Working Group on Public Service Productivity: Recommendations

Productivity measurements for Canada’s public sector

Recommendation 1: Statistics Canada should explore, test and report publicly on the development of a productivity measurement program for the public sector in Canada that uses a direct output approach.

Productivity measurements for federal services to individuals

Recommendation 2: Building on the recent State of Service report, federal departments and agencies that provide direct services to Canadians should work with Statistics Canada to develop productivity metrics for those services. For quality control, the Treasury Board, with support from Statistics Canada, should review and approve these metrics.

Culture

Recommendation 3: The government needs to foster a proud and distinctive organizational culture that supports a high-performing and innovative public service and discourages risk aversion and conformism.

Actions to support this could include:

• embedding public service values into recruitment and onboarding processes
• channelling the intrinsic motivation of public servants by aligning the contributions of individuals and teams with the missions of their organizations and the wider government
• supporting public servants when well-intentioned and prudent risk-taking and innovation result in failure
• creating innovation “sandboxes,” exempt from usual administrative policies, in which new ideas can be explored and scaled quickly
• creating intake channels for public servants of all levels to propose new ideas

Leadership

Recommendation 4: Leadership is about having the right person in the right place with the right mandate. The government should support effective leadership of the public service by:

• preparing officials for senior leadership roles through management training, including for “soft” skills that support a collaborative and healthy organization
• opening pathways to senior leadership for external candidates (for more on this, see recommendation 9 on a more permeable public service)
• increasing leadership stability by:
  • bolstering the deputy-head talent pool through effective succession planning
  • taking an approach to deputy-head appointments that considers the organizational needs of individual departments and agencies, as well as government priorities

Performance

Recommendation 5: The government should support public service excellence through a culture of rigorous performance management.

Supporting actions could include:

• clear corrective action for poor performance by individuals at all levels
• requiring rigorous performance reviews before the end of a one-year probationary period for both newly hired and newly promoted public servants
• reporting the number of public servants who have been dismissed, as well as the number of public servants identified as underperformers, in the Annual Report on the Public Service
• providing managers with performance management training, as well as with clear guidelines on performance management
• recognizing that poor performance can be a result of systemic factors (for example, insufficient training, lack of direction and managerial support), ensuring that measures are in place to deal with these factors
• recognizing the potential for biases and higher rates of disciplinary action among certain groups, ensuring that performance management processes are timely and appropriately documented

Training and skills

Recommendation 6: The government should determine how to best acquire or develop—or both—the skills the public service needs to serve Canadians now and in the future. This should include ensuring that the suite of mandatory training requirements for public servants is not solely focused on compliance with rules but also that it includes training to support upskilling across the public service.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

Recommendation 7: The government should continue with actions taken in recent years to ensure an equitable and psychologically safe work environment for all employees, including those from historically marginalized groups, to ensure that all employees can produce their best work in service of Canada.

Recommendation 8: The government should build upon the significant progress it has made in hiring employees with disabilities by putting in place measures to unlock their ability to contribute, such as:

• making use of the Government of Canada Workplace Accessibility Passport mandatory across all federal departments and agencies
• developing service standards (for example, not more than 30 days and an average of a week) for responding to accommodation requests

A more permeable public service

Recommendation 9: To enable a free flow of ideas and to diversify management styles and policy perspectives, the government should:

• bring in the best talent from the private, academic and non-profit sectors
• strengthen dialogue between the government and other sectors
• encourage public servants to gain experience outside of the federal public sector

Actions to support this could include:

• encouraging the creation of external advisory committees for federal departments and agencies, made up of academics and other relevant external actors (such as private sector and non-profit sector practitioners), to support dialogue between public servants and external experts and practitioners
• supporting external Interchange Canada^{Footnote 1} participants, as well as mid- and late-career recruits to the public service, through improved onboarding and training to help them navigate the unique public sector working environment
• displaying greater openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things proposed by external Interchange Canada participants as well as mid- and late-career recruits to the public service
• increasing promotion of the Interchange Canada program, within government and without, through presentations, job fairs, advertising campaigns, and so on
• including experience outside the federal public service as an asset qualification in all job postings for senior executive roles in the public service

Technology

Recommendation 10: Enhancing productivity requires investment, especially now when new technologies are emerging that can provide significant benefits. Even in times of fiscal restraint, the government should make it a priority to invest in technology and associated training to support productivity and a world-class public service.

Artificial intelligence

Recommendation 11: To responsibly accelerate the use of AI and exploit its productivity-enhancing benefits, the government should:

• invest in AI-supported technologies
• improve the way it manages data
• actively manage risks posed by generative AI, such as bias and hallucination
• ensure that managers and employees have access to AI-related training

Recommendation 12: The government should appoint an external working group made up of individuals with public service experience and experts in AI, human resources and labour relations to advise the government on how to proactively respond to the impacts of AI on its workforce, including potential workforce reallocations or reductions.

Investing in small-to-medium size technology initiatives

Recommendation 13: The government should mobilize the innovative power of public servants at the working level by establishing an investment fund (or funds) to support small-to-medium-size projects with high prospective benefits in terms of enhancing productivity, and manageable costs and risks. These investment projects should be supported by business cases with rigorous cost-benefit analysis and a clear articulation of expected investment returns, as well as ex-post public evaluation reports detailing actual investment returns.

Re-orienting the Cabinet and Treasury Board decision-making process

Recommendation 16: To make the best use of ministers’ time and lower the burden on departments, the government should strengthen the Treasury Board’s ability to serve as its management board by focusing Treasury Board time on significant, complex and strategic-level items. This may require raising delegated authorities for ministers, deputy ministers, the President of Treasury Board and the Secretary of the Treasury Board to reduce the volume of items brought to Treasury Board for decision.

The government should also re-sequence the Cabinet decision-making process by stress-testing the implementation assumptions of budget and policy proposals at the Treasury Board before they receive consideration by Cabinet and the Minister of Finance. This re-sequencing would re-balance the Cabinet decision-making process from its current emphasis on policy direction to a process that better integrates policy, costing and implementation considerations.

Strengthening management and leading ongoing reform of the public service

Recommendation 17: There should be a senior official whose full-time function is overseeing the general management and ongoing reform of the public service. This official could be based at the Privy Council Office or the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.

Streamlining internal rules

Recommendation 18: To ensure that resources are appropriately focused on delivering services to Canadians, all existing Treasury Board and departmental policies should be reviewed with the aim of supporting productivity and reducing administrative burden. Any new policies should undergo an administrative burden check through a cost-benefit analysis.

Increasing budget process discipline

Recommendation 19: The government should introduce greater discipline and longer-term planning into the budget process by:

• planning spending that supports core operations on a longer horizon
• considerably limiting budget proposal intakes outside of the annual budget process
• reducing the number of supplementary estimates to one, if the government is successful in significantly reducing the number of off-cycle funding announcements, as proposed above
• reviewing each “sunsetting program” to ensure its continued relevance; relevant programs should receive permanent funding and those that are no longer relevant should be discontinued
• minimizing or eliminating the use of “sunsetting programs” in the future