What we do know from our findings is that citizens expect a ‘user-first’ approach for all the services they receive which recognises and understands their personal journeys through the service system. With greater complexity in certain service offerings citizens also expect a more personalised approach with greater client care and support. The APS is making more substantial progress in understanding how to proceed in this area given the path-breaking work of the ATO, DHS, and the DTA, and the investment in design and innovation units, practice guilds and user-simulation labs, whole-of-Commonwealth government.16
Continued support to foster this community of practice, encourage a multi-disciplinary approach and stimulate whole-of-government learning remains crucial.17 With the support of the DTA we would envisage Regional Support Centres developing capability in human-centred design to ensure the delivery of usercentred services.
So, what could a high quality ‘citizen-centred’ service culture look like? Our focus group participants have given us a strong sense of the four value-based components of trust that they believe inform public trust in Australian public services:
- Integrity – procedural transparency and fairness, competence, consistency of information, advice and treatment
- Empathy – duty of care, respect and understanding
- Delivery – that the service promise will be met
- Loyalty – an expectation of ongoing support and guidance
These components of trust can be considered micro-psychological contracts between government and citizens and are the key to building service culture. As such, they should be modelled as public service delivery values. Above all, public trust in government services is earnt by delivering on the service promise in a way that values and respects citizen input.
Training programs should be co-designed with frontline staff and citizens to ensure that these four public service delivery values are embedded in practice. Service culture is achieved by people, not by structures or processes. Therefore, we need frontline public servants to want to understand the service delivery strategy, to want to keep it relevant and effective, and who see how their work supports the strategy. There is much evidence that people at the frontline tend to have their own ideas about what they are supposed to achieve18. Part of being a strategic organisation rests in finding ways of creating an appetite for strategic working and in aligning the ways that people work at the front line (and of those in the wider community who co-produce outcomes) with the broader strategic goals of the APS.
16 See: https://www.dta.gov.au/blogs/digital-practice-guilds-government (retrieved 20 November 2019).
17 See: Boddy, J. and Terrey, N. (2019), Design for a better future, Routledge.
18 See Lipsky, M. (1980), Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York. Russell Sage Foundation..