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Recent work on public employment and management includes the following:
Total public employment
Analytic work has identified much rhetoric about downsizing total employment in publicly funded activities– and perhaps a little reality, particularly in the more strongly position-based systems. Interpreting the somewhat weak data in this area is made more challenging by the clear trends towards the reclassification of civil servants as other employees – and some decentralisation of staffing to subnational administrations.
Performance incentives for staff
The very significant devolution of budgetary frameworks to provide single running-cost appropriations for salary costs and other administrative expenditures has been tracked, identifying the association with moves towards a disaggregation of larger multi-function, vertically-integrated departments. Work has also tracked the strengthened focus on performance in staff appraisal – with a significant extension of performance-related pay (PRP) policies across OECD civil service systems. Current work is focusing on pension reform.
Core values and a whole of government perspective
In the past 20 years, some areas of public employment in some OECD member countries have lost aspects of their traditional job security. However, the general case is that, while the last two decades have seen some diminution of the distinctiveness of public service employment with a broad move towards position-based systems, special rules and the distinctive status of civil servants have far from disappeared. Over the same period, there has also been a modest counter-current for the very senior civil service with an emphasis on career management for that group.
A full summary of the outputs from the Working Party since 1995 are set out here.
The current analytic work programme of the Working Party is as follows:
Regular monitoring
Improved data on public employment, improved survey of human resource management processes (national and national/sub-national), leading to a biannual publication on the state of the public service.
Studies on balancing flexibility with cohesion:
Integrated governmental responses including the consequences of ageing on the management of the civil service
Transferability, preparing knowledge for outreach to non-OECD governments
Topical studies including a review of pensions systems in the public sector, coordinating human resource management across levels of government and effective pay negotiation structures and practices
Peer reviews
Collaborative reviews of core human resource management policies within OECD and non-OECD member governments.
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