It is evidence that the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus has led us rapidly to a different lifestyle, has changed the way we relate to each other and our environment, and the digital channel has become the main route of relationship. For many months, the only way to work, make contact with family and friends, shop, make arrangements and enjoy entertainment and leisure has been through digital media and platforms.
Many of these forms of digital relationship which we have set up expressly and improvised in many cases have come to stay. Maybe modified, adapted to new realities and applying improvements, but we have the opportunity and the responsibility to normalize and obtain value of what we have lived in times of isolation and which has given good results, which has opened a new way of life that brings benefits.
One of these forms is the relationship of the worker with his professional environment, with colleagues and collaborators, with clients and users, with the business and with the work tools, that is to say: a new way of working.
The process of digitization of public administrations is not new. It started years ago, but the situation generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown us that this process must be completed because, to do so, we need several levers: infrastructure, new profiles of public workers, rethinking and simplification of processes. But it is also necessary to redefine and adapt workspaces and incorporate new forms of work in which the mobilization of workers is a common element.
An important part of these new ways of working is effectively the teleworking, but it is not the only one, and in this text we will point out other aspects that must accompany it. And we will do so by focusing on the public worker and how these new forms have impact on the relationship between the Administration and the public and in the provision of public services.
It should be clear that having remote access to information from our organization or professional mail is not teleworking. There are many other aspects that must be taken into account, such as: being able to work with all the business applications we use from the office, having virtual workspaces with project partners where we can share ideas. , discuss points of view, define lines of action, have mechanisms for monitoring projects and tasks of work teams, as well as a clear methodology for organizing information and procedure.
The public sphere must seek to have efficient, agile administrations that are open to the public and that provide them with quality, proactive and personalized digital public services.
The situation we live in since March 2020 has accelerated many processes of transformation of the AAPP and since then telework is a topic of continuous conversation in our lives (professional and personal), but it is only one aspect in the transformation of organizations. The public sphere must seek to have efficient, agile administrations that are open to the public and that provide them with quality, proactive and personalized digital public services.
The reality is that we are at a turning point in cultural change in organizations. The pandemic has forced us to speed up this process and this has meant having good and bad experiences. The good ones need to stay and improve (teleworking, virtual governing bodies, new forms of citizen care), and the not-so-good ones need to be analyzed and evaluated before discarding them and going back. Surely they have room for improvement: if the telework has not been satisfactory because we could not guarantee the security of access, we assess how we can improve data protection, or, if team leaders are not clear about the dedication of their teams to projects or business actions, we evaluate how tracking and balancing tasks can be done.
Citizens must feel that they have the support of the administrations and, for this to happen, there must be an agile, easy and efficient relationship. The way to achieve this is through the digital transformation of administrations and this also requires new forms of management and an organizational and cultural transformation, which must necessarily start from new ways of working.
How can you condition the workspace to the forms of management?
In fact, we are probably faced with the dilemma of "which comes first? The egg or the hen?" Maybe we should question ourselves first how we want to manage?, how we want our administrations to operate. Part of the way to achieve this would be to transform workspaces. The reality is that the two concepts are closely related. To provide quality digital public services, there must be a digitized administration behind it, with digitally trained public workers, with appropriate work tools, and with associated roles and tasks away from traditional administration.
The workspace of a digital society must be based on zero paper policy and tailored to workers with a high level of digital skills.
The organization must guarantee workers a series of work tools that allow them to carry out tasks easily regardless of the physical place where they are (in the usual workplace, in a meeting room, visiting another entity, at home or in any mobility variant if the tasks require it).
These tools are both in the field of hardware (laptop, PC or tablet, screens, scanners, headphones, storage) and software (information systems, office automation, collaborative work tools and task tracking, etc.). ) and, of course, continuous training in all its variants. Bet for this new way of working it must include the guarantee of safe and quality connectivity that allows to make use of this range of tools from anywhere and at any time. You can consult it Quick Guide to Safe Teleworking.
Let’s go back to the physical workspace: of course that what we have in our space, at the table, conditions the way we work.
The starting point is to have good work tools. If we have good digital repositories of documentation and data that help us to sort, search and manage it in an agile way, while allowing us to access all the information remotely and thus be able to work in mobility, we will easily acquire the clean table habit (with nothing on top). If we do not have good tools that allow us to work digitally, we will have the table full of folders or stacks of paper, we will end up taking the stacks of paper to work and we will continue to generate and stack more papers, and therefore most likely we will need to be physically in the workplace, in person, to continue handling paper.
If workers dispose of tools, training and culture of digital systems to organize information, tasks and also workflows and the relationship with other actors, the change of habits and culture towards digital transformation will be viable and easier. If not, it will be very difficult, no matter how much will to change. The will for cultural change and the adequacy of tools and workspace must go hand in hand.
A clear case is that of the signature folders that we have all seen in town halls or public bodies circulating through buildings, floors, from table to table and that required you to sign only in person, when you were at the office and the folder arrived (often after collecting several signatures previously), which in many cases could mean that days passed before a document was signed. I am referring, of course, to the process of collecting handwritten signatures. Nothing to do with the portasignatures digital, where signature collection can be immediate, without following a sequential collection process, at any time, from any place and any device; that is, mobile signature.
We can hardly imagine going back to actions as simple as this, or in communications between departments and organizations, with transfers of envelopes and suitcases continuous and dilated in time, when, with digital solutions for interoperability and communication between us, they can also be immediate. .
We would find many examples of successful changes in the way we work and that have brought us order, efficiency and effectiveness at work, and these changes have always been accompanied by the availability of digital infrastructures and tools that have made it possible.
Once your habits and ways of working have changed, the least important thing is whether when you work you are in the office, at home or in a library.. The important thing is that the site does not limit us in our roles and responsibilities, and surely the optimal point is in hybrid models of presence, remote work, flexibility and goal fulfillment.
We must not forget that working without paper, and with tools that allow us, has positive effects on work and organization, such as, for example, that it is facilitated data-based management. The unique and quality data, which we talked about for years and years but which we find so difficult to reach, allows us to have a more accurate view of the information we handle, making exploitations that help decision-making and the best provision of services, while making us possible the transparència towards the citizenry, giving access to public information and their own data easily.
We continue with the cultural change of our organizations and the important factors that facilitate it.
We talked about the workspace, the importance of having tools and training on those tools. But there is another very important factor: the transversality. Public workers do not have to be pieces in an assembly line who perform the same task every day without having a global view of why they perform it and why. Cultural change also means that there is more transversality in the organization, that it is internalized that the work we do and the information we handle is not our job, but everyone's, opening our eyes and having a global vision of what we do and for whom: citizenship.
To foster this vision, it is necessary to have internal participation policies in the organization, enhance the talent and motivation of workers, break hierarchies and work collaboratively and flatter, creating spaces for continuous improvement research where all workers who want to contribute their ideas and talent.
The people they are a key piece in organizational transformation and in achieving the goal of managing differently and digitally transforming administrations. That is why we must bet on training and qualification, to enhance talent and identify driving profiles of transformation.
It is also necessary work on projects, setting common goals and objectives. This means, again, working differently: devote time to planning, the distribution of tasks according to the members and the training of the project team, evaluate them and apply continuous monitoring methodologies of tasks and the project, and, of course, learning to manage flexibility and this more dynamic, less rigid way of working. Quite a challenge for the human resources and organization areas of our administrations, focusing policies towards public worker confidence, fueled by continuing education, motivation and involvement, and abandoning control-based systems.
With the implementation of the digital and organizational transformation of our administrations based on the factors we have discussed (new ways of working, data-based management, zero paper, transversality and transparència), what we achieve are new forms of management and relationships with citizens to offer a better service.
New forms of management must be based on the will of proximity to the citizenry, to consider the vision and need of the citizen from the beginning and in each service, and, therefore, to offer him agile, accessible and intuitive services.
The private sector already uses the information it has about us to make us tailor-made offers (depending on the likes we make, what we buy, where we go, what we look for and who we interact with). We can do the same from public administrations. We have the responsibility to be a solid and reliable reference for the citizen, also providing security and ethics of privacy.
It is necessary to give way to innovation, not only from the point of view of technology but also in procedures, ways of relating and methodology.
This approach based on the needs of the citizen takes into account omnichannelity, new ways of caring for people by different means and even accompanying them in carrying out digital procedures if they so require. However, it is necessary to strengthen the telematic route, more adjusted to the digital world in which we live, which guarantees 24 × 7 services and which must allow the administrations to offer the citizen a joint vision of all their data and transactions with the Administration, and the ability to anticipate their needs and offer them the public services they require. For example: if we have evidence that each year a user requests IBI discounts per large family and we know that it continues to be so, there is no need to wait to request it again. We need to offer it proactively. Achieving this is possible with data-based management and interoperability, in the analytical and artificial intelligence processes that allow us to offer proactive and personalized services.
We must be clear that the main goal of our organizations and our work is to provide good services to citizens and, therefore, the citizen and his vision and need must be at the center of everything we do. , we design and decide, and that everything we offer you as a digital service must be usable, secure, agile and intuitive.
El first step in tackling the challenge of transformation is to overcome resistance to new ideas, to what is different. We have to do the exercise of getting out of the box and looking away (Open your mind/Out of the box) and accept that what we have always done in one way may be done in another (simpler, agile, and efficient). This implicitly implies give way to innovation, not only from the point of view of technology but also in procedures, ways of relating and methodology.
It is necessary to reinforce the transversal and collaborative work: any process of innovation has much more impact and route when it works taking into account different points of view, of profiles and roles of workers, of citizenship, of other administrations. You can consult ours Collaborative telework guide.
Because the sum of efforts always makes us go further.
Marga Bonmatí, managing director of the AOC
Article published in the Blog of the School of Public Administration of Catalonia
