Governments need to rethink how they reward andmotivate civil servants
政府需要重新思考如何去獎勵和提升公務員的工作動力。
THE French call them hauts fonctionnaires, theGermans Beamte im h?heren Dienst and the British, somewhat more economically, know themas “mandarins”. The senior echelons of civil services are a powerful arm of the state. Theyimplement the reforms dreamed up by politicians, and design public services ranging fromwelfare systems to prisons. Compared with private-sector bosses, the bureaucrats who managethe public sector tend to be less well paid but have more cushioned lives, with more securejobs and far less pressure to improve productivity. Now the mandarins face change.
There has long been taxpayer fury when big projects go awry. Berlin's new airport is threeyears overdue and predicted to cost 6 billion (8.1 billion), three times the original estimate.But voters, and thus politicians, are especially intolerant of civil-service inefficiency nowadays.One prompt is austerity. Another is technology, which is changing not only how public servicesare delivered—think of “massively open online courses” in education—but also the way they canbe measured. Social networks enable users to grumble about hospital waiting-times andmathematics results. Perhaps the biggest pressure is the passing of time: private-sectorworkers are incredulous as to why civil servants should escape the creative destruction thathas changed other offices around the world.
The reform of the public sector is a huge project, but people are at the centre of it.Government is a service industry, and there is a basic talent problem. A few civil services—Singapore's is the obvious example—compete with the private sector for the bestgraduates. But elsewhere even elite departments, such as the US Treasury and Britain'sForeign Office, struggle (or lose high-flyers quickly). The mandarins and their political mastersneed to change tack.
Too many civil servants, especially in continental Europe, swirl around a bureaucraticGormenghast but rarely leave it. Nearly four-fifths of German senior public servants have beenin public administration for more than two decades. The French state under Franois Hollande isgoverned by a caste of unsackable functionaries, resistant to reform. One reason manyofficials become stuck is their generous pension deals: making pensions portable should be apriority. But career structures also must adapt.