Reimagining the new world of work:  A public sector perspective

The world as we know it is now in a state of complex flux. And our current conceptual framework for understanding the breakneck speed at which things are moving is to say we now live in a VUCA—vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—environment. This understanding has some significant implications for the way we see our lives, […]

The world as we know it is now in a state of complex flux. And our current conceptual framework for understanding the breakneck speed at which things are moving is to say we now live in a VUCA—vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—environment. This understanding has some significant implications for the way we see our lives, our relationships, our organisational dynamics – the way work is organised, the way we get work done and the way we produce. And so, when the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria (CIPM-N) recently convened its 57th Annual International Conference at Abuja, there was no other theme than can be more auspicious and imperative than the one which reimagins the intersection of management, work, workplace dynamics and disruptive technologies.

We are at the dawn of a new knowledge age that is driven by information and technologies that are creating new mindsets, conceptual tools, management system, culture and all, in ways that enable public administrators, personnel and human resource managers to rethink the traditional understanding of what an organisational workplace means in the new normal. With the fast rate at which new technologies are emerging, there is an increasing geometric rate at which traditional management and bureaucratic borders are being seamlessly dissolved and disrupted. Knowledge, information and data are mediated by artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things with an enormous computing power to not only generate new forms of interactions between humans and machines. They also complicate and transform the task of managers in the workplace regarding human resource functions and management, decision making and policy architecture.

The point must be made, that the transformation of the nature of work and of workplace conditions and dynamics is not solely a technical, technocratic and technological matter. The transformation of the workplace by knowledge, information and data inflow as well as disruptive technologies have significant sociological implications that impact on value orientation, identity construction, tradition and experience, communal ethos, social inequality, and essentially what it means to be human in the world of work. These are all issues that must form the basis of policy action and management research by public administrators, public managers, management and administration scholars and researchers, and the entire communities of service and practice.

While the private sectors across the world, and most public sectors, were already fast tracking their alignment with the emerging times especially in managerial revolution, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to deepen our understanding of the parlous state of the Nigerian institutional and administrative resilience in the face of disruptive challenges like an unyielding virus. The pandemic demonstrated starkly the structural weaknesses in the capability readiness of the public sector, the fragmentation of work in the public sector workplaces, and the near-absence of policy innovation and creativity. Fundamentally, it raises an urgent concern about public sector institutional resilience-building, and the capacity to manage emergencies, early warning signals and systems, crisis response and crisis mitigation.

What I consider to be the most urgent workplace consideration is what we can call the people-issue. This is the issue of how persons and personnel remain the focus of whatever reforms, changes and adjustment that information, data, knowledge and technologies are forcing on the reconstitution and reimagining of the nature of work and of the workplace. The other dimension of this people-issue is how the public service workplace is regenerated—instigated by the pandemic—to mainstream into its operations, technologies and new managerial procedures and processes that shift the paradigms in terms of redefining citizens engagement by placing the citizens-as-customers at the centre of service delivery designs.

The open government initiative, a crucial part of the new managerial revolution in the public service, refocuses the significance of the people as citizens, and insists on giving attention to the challenges of where, when and how people work and how they are worked for especially within the context of how digitally-enabled platforms and technologies assist the government and the public service to measure institutional and administrative successes and performances in humane and transparent ways. Public managers and administrators are also compelled to focus not only on the imperatives of work-life balance that often dehumanise humans as mere capital or resources in the workplace. But also articulate, within an administrative context like Nigeria, best practices that involves participatory budgeting, co-creation of public values, delegated authority within an evolving decentralised work environment, as well as real-time strategic communication dynamics within bottom-up planning frameworks that instigate co-designing of policies and decision-making.

The public sector is also contending with  the dynamics created by the growing informalisation of wage employment—including the implications of the GIG economy—that complicate the social protection systems and labour regulations guiding employer-employee relations, especially in terms of formal and written employment contracts, as well as the dynamics of the labor laws and contracts system that inform the processes of access to formal benefits like gratuity and pension, health insurance scheme, etc.

Institutional reform of the workplace begins with the urgency of rethinking the intellectual bases of what work, jobs, skills, pay and compensation as well as sundry employment policies as ways and means for making the workplace functional. A constant programme of re-professionalisation, training and upskilling will become important not only for the workers but even more so for the public managers to stay on top of new demands for workplace culture, ethical relations, work-life balance, and flexible human resource functions.

Going forward, we need to become proactive in the development of educational and administrative curricula in public administration and public management while also activating the many administrative training institutes across the country to key into basic and action research that emphasise skills development that cannot be easily replaced by machines and robotics in areas like critical thinking, emotional intelligence, conceptual and analytical competences, and ability to manage project complexities, and problem-solving. The fundamental key to transforming the workplace is therefore the willingness to continuously educate the workforce and build their capacity for “learning to learn” the dynamics that keep changing the workplace. This will require equipping future employees through creating new knowledge based on intelligent prospecting of future work and the future skills requirements the national economy will need to keep performing productivity.

 

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission  and a  professor of public administration