Clerk of Privy Council looking at ICTs and infrastructure to support a modern workforce
Ottawa’s top bureaucrat says embrace 'Facebook' workers
By Kathryn May, April 11, 2010
OTTAWA — Canada’s top bureaucrat wants to retool the federal workplace and change how public servants work, where they work and even what they do.
Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters sketched his plan for public servants facing “extraordinary times” in his first report to Prime Minister Stephen Harper since he took over the top job last summer from Kevin Lynch. It was Lynch who kicked off “public service renewal” initiative and made it a priority.
In his report, Wouters said renewal remains “his top management priority,” but he is shifting it from a focus on recruiting and developing talent to modernizing the workplace.
“While continuing our emphasis on people, I see a need to pay greater attention to how we work, where we work, the tools with which we work and what work we should be doing,” he wrote.
Until now, public service renewal was largely seen as a massive drive to recruit, train, develop and groom talent to take over as the baby boom generation, that has dominated the public service for 30 years, retires.
Lynch led a massive hiring spree at Canada’s colleges and universities over the past three years, hiring thousands of new and mid-career recruits.
But Wouters argues the way government works must also be rejuvenated or modernized too with “new tools and approaches” to help get more out of employees while better serving ministers and Canadians.
Wouters’ report is light on details, but he calls for more collaboration, innovation, better use of technology, upgrading archaic “back-office systems” and better management of one of its most valuable assets — information and knowledge.
He said departments have to embrace the Web 2.0 tools and technology that rest of the world uses that allow more collaboration among workers, levels of government and Canadians.
Many have questioned how this new generation of bureaucrats, reared on Facebook and Twitter, will work in a rules-bound hierarchy where freely sharing information is an anathema to many managers.
He said technology would help increase productivity. With Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, departments can tap into the knowledge of their employees across the country.
Public servants now have “different skills, expectations and attitudes toward their employers and careers,” said Wouters. They think, work and interact differently and won’t stick around departments that forbid employees to use Facebook at work
Some say Wouters is sending the long overdue message that technology is not just a tool. The changes in behaviour and expectations brought by technology are what make the new generation of workers tick.
Ottawa Citizen