Why is the culture in government so bad?

[Guitarb]

I have worked in the Civil Service at a variety of grades [EO-G6] and feel I’ve reached my limit with the poor culture. I reckon there’s a similar culture in NHS & local government too...

It’s a dodgy culture at times, where incompetent people are in role and no one can do anything about their performance due to worry of union involvement. So they go on with terrible behaviour for 20 odd years until they retire as no one wants to manage them appropriately. Or people just having outright bad behaviour, being resistant to change, hostile to new starters, bullying and being quite gradist and territorial, and again that behaviour being written off as “just what they are like”. Or problematic people being shifted around to another team, but again their behaviour never outright disciplined.

Plus the general slow pace, meetings about meetings, colleagues merely hanging around for the pension/flexi time and simply aren’t productive when in work. Even the recruitment process with the wrong people seemingly ending up in the wrong jobs, non technical people in technical roles coupled with the lack of proper onboarding and training for roles that aren’t mass recruitment etc.

The culture irritates me as I like working in government and being part of something bigger, but why is it so unprofessional? Unsure if this is just me getting older and more miserable!

I think this is what the majority of large organisations are like. See also nhs (background roles at least, not clinical), academia etc.

Ultimately humans have invented most “work” to establish a capitalist society. At a primal level we all know most of it is bollocks.

It is tiresome a lot of the time. I’ve been in CS for decades. Wouldn’t it be great if they could just get everyone to vote once a year for who they know is a waste of space and get rid of them! We know who they are. It’s virtually impossible to manage poorly performing people out.
I constantly marvel at how so many of my colleagues are hard working and brilliant because they get paid the same as people who do nothing. In my current place almost everyone is hard working and brilliant so it’s not all bad. Takes a lot of work to recruit carefully and maintain a positive culture though.

I recognise this though I’m not in the CS. You need great management from top to bottom to make an organisation’s culture work - and proper penalties for bad/lazy behaviour. Many organisations can’t afford the effort and training that is required to ensure this and so things stagnate and fester, dragging others down.
It’s demoralising, but try and focus on what you can control, and affect change there. My organisation might be sub par but my team is shit hot 😄

oh god, the worst bit is being a line manager and having no control over who gets hired on your team. Inheriting useless idiots etc. I genuinely don’t want to manage anymore unless I get to select my own team.

I left CS earlier this year and this was a big factor. The worst was having to put up with drossy staff and also the expectation from management to tell the crap they’re bloody marvellous all the time because we need to be nice to them. So tackling poor performance was next to impossible and you can end up with teams mostly made up of lazy poor performers you can’t shift on.

I think the culture has slowly got worse over the last 5 yrs. when I first joined CS a couple of decades ago I really believed in the public service aspects, when I left I was so disillusioned .

Not delivering very much doesn’t seem to matter in Government Depts.

Tried to call the Breavement Line at HMRC, waited nearly 30 mins to be answered and the agent was poorly trained, had to keep referring to a supervisor and the query wasn’t even that complex. They had sent a letter and it indicated tax was due. I knew my solicitor had paid it 18 months ago.

The money was in a holding pot and hadn’t been allocated to my late Mum’s account. They had only just round to sorting it out 18 months later. The whole call took over 1 hr 15 mins.

Twats!!

It really does just attract the candidates who can’t get a job elsewhere!

it’s annoying because then you develop a skillset to overcompensate for that - like for example in every meeting I’m in, I anticipate the textbook CS negativity/low productivity. Even now that I’m not working with that group of people anymore - it’s like a defence mechanism almost.

I’m in the CS also. I don’t relate to the pace as where I am we turn things around very (too…) speedily.

But I totally agree about poor performance, it is SO badly managed in the CS. There are very few managers I’ve seen who have the confidence and ability to carry out performance plans, chicken out of it, leaving us with crap people. What’s really frustrating is how prevalent it is in our contractors too and they’re easy to get rid of!!!

Remember when some ambitious person tried to change things with the ‘moderation’ idea. Every business area had to identify the bottom 10% by committee and put them on a performance plan. Eventually sack them if they didn’t improve.
Didn’t work as there was insufficient backing from HR or support for managers. Plus it was fundamentally unfair. Some areas were full of high flyers with consistently high standards and some were packed with duffers.
It got challenged for being discriminatory and dropped very quickly!

My CS friend says the issue is that it is practically impossible to sack anyone, so to get rid of poor performers in your team you have to have them move to another team with the CS. For that to happen you need to give them decent performance reviews or no one else will take them. So poor performers just get shuffled between teams on the basis of disingenuously positive performance reviews.

On the other hand there are also those “promoted to the level of their incompetence” because moving people via promotion is easier than actually getting anyone sacked.

Sad state of affairs and very frustrating.

It’s absolutely not impossible by any stretch (I’ve seen plenty go, just not enough), it’s just so few people seem to have the bottle and skill to undertake the process.

I agree that it’s not impossible.

I was a civil servant for over 30 years (have now been retired for 5). In the early days, there were definitely people who shouldn’t have been there. Some of them were managed out, but they were often paid off, which I found very frustrating.

Over time, managers in my department became more willing to tackle underperformance, perhaps because budgets were tighter and we couldn’t afford to carry any dead wood.

The problem was that it wasn’t consistent. I remember being a bit upset for one member of staff who was sacked. He was not very efficient, but he was very willing and was a lot better than a couple of other people in a neighbouring team who were left alone.

That’s very true. If you lose someone you can never guarantee the role will be backfilled and you could lose it entirely.