logical step, a more complex challenge that will feed my expertise.
What I didn't expect was that apparently,
by working in the public sector, I had irrevocably crossed over to the “dark side”, with little hope of return. No one tells you, but everyone seems to know.
When I was looking for a new job less than two years later, and at a time when my kind of skill set was in high demand (on paper), I was consistently rejected by private sector hiring managers. In one of the only interview I got, the first question I was asked was:
“How do you think you would cope with the cultural difference, coming from public sector? You know we expect a lot more here.”
I was gobsmacked - where was this coming from? I had worked SIX YEARS in private sector, but apparently LESS THAN TWO YEARS were enough to render me “culturally unfit” for the private sector.
After surprise came rage for me, rage over the injustice and bigotry of these people – which has only become more ingrained with each year passing, of course.
Particularly in my field, this is very true:
Designy people and creative folk LOVE referring to their curiosity, talking about how fundamental it is to their very being and to everything they do at work.
But most people who have rejected me and other public servants I know in hiring processes have never worked in the public sector themselves. And they rarely worked with public servants - because they don’t trust they’re up to the task. Where’s your curiosty now? The judgement was and is prejudicial, fed by the same nasty stereotypes that New Zealand’s government seems to base some of its strategy on: public servants are slow, lazy, in for a cushy job, allergic to change.
Yet, the thing that I remember most from my switch from the bank to “Better Public Services” was the intense pace of work. In public sector, you need to be both entrepreneurial, creating your own opportunities to do the job you're hired to do, AND you have to get very smart about how to work the insane internal politics and relationships. There is so much to learn and so many unwritten rules in a public service organisation. And to be clear, I'm not saying that that's good - in fact it's the darn opposite. But to think that working in public service is an easy job, or that you're culturally falling “behind the times” when you work there is simply ignorant.
I'm not saying there are no cultural differences, there most certainly are. But as with everything, they come in strengths and in weaknesses.
I've always experienced public servants as relentlessly resilient, able to handle complexities and cognitive dissonance in a way that I've never seen in my private sector teams. I've also seen public servants underestimate their own expertise and contribution, cower under hierarchical pressure, and stop themselves from speaking their mind because they've been burned in the past. That's not to be sniffed at, it's not good.
Because I have worked in so many different contexts, I have a different proposition to offer: a noticeable difference in people’s adoption to a new working environment isn’t so much private versus public sector -
it’s much more along the lines of large or small organisations, imho.
A large private sector organisation like a bank or a tech company has a lot more in common with a beefy ministry than it does with a small private sector startup. They like to think otherwise, but that’s not my observation at all. And in small public organisations, people work nimble, thrifty and close to the frontline - much more akin to smaller private companies also. So put that in your pipe and smoke it…
In the end, an unprejudiced and curious exchange of skills between both should benefit all. But given the “current climate” you'll need to excuse my continued pessimism on the matter. At least, if you read this and you've been through this yourself - know that you're not alone.