Human Resource Management in the Public Sector

Policies and Practices

John Daly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317468431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

This affordable text covers the management of both human resource systems and employees in local government settings. It focuses on the significant changes facing local governments, especially the growing demand for increased Work-Life balance as an integral component of human resource management.

	1	Twenty-first Century Human Resource Management

The public sector is about service. It is about community and making a difference. I would rather work for state or local government and make a real contribution to my community than make gobs of money working for a corporation that has no understanding of the various elements of its own community. I made the right decision.

—Anonymous Harvard Business School MBA graduate

After reading this chapter, you will

• understand the influences of environmental changes on human resource management strategies, policies, and practices;

• grasp the significance of values-based human resource systems;

• appreciate historical events that have stimulated the growth, development, and application of professional human resource management;

• recognize human resource system’s role in reshaping local governments to become innovative, learning-based organizations;

• comprehend emerging public workforce trends and their influence on the practice of human resource management in the twenty-first century.

The arrival of the third millennium now is a reality and so is the need for twenty-first century human resource management. Yet many human resource practitioners, especially in the public sector, appear unprepared for the challenges they will experience over the next quarter century. Our society faces immense transformation, much of it caused by global, technological, demographic, political, and economic forces of change. Lavigna and Hays (2004, 238) confirm this concern: “At a time when governments need to be most adept at luring talent to the public service, their ability to do so has rarely been so constrained and complicated by economic, social, and organizational pressures.” Our transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based society is still in its infancy. For example, Ray Kurzweil indicates in The Age of Intelligent Machines that America is less than 1 percent into the job loss it will experience due to the emergence of electronic intelligence. Samson notes also that within the next 50 to 100 years we will experience a transformation of jobs based on electronic intelligence beyond things we can even imagine (Marshall 2003, 23). Change is upon us as never before. Local governments must address these challenges and identify innovative ways to sustain high-quality services; otherwise, they will lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public they serve.

Public organizations and their human resource staffs must develop and adapt innovative human capital. All sectors, whether public, not-for-profit, or private, face the need for creating “organizational learning cultures.” According to John Luthy (2000, 20), organizations exhibiting learning characteristics seek improvements at all levels and have more initiative, creativity, spirit, ability to collaborate, productivity, and quality than those that remain static (i.e., those that maintain traditional management practices). Unfortunately, Peter Senge’s (1994) research indicates that the public sector’s utilization of learning cultures has not been effectively promoted nor actively practiced. Learning cultures facilitate the necessary adaptive capacity that organizations need in order to succeed in increasingly complex and competitive environments. For many organizations (including those in the public sector), a culture of learning, growth, and adaptation to change will constitute, over the next quarter century, the difference between success and failure. Sustaining acceptable productivity is no longer sufficient for today’s public organization. Citizens demand more from government, and if more cannot be delivered they will call for change in either the leadership of the organization or the ownership of service production; that is, the public will demand the privatization of public services. As Stephen Covey (2004) states, service levels and quality today must exceed the expectation of customers if organizations hope to remain a viable force in the marketplace. Local governments must strive to achieve similar outcomes so their legitimacy will not be questioned nor their survival threatened.

American citizens are impatient consumers of government services. They expect government, at all levels, to provide high-quality services in a timely manner and within existing resource bases. The lethargic response in early September 2005 by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and other southern gulf coast communities, demonstrated the level of public wrath that results when expectations of timely service delivery are not met. Clearly, meeting these expectation levels challenges public workforces. Such pressures mandate increased program innovation, higher public employee commitment, better program planning, and enhanced coordination across interagencies of government. Unfortunately, what worked well in the past becomes the road map for doom for tomorrow’s public sector unit and its human resource system. Citizens demand quality services, even though their trust and expectation that government can deliver has dwindled over the past half-century and remains low today (Thompson and Radin 1997).

Public sector human resource systems today also face internal questions of legitimacy. A disturbing paradox exists for many public sector human resource units. At a time when human resource expertise is most needed, operational staffs least desire it. In many local governments, department supervisors and their employees detest their human resource management units. Some view human resources as “those people who do things to us” rather than “those professionals who do things for us.” As Lavigna and Hays (2004) note, job applicants often equate applying for a public position with visiting a dentist, except that the pain of the application process persists longer. Movement beyond this obstructionist perception (and in some instances reality) requires both a shift in the mind-set of the workforce and, more importantly, an alteration of the human resource unit itself. This entails more than a complete and thorough reexamination of human resource processes, practices, and policies. It warrants a cultural transformation of human resource management with an eye to service, rather than compliance, within the organization.

WHAT IS HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT?

Human resource (HR) management¹ consists of dedicated professionals working cooperatively with other talented organizational (and community) members to achieve the organization’s vision, mission, goals, and values. As such, HR management operates as a service unit for other operational units. HR strives to develop policies, plans, programs, and initiatives that advance other working units’ human capacity and their ability to provide high-quality products and services to customers, clients, or citizens (in the case of government).

HR began as personnel administration. Many of the same tasks that personnel administration units coordinated in the past continue to be part of HR management today. Chapter 2 will discuss more comprehensively the three levels of HR management. Operational-level HR (i.e., the work of coordinating personnel functions on a day-to-day basis) incorporates many of the traditional personnel administration functions. Today, however, HR systems cannot simply focus on coordination of the organization’s human capital needs in a present sense. HR units increasingly are moving toward serving in a strategic capacity, assisting other organizational units to identify and reward talent, as well as identifying methods and strategies for improving organizational outcomes.

HUMAN RESOURCES’ SIX CORE VALUES

Strongly held and effectively practiced values significantly influence the quality of HR services offered to individuals seeking professional assistance. These values must be living standards that guide HR practitioners’ policies, attitudes, actions, and behaviors. Progressive personnel units’ principles drive the team’s responsiveness to internal customers (i.e., those departments and people that HR assist in their organizations) and external customers (e.g., the media, individuals seeking employment information, and other units of government). The six core values fundamental to high effectiveness and to quality public sector HR units are:

1. Responsiveness to the public’s will

2. Social equity

3. Mission-driven focus

4. Skills-based competency in employment practices

5. Professional human resource competency

6. Ethically based organizational culture

RESPONSIVENESS TO THE PUBLIC’S WILL

The principal responsiveness to the public’s will demands that public employees act in the citizens’ best interest. The public’s will is determined through the electoral process and expressed through public policy decisions offered by their elected representatives. In this instance, the public servant’s actions ultimately follow the policy directives of elected leaders unless some compelling reason dictates otherwise. Compelling exceptions might include officials’ attempts to circumvent existing laws, actions patently serving private interest or benefit at the expense of the public’s good, and situations violating the ethical or professional standards of one’s profession. In these circumstances, public employees face difficult professional (and personal) decisions. Voicing opposition (e.g., whistle-blowing) to anticipated or actual practices may be one path of action. A second recourse is to remain quiet while resigning one’s position with the organization. A final approach may be to bring questionable practices to the attention of leaders (and, if necessary, legal authorities) while remaining a force for meaningful change. Each whistle-blowing scenario requires personal fortitude and a strong character, as individuals experiencing these circumstances often suffer greatly for maintaining high public standards.

SOCIAL EQUITY

The second value, social equity, stresses the fair treatment to all members of society, including employees (and protected group members seeking entry) in public organizations. Social equity, in a HR context, focuses on the employment-related decisions affecting protected class groups (e.g., women, aging employees, the disabled, veterans, and people of color and other ethnic affiliations). Employment-related actions include recruitment and selection practices and outcomes, promotion and demotion decisions, training and development policies and programs, employee discipline processes, and downsizing, outplacement, and termination strategies.

HR systems serve as gatekeepers of fair treatment across competing interests. Arbitration of conflict here can be a most formidable task, as social equity issues often come in direct conflict with the skills-based principle (discussed below). In addition, employee-related decisions often result in zero-sum outcomes (i.e., one party wins while others lose), raising the likelihood for conflict (Thurow 1980). Intraorganizational harmony may become the casualty of organizational decisions. Frequently, nonwinners in these zero-sum decisions place the blame on HR units and maintain high resentment for officials centrally placed in such decision-making authority.

MISSION-DRIVEN FOCUS

Over the past quarter century, public organizations have incorporated mission statements as an integral component of their management planning process and organizational philosophy. Mission statements give organizations purpose, vision, and meaningful directions for seeking collective agency accomplishments. These benchmarks also serve as the barometer of mission-driven success. Traditionally, organizations have viewed efficiency and effectiveness as measures of success. Paradoxically, organizational activities can be both efficiently administered with desired outcomes yet fail to achieve an organization’s purpose and longer-range mission. Paraphrasing a quote that the author read years ago, “A speeding train moving in the wrong direction gets nowhere fast.” Thus, HR units play a significant role in the identification and attainment of the organization’s mission by assisting in the identification of human capital trends and aiding departments through necessary organizational restructuring. Furthermore, HR helps employees gain new skills and leadership development. Finally, through effective human capital planning, HR assists employees to acquire the requisite talent needed to succeed in executing policies, plans, and programs that sustain the organization’s mission.

SKILLS-BASED COMPETENCY IN EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES

The principle of skills-based competency relates to the identification and selection of individuals with the demonstrated talents and capacity to function effectively in the position they hold or seek. Typically...