Public sector managers need to do better

Better workforce planning; more collaboration; greater staff redeployment: in short, the need to do things "that might have seemed unpalatable five years ago". That is the conclusion from recruitment group Hays , which this week published a survey on the management skills - or lack of them - across the public sector. The report coincides with and echoes the findings of a survey published today by the Chartered Institute of Personnnel and Development (CIPD), which says that delivering more with less would be achievable in the public sector - if only managers were up to the task. In today's Society Guardian , David Brindle outlines the two reports' "scathing" evaluation of management in the public sector, which is described as ill-equipped to respond to the challenges ahead. The CIPD has more than 50,000 members in the public sector and this report is the first of four detailed analyses of people management in the public sector, under the title Building Productive Public Sector Workplaces. Its report says that simply having good intentions is not good enough - productivity needs to rise in the public sector - and the overview to the series identifies a mix of poor line management and low-trust employee relations within the public sector as creating both active and passive resistance to change. For this reason, says the CIPD, policy makers "must ensure that any drive to make efficiencies across the public sector is combined with a sustained push to improve the quality of people management, particularly on the front line". The Hays report portrays a similarly gloomy picture for public managers as they prepare to lead their organisations into a spending squeeze. Of those surveyed by Hays, only 16% felt their organisation had the resources to manage a reduced budget in 2010. A disturbing finding is that a fifth of junior staff do not consider their organisation has a clear strategy in place to cope with the challenge of offering more services with fewer resources. So what is to be done? Don't cut training and leadership budgets might be the first answer; the Hays report suggests that while most people agree on the qualities of leadership - an ability to communicate, forward vision and integrity - there are still gaps in the training needed to acquire those skills.