Table of Contents
Summary
There are substantial problems with the civil service’s HR and HR-adjacent processes. Fixing them would improve the quality of the government machine tasked with delivering the government’s agenda.
Problems include poorly advertised jobs, slow onboarding, poor inductions, and officials finding it difficult to communicate with colleagues.
These problems reduce civil service productivity. They make it harder to recruit good people. They make it harder to facilitate secondments and interchange with the private and wider public sector. And they lead to staff feeling alienated and unmotivated.
These problems are not the sort that require intense brainpower or extremely complex solutions, but rather a relentless focus on doing basic things well. To address them, the government should implement the following eight actions:
Establish new standards for advertising jobs.
Establish a pass/fail onboarding standard, monitored and graded by the Government People Group in the Cabinet Office.
Include more questions about recruitment in the Civil Service People Survey and publish more data about HR processes.
Establish mutual secondment pipelines with local government, the private sector, and civil society.
Provide hiring managers with more administrative support.
Task the Government Digital Service with building a live, whole-government organogram which can be updated in a decentralised way.
Move the whole of government onto the same collaboration platform as quickly as possible.
Use the Government Skills and Curriculum Unit and Line Manager Capability Programme to improve inductions.
The Challenge
Some problems are best solved by adopting the approach suggested by Nike’s slogan – Just Do It. They are not the sort of problems that require intense brainpower or extremely complex solutions, but rather a relentless focus on doing basic things well to make it as easy as possible for staff to be effective.
The civil service is an enormous organisation of over 500,000 officials. There is variation between departments and public bodies, and between functions and professions. But in general, it has too many of these basic problems, undermining its ability to recruit the best, reducing the effectiveness and happiness of its staff and, at worst, hamstringing the delivery of policy priorities.
The latest Civil Service People Survey found that only 55% of officials thought “efficiency is pursued as a priority”. At a time when the public finances are tight, anything that needlessly limits the productivity of public sector workers further constrains the government’s scope for action.
As such, this briefing focuses specifically on HR and HR-adjacent improvements that would unlock substantial productivity gains. These are the sort of changes that are easy to overlook but would make government work a lot better.
That is not to say there aren’t also more fundamental problems with the way Whitehall works that deserve attention. The new government will need to decide if they will clarify the current fudge over what ministers and officials are respectively accountable for; whether the increasing trend to give expert arms-length bodies responsibility for recommending solutions to tricky political problems is a good one; and whether there needs to be a better way to apply external scrutiny to the civil service, whose monopoly on policy advice can disincentivise continuous improvement.
There is also broad acceptance that changes need to be made to improve the way the civil service workforce is managed, including by reducing churn (more than one in 10 civil servants either moved between departments or left the civil service in 2022/23, and turnover is even higher within departments) and improving recruitment (including by establishing senior specialist roles which allow officials to get promoted without having to take on substantial managerial responsibility.)
But, while these bigger questions should be addressed, doing so should not come at the expense of seizing opportunities to fix basic problems and make the civil service a more functional organisation. A new government, eager to deliver, will expect that the basics are in place to allow them to do so.
Current problems include:
Poorly advertised jobs
Too often, civil service job adverts are inaccessible to people outside government. They are often filled with jargon and assume the civil service’s grade structure is self-evident, failing to clearly explain the level of responsibility a job entails. They don’t explain who candidates will work with and what they will learn as a result, nor do they frame the civil service as a talent-dense environment. Some roles are still only advertised on GOV.UK.
This discourages people from applying to the civil service. As one interviewee put it in an Institute for Government report: “The job advert lost me, so I lost interest in the job.” It also reduces the quality of those who do apply. Another interviewee for that report, who is part of the senior leadership team at a UK start-up valued at more than $500m, described how in his organisation: “we explicitly market ourselves to prospective employees as a highly talent-dense environment; we find that the higher we make the quality bar, the more attractive we are to the most talented people.”
Slow onboarding
The Civil Service People Plan acknowledged the need to “revamp… processes to speed up recruitment and open up as many entry routes as possible.” It can take months for candidates to get security clearance, depending on the level required, and weeks more to receive a formal contract offer.
There are obvious reasons why security clearances can take time to acquire, particularly at the highest levels, and people spoken to for this briefing argued things had improved recently. But it is less forgivable for basic administration like the provision of contracts to be so slow. And in practice the current onboarding system asks applicants to put their professional life on hold, sometimes for several months, while they:
Wait for their security check to be completed
Resign at their current employer and serve out their notice period (the official advice sensibly suggests that candidates only resign once security checks have been passed)
All while, in some cases, still waiting for a formal contract to be sent to them.
This is not only frustrating for both the candidate and hiring manager, who both want the new hire to be in post, but also increases the risk that good candidates will be ‘poached’ while waiting to go into government by organisations who can turn around job offers much faster.
There are other problems as well. Hiring managers are often unclear about exactly what they are allowed to do during a hiring process. This leads to a risk averse approach to recruitment, which mainly relies on success profiles and interviews in which all candidates are asked the same questions. Hiring managers are also expected to do a substantial amount of admin when hiring new staff, with limited support from the HR function, reducing their productivity in their day job. In this environment it is unsurprising if they cut corners to try to reduce the burden on themselves.
Reserve lists are poorly used, with information on good candidates who just missed out on roles rarely shared between hiring managers. And once new staff arrive, basics like building passes take too long to arrive – meaning people have to be escorted to the toilet and let down to lunch. Some people report laptops taking up to six months to arrive.
One interviewee for an Institute for Government report, who had run a scheme bringing secondees into government, said that “The operational side of things is a significant barrier. The onboarding, IT, contracts – all of that [takes] way longer than it should.”
Poor induction
External recruits find civil service-wide processes are poorly explained, and that understanding of the practical meaning of officials’ duty to the four core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality is (sometimes wrongly) assumed. Typically, new hires learn at least some of these things by observing their colleagues, but this has become harder with the shift to hybrid working and increased relocation of senior and policy civil servants to different parts of the country.
The civil service’s standard induction is a six-hour, online course. Too often, line managers offer little help, particularly at more junior levels. This is partly because they themselves lack guidance or training on how to induct staff effectively. Institute for Government research has found that this “creates big barriers to the effectiveness of external entrants.”
Induction can also be lacking for internal recruits who move team or department. It is too often done ad-hoc and with unclear explanations of departmental processes, meaning people are left without the knowledge needed to do their jobs effectively.
Difficulty communicating with colleagues
There is no usable and up-to-date whole-government (or even whole-department) organisation chart. This means that officials are often flying blind when it comes to understanding what their colleagues across government work on, missing opportunities for synergies and collaboration.
Even more prosaically, email addresses are not always in a consistent format so it is hard to reach out to people across government. It can take months for new joiners to be given access to IT systems so they can communicate seamlessly with colleagues. Differences in whether departments use Google or Microsoft platforms makes cross-government collaboration harder – sending across a Google Docs link when the recipient uses SharePoint adds friction.
Miscellaneous obstacles to productivity
There are other barriers which cause frustration. In some departments, the expenses policy can be difficult to navigate. Requiring people to book things like flights from approved suppliers can actively cost the government money in instances where these platforms are more expensive than alternatives. Budgets for things like strategy away days and team-building activities are often extremely tight, making it harder to use them well and reducing staff morale. Failing to provide basics like tea and coffee in the office does not make staff feel valued.
The Opportunity
The UK has an exciting opportunity to be a global leader in science and technology, using new ideas to boost economic growth and improve public services. But for these ideas to have a positive impact in the real world relies on an effective civil service. It must provide politicians with high quality analysis of the UK’s current landscape, suggest which policy options are workable and subsequently implement politicians’ decisions. The UK needs talented officials working in an organisation which facilitates high performance, not one that makes it more difficult to operate effectively.
As demonstrated above, the seemingly low-level administrative issues that currently plague the civil service have outsized consequences for the effectiveness of government. Fixing these problems is a major opportunity that would increase the likelihood of the new government being able to achieve a transformational agenda.
Recruiting talented people
Exceptional candidates outside government are put off by the government’s slow recruitment, onboarding and induction process. As an interviewee told the Institute for Government, “for a busy and successful person, investing that much time and energy into a really drawn-out process is very unattractive.” This is a problem even at the most senior levels. Another interviewee told the IfG that:
“I chaired a DG panel and there was a candidate who was great but just not quite right for the job. There was another job coming up that I knew she’d be perfect for. So I asked the executive search firm we were using to tell her: please apply again, you’d be so great. But she said no, she didn’t want to go through that process again.”
Even when candidates are willing to go through the process in principle, in practice many of them are poached during the weeks and months it takes to get them their contract and security clearance.
More secondments and more interchange
In his 2023 review of Whitehall, Francis Maude argued that “there should be more and easier interchange [between government and other sectors], but it is a stubbornly difficult problem to eradicate.” One of the main barriers is the administrative system described above.
It is a long-term aim of the civil service to promote ‘in-and-out’ careers, with officials gaining more experience outside government as well as within it. Every so often there is a push for the civil service to ‘do more secondments’ because they are a ‘good thing’, but these efforts are often organised centrally and the arrangements made only loosely connected to business need across government. They tend to have little effect - for example, a secondments unit set up in the Cabinet Office after the 2019 election did not achieve much success. Organising secondments is also difficult because pre-employment checks and related admin can take longer than the proposed secondment itself.
Interchange more broadly is also difficult. Managers, frustrated at being unable to hire people externally in a timely fashion, reflexively look internally (undermining attempts to facilitate more ‘in-and-out’ careers) or accept that their team will be under-resourced until their external recruit can join. The Plan of Action should substantially improve this situation.
More productive staff
Poor administrative processes lead to frustration and alienation amongst staff. One interviewee for an IfG report recounted how their poor induction into the department meant that “I started on a Friday morning and by the time it got to lunch, I was seriously wondering if I had made a mistake”. A former DG recounted that “the department had invested in me by hiring me into my role… they didn’t get as much return on investment as they would have liked because they didn’t induct me properly. It took months to get confident.”
Once in role, bureaucratic barriers cause problems. There are too many internal processes that decrease productivity directly, given the additional time required to work through them. Sitting in the lobby for half an hour until someone with a security pass picks you up is a waste of time.
Situations like these also reduce morale and therefore productivity, given staff feel like they are working against official systems, rather than being supported by them.
Making it easier to contact and work with officials in other departments would decrease the government’s siloed nature and support collaborative, ‘mission-led’ government.
Plan of Action
The next government should implement the following eight action points:
1. The Government People Group should establish new standards for advertising jobs
The Government People Group – the central HR function in the Cabinet Office – should take two steps to improve the way civil service jobs are advertised:
Publish a set of standards on how to write good job descriptions, drawing on best practice across government. In the longer-term, this guidance could form the basis of an AI tool which is rolled out across government to co-pilot the writing of job adverts. Prototypes of such tools are in development and should be trialled as soon as possible.
Establish a standard that all civil service jobs are advertised on job hunting sites like Indeed by default, as well as on GOV.UK, to widen the pool of potential applicants.
2. The Cabinet Office should establish a pass/fail onboarding standard
Departments need to be incentivised to, and held to account for, improving their onboarding. A pass/fail test would help do so, building on existing work to establish consistent metrics to measure and compare departments’ performance. Metrics that departments could be judged on include the time it takes for someone to:
Be sent a contract after being formally offered a role
Receive their security pass and laptop once in post
And, as long as the data collection is not too onerous:
Given access to all IT systems, including email and Microsoft Teams (or equivalent)
The standard should be set and monitored by the Government People Group. Whether their department passes or fails should be in permanent secretary and HR director performance objectives, and a commitment to pass should be in a department’s Outcome Delivery Plan (or equivalent). Best practice should be gathered from the highest performing departments and shared with the others.
3. The Cabinet Office should publish more data and the People Survey should ask more questions about recruitment
To encourage better decision-making inside government and helpful scrutiny from outside of it, the Cabinet Office should collect and publish the data discussed above annually on GOV.UK, perhaps on the same annual cycle as the Civil Service Statistics.
There would also be value in gathering more information about officials’ subjective experience of recruitment. The Civil Service People Survey provides valuable data about officials’ attitudes, morale and more. But there is a dearth of questions specifically about people’s experiences of recruitment, onboarding and induction. Asking them would be beneficial, and any problems that arise should be acted on. The civil service should also, as standard, arrange a meeting 4–6 weeks into an external recruit’s time in government to gather feedback on the recruitment process and initial thoughts on how the civil service could be improved - as recommended by the IfG, the Baxendale Report, and the Maude Review.
4. Departments should establish mutual secondment pipelines with local government, the private sector, and civil society.
Making job adverts more accessible and speeding up slow onboarding would help to encourage the secondment of talented people into government. But any secondment route needs to be as low friction as possible if it will be widely used, particularly given their wide-scale use is counter-cultural to the way the government currently operates. Secondment routes also must map onto business need. History shows that people do not end up using centrally run secondment routes that are unable to deliver people with the skills that the professions and departments need in practice.
One model that could be adopted is an equivalent of the US government’s Intergovernment Personnel Act (IPA). Its mobility programme aims to “facilitate the movement of employees, for short periods of time, when this movement serves a sound public purpose”, by establishing a legislative framework that allows skilled employees of other organisations (e.g. local governments and universities) to work for the federal government for a period, and federal officials to spend time in other organisations. Agreements are reached between individual federal agencies and relevant organisations, with oversight from the Office for Personnel Management. The IPA is generally considered to be an effective tool.
In the UK context a legislative solution is not necessary. But the principles underpinning the IPA - of making departments responsible for arranging secondment pipelines with relevant organisations, so they can quickly pull in people who match business need and allow talented staff to grow professionally through a spell in another organisation - are the same as the ones which should underpin a UK system. DSIT’s recent success with secondments in the field of AI is proof of concept that this can work in the UK.
Departmental HR teams, in conversation with the permanent secretary and other senior staff, should establish these mutual pipelines. For example, the Department for Transport might establish a pipeline with the Highways England, the Eurostar and Tesla. The functions and professions should also feel empowered to establish them - for example, the analysis profession might establish a pipeline for economists with the Bank of England and actuaries with Legal & General. Senior staff should be encouraged to use their personal networks to cultivate these pipelines - for example, Chief Scientific Advisers might be able to help set up pipelines for scientists with Imperial College London and the European Space Agency.
Pipelines should be supported and encouraged by the HR function. They should be overseen by the Civil Service Commission to ensure they are not being misused, either as a mechanism for cronyism or as a way of farming out underperforming staff.
5. Hiring managers should receive more HR support
Some hiring managers are unsure how they are allowed to approach recruitment competitions. But in other parts of government, innovations that are within the rules have taken place with positive results. At least one data science unit has been using rigorous tests to assess candidates’ coding ability during their recruitment process. The HR function should be better at sharing that sort of best practice and substantially expand the ‘discovery pilots’ scheme, which allows departments and professions to trial new approaches to recruitment. Discovery pilots should also be available ‘location-wide’, acknowledging that campuses outside of London might want to sample new approaches that fit their local circumstances.
Furthermore, plenty of hiring managers are frustrated by the administrative burden on them. The new applicant tracking system currently being procured will help by automating some functions. But more should be done, especially as that system will not be operational soon. The HR function should provide more on-the-ground support during recruitment processes, taking more responsibility for performing the back-end tasks necessary for a process to go smoothly. This would include things like, for example, taking responsibility for posting a vacancy on job sites across the internet, as recommended above.
In the medium term this could be headcount-neutral for the HR function, with an increase in staff providing practical recruitment support offset by a decrease in the number of people working on policies and strategies across the function.
6. The Government Digital Service should be given responsibility for maintaining a live, whole-government organogram
A whole-government, live organogram with the name, job title and contact details for officials across government would bring substantial benefits. The German government has one, proving that it is possible (here is a less detailed publicly available version). The UK government does publish a version but in the form of an excel sheet that only covers the most senior officials and contains little useful information for people within the civil service (e.g. no emails or contact numbers, which wouldn’t be expected to be published for security reasons but which an internal version could contain).
The Government Digital Service (GDS) should be given a mandate to build one. The emphasis should be on speed and building a minimum viable product – perhaps starting with an organogram that covers Grade 7s and above and expanding from there if it proves helpful. This should not be a project that takes years and costs hundreds of millions.
One of the important features of such an organogram is that it is live. It would therefore likely be easiest to create a decentralised system in which people are able to input information about themselves, which is then organised centrally. But there needs to be a way of making sure people properly engage with the system. The 2023 Civil Service People Survey was answered by 65% of officials – for an organogram to be most useful, the equivalent number would have to be higher.
Part of the way to do that is winning hearts and minds by explaining how officials will benefit. But part of it is about creating the right incentives. You could, for example, give everyone who inputs their details the chance to win a prize, or exclude anyone who doesn’t from receiving a non-consolidated performance payment (the most common type of civil service bonus). It could also be possible for other people to update each other's profiles. This would help to ensure full coverage, especially if there are two or three champions per directorate who are motivated (or incentivised) to maintain it.
There might be security sensitivities around having some details on the organogram. These can be resolved on a case by case basis. In an ideal world, information could be filtered depending on security clearance. Those with higher clearances could access information about who is working in sensitive areas that need to be hidden from those with lower clearances.
7. The whole of government should be on the same collaboration platform as quickly as possible
There is clearly a similar need across government for collaboration platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that facilitate virtual work and the government’s interoperability programme is aiming to facilitate the roll out of Microsoft tools across government. But it is happening slowly and many officials across government remain on siloed IT systems, creating friction in cross-government collaboration.
The government has two options:
Substantially accelerate the interoperability programme, potentially by investing more money into it.
Give the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) – the civil service’s central procurement function responsible for “managing the procurement of common goods and services, so public sector organisations with similar needs achieve value by buying as a single customer” – a remit to simply negotiate and purchase a collaboration app as a single customer for the whole government.
This second option might pose insurmountable difficulties around getting out of existing contracts, but it would probably be cheaper and more efficient in the long-run. If that was the option the government decided to pursue, the presumption would have to be that, once existing contracts have ended, all organisations move onto the centrally procured system.
8. The Government Skills and Curriculum Unit should produce enhanced materials and Line Manager Capability Programme should focus on inductions
The Government Skills and Curriculum Unit (GSCU) runs an online induction for new officials (which should be publicised further), particularly focusing on cross-civil service issues. The Line Manager Capability Programme (LMCP), soon to be launched by the Government People Group, will provide enhanced training to line managers.
But there remains more to do. It would be helpful for GSCU to take the lead on producing new, more comprehensive, centralised induction material. This might include a widely publicised handbook of civil service jargon, evolving out of the existing ‘acronym buster’ it produces, or an explanation of the submission process.
The LMCP has the potential to be very beneficial. It should be sure to focus on training line managers on how to induct new starters, upskilling them so they are more capable of running their own team-specific inductions and producing good department-specific material.
FAQs
Why haven’t problems that seem this simple been solved?
A major reason is the incentive structure for senior officials. Ministers (reasonably) tend to be focused on policy, not how their department is running. Permanent secretaries and other senior officials recognise this, and so spend their energy and (small-p) political capital on addressing policy questions, with organisational ones relegated to second or third-tier importance. Policy is also their comfortable territory – administrative questions are not those which they naturally gravitate towards. This means that HR and HR-adjacent teams are not held to account for outcomes as rigorously as they ought to be, nor embedded in the management of departments as deeply as they need to be. It also means that too many policy officials feel that engaging seriously with recruitment in particular is a ‘nice to do’, leading to worse outcomes.
The preferences of ministers are unlikely to change. Solutions need to work with the grain, not against it, and change the incentives that act on senior officials without expecting too much political oversight.
Who might oppose these reforms?
The solutions above are a mix of centralising (by giving a central team responsibility to do something across the whole of government) and radically decentralising (by empowering individual officials to solve the problems they encounter). This might be opposed by departmental permanent secretaries, HR directors, and HR teams who feel these solutions cut them out of the loop and undermine their ability to manage their department.
But the fact that these basic problems haven’t been solved under current governance arrangements makes a strong case that change is needed.
There are also legitimate security questions about some of these proposals (e.g. the organogram). But they might be overplayed by people who do not want them to happen.
Why bother with e.g. an onboarding standard; can’t the Cabinet Office just force departments to be better?
The civil service has a federated structure. The civil service’s corporate centre in the Cabinet Office has limited levers over the organisation as a whole. It cannot set targets that departments must reach; it can only establish standards and use name-and-shame tactics to enforce them. Many observers think that the weakness of the civil service’s corporate centre is a big problem, but it is a much wider-reaching and longer-term problem than the sort addressed in this briefing.
Why is it important to encourage interchange?
Bringing more external recruits into the civil service (and encouraging more officials to spend time outside government) would be beneficial for two main reasons.
First, there are some skills that it is harder to acquire in government. To be an expert in AI Safety, you probably need at least some experience working with frontier models. Bringing in outside experts with that experience increases the technical expertise available to the civil service, making it better equipped to advise ministers, deliver their priorities and run government effectively.
Second, and partly as a result of hiring people with different professional experiences who have been trained to approach problems in different ways, it would increase the cognitive diversity within the civil service. This would improve the way it identifies problems and operationalises solutions.
Jordan Urban is a senior researcher in the Institute for Government’s civil service and policy making team, working on all things government reform. He was the lead researcher for the Commission on the Centre of Government and his work has been featured widely in government reviews and across the media.
He previously co-founded GovTracker, an initiative tracking the progress of the government’s manifesto pledges, and worked at Full Fact and in communications. He helped to build multiple civic technology tools at the 2019 General Election, including one giving students information on whether voting in their home or university constituency would have the most impact. He has been published in the academic journal Political Studies.