Towards a human resource management strategy for public sector innovation 51
Leadership • Leadership helps build innovation abilities as leaders play a key role in developing and reinforcing an innovation-oriented learning The role of leadership culture. • Leadership can motivate innovation by modeling and rewarding innovation-oriented behaviour. • Leadership can create opportunities for innovation, opening doors and removing barriers for people and projects that they support. . 52
The role of work organisation • Work organisation can ensure that abilities are matched to tasks and responsibilities (e.g. through job profiling). • Work organisation can affect motivation by designing jobs and tasks that provide appropriate levels of meaningfulness and feedback to motivate innovation. • Work organisation probably has the most direct impact on opportunity to innovate by structuring work around problem solving and giving employees safe spaces to learn by doing, as opposed to working on an assembly line. 53
The role of recruitment • Recruitment and selection builds innovation ability by bringing people with the skills profiles, competencies, values, and mindsets needed into the organisation. • Recruitment and selection processes can • Recruitment and selection may have an impact on 54 also assess candidates’ motivation to opportunity from a manager’s perspective as they innovate, thereby selecting people who build their team, particularly when they are may have more intrinsic motivation to competing in a tight labour market for particular contribute to public sector innovation. qualities that are in high demand.
The role of performance management • Performance management can help to build ability to innovate by helping to 55 identify training and development needs and aligning career development with innovation- oriented objectives. • Performance management can motivate innovation by rewarding innovation- oriented behaviour, and taking care not to discourage appropriate risk taking and learning by doing. • Performance management can also help to create more opportunities to innovate when employees are encouraged to use performance discussions to raise perceived limitations to innovation within their working environment and come up with solutions.
The role of training and development • Training and development is one of the most important tools to build a public workforce’s ability to innovate, especially in career-based civil services where recruitment is generally limited to lower- level employees who are expected to develop throughout their careers. • Training and development can have a significant secondary impact on motivation as employees take pride from mastering new skills and are motivated to put them to use once learned. • Training and development can also increase opportunity as new skills open doors to new experience, while often learning opportunities bring together staff from a range of areas who share ideas and build networks, which can develop into opportunities for new collaborations elsewhere. 56
An HRM for public sector innovation LAW INSTITUTIONS LEADERSHIP Innovative § Networks § Learning culture § Risk acceptance § Employee/work engagement § Workplace quality/wellbeing Innovative Strategic § HR strategy and planning § Workforce data Does your workforce contribute to Professional § Agile and flexible and drive performance through § Competency innovation and continuous Strategic improvement? management Are the right people with the right § Merit-based skills working in the right place at § Open and fair the right time to deliver results as § Performance efficiently as possible? orientated § Diverse and inclusive Professional Is the workforce professional and managed through fair, transparent and consistent practices? Are skills and experience rewarded? 57
Organisational Leaders and HRM as catalyst for innovation 58
Leaders and HRM practitioners. These individuals are well positioned and have the responsibility to start developing innovation capabilities and capacity immediately. Leaders are a critical HRM is often overlooked as component of driving a a critical partner to boost culture of innovation innovation capacity 59
Organisational Leaders 60 60
How leaders can help build innovative organisations A leader is defined as an individual that has some autonomy over resources (a combination of managing people/team, budget, and priorities). If we consider building innovation capacities as a change management initiative, middle managers are seen as major impediments if they are not properly engaged (Kotter, 1996). Leadership of an organisation plays an important role in signalling what’s 61 acceptable, what’s valued, and what’s needed. In a traditional bureaucratic setting, with defined responsibilities and clear lines of reporting, it may not have been appropriate for people in different parts of the organisation to discuss and contribute their ideas about how something should be done. In an organisation dealing with issues requiring new perspectives and insights, a different approach to idea generation is likely to be needed. (OECD, 2017)
Rotational Programme How does it build innovation capacities? What is it? • Employees hone their skills, begin Allowing and encouraging employees to work temporarily working across silos, spread best with another team or on practices, and organisations are another project is one of the able to quickly add talent and most common strategies for needed skills to a project based on employees to gain new priorities and urgency. experiences and build • provide the opportunity for innovative skills. employees to continue to learn and develop at low cost while How to get started? traditional training budgets • promote the idea among continue to be cut. employees while also What are the challenges? encouraging managers to both • most managers do not want to accept temporary employees dedicate the time to train someone (a relatively easy task) and and prefer individuals that already allow employees to leave on have at least intermediary skills and temporary assignments (a expertise. more difficult task). • Oftentimes, a leader can • rotational programmes are difficult model and reinforce the to maintain and need to be benefits through facilitating encouraged for both employees and the first few assignments and managers. allowing the employees and managers to become the • Without constant stewardship of the evangelist of the programme. programme, it can shift to a small group of individuals rather than an organisational strategy. 62
Project Based Teams What is it? • The workforce is organised by projects and tasks based on the skills and experience needed in the task, the importance of the project, and the interests of the employees. • This allows for an increasingly flexible and engaged workforce that can mobilise and react much faster than traditional organisations. How does it build • Instead of organising by function, employees across functions work innovation capacities? together and therefore, learn new skills, techniques, and approaches that How to get started? they potentially would not have learned staying within their function, which often can settle into a specific approach. What are the challenges? • leaders can select a certain number of priorities which are of critical importance, define the functions needed, and ask employees to volunteer from those functions across the organisation. • By shifting this to a voluntary initiative, leaders can better understand the interest for project based work both from employees and managers in the organisation. • For most public sector organisations that are creating project based teams for high priority projects, top-talent is taken from the defined functions needed for the project or the best talent is amassed regardless of function. This is often at the discretion of leadership and seen as a privilege rather than a new way of work. Leaders should avoid this mind-set and seek to use this as an opportunity to build skills across the organisation. • A lack of interest in project based work due to a lack of career path. 63
Managers report high satisfaction with their experience hiring a Free Agent (91%) and the vast majority would hire a Free Agent again (85%). Case study: Free Agents Canada Canada’s Free Agents (OECD, 2018) is one of the earliest pilots to test out the feasibility (including market viability, efficiency savings, psychological stress on workers with short-term contracts and work, competency modelling and screen design) of a new type of project-based workforce. They have the freedom They are able to choose Improved mobility, to select work that their work and higher job satisfaction, matches their skills and undertake project-based better opportunities to interests, which allows opportunities across the develop skills, and a them to make Public Service. higher likelihood of contributions that they remaining in the public find meaningful. service. GET THE SKILLS YOU NEED INCREASED OPPORTUNITY SUPPLEMENTAL TO 64 FOR DIVERSITY EXISTING HR SYSTEM
Effective Learning for Innovation
Effective Learning for Innovation Channels for Learning Enabling Tools Conditions What are the enabling conditions What are the channels for What are the tools that can be used that encourage organisations and learning? How is new intelligence to reveal current assumptions? That individuals to reflect and allow about the world and the can best demonstrated the people to challenge existing ways changing operating context difference between ‘what is’ and of thinking? accessed? ‘what is wanted’, and provide insight into how to respond to that gap? 66
Move from Scarcity to Abundance of Information Data and Relevant and customer / accessible external citizen insights knowledge Possible futures Actors with External events or Ideas to explore possible influence developments that and opportunities or impact matter to experiment Scarcity Abundance 67
New Information Leading to New (or Better Understood) Problems (Does this still hold true in (Does this still hold true in light of new knowledge?) light of new expectation?) New information What is possible What is needed What is known What is expected What is the problem (Does this still hold true in (Does this still hold true in (Does this still hold true in light of new information?) light of new possibilities?) light of new needs?) 68
Key Considerations for Effective Learning for Innovation Enabling Conditions Channels for Learning Tools • Purpose • Knowledge • Complaints and • Dashboards • Openness management and feedback • Capacity • Networks • Horizon scanning • Capability learning and • X-Factor development • Open Innovation • Design thinking • Staff mobility • Accountability, • Systems thinking • Behavioural • Benchmarking and evaluations, political insights • environmental processes and crises • Peer-to-peer scanning • Enabling others learning • Data • Unlearning and • Socialisation mechanisms of • Learning organisation challenge • Innovation Labs 69
Tools that Clarifying Intent can Support Learning for Innovation Avoiding Jumping Making Assumptions to Conclusions Explicit and Build Experimentation Shared and Reducing the Understanding Cost of Failing: Connecting with Others Reframing the Problem
Tools for Assisting Identifying Problems and Learning for Innovation Features / Clarifying Making Avoiding Connecting Experimenta Reframing Tools Intent Assumptions Jumping to with Others tion and the Problem Explicit and Conclusions Reducing Build Shared the Cost of Understanding Failing Dashboards Horizon Scanning Design Thinking Systems Thinking Behavioural Insights Peer-to-Peer Learning Learning Organisation Innovation Labs 71
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