What Can The British Armed Forces Learn From the Civil Service?

The Civil Service is under fire again, with demands for it to change to reflect better the society it serves and be more flexible and business like. These demands are made regularly by all sorts of people and institutions, but are they fair, and what lessons could the British Armed Forces draw from the Civil Service?

In the UK the Civil Service is a term used to, in broad terms, to refer to the people who work in the central government departments, such as the MOD, the FCDO, Health, Work & Pensions and so on. It can also refer to people who work in a variety of arms length bodies or smaller organisations, that have links to a major department.

All the main Ministries have their administrative HQ’s in Whitehall, where they will house a raft of senior officials (the so-called Permanent Secretary) and Ministers. In general terms these Minsters will range in rank from relatively junior posts through to the Secretary of State, to whom the Department reports, and who is accountable for it.

The role of the Civil Service is to carry out the wishes of the Government of the day in a politically agnostic manner. Unlike some other systems like in the US, civil servants and their leadership do not exist at the behest of the Government, and remain in place as changeovers occur.

To deliver this, Ministers will set out in broad terms their policy ambitions, usually linked to the manifesto, and provide guidance to their Departments on what they wish to prioritise. The Civil Service will be tasked to find out ways to make the manifesto commitment work, in a way that is legal, affordable and which does not disrupt other parts of government activity.

Over time this work will be translated from policy into activity, and the system then functions as a delivery body, charged with setting up and delivery the activity that Ministers want to happen.

In practical terms the Civil Service has historically been both a closed shop and very heavily London focused. These are criticisms which are regularly levelled against it as a reason for change, yet arguably neither of these are now true.

Recruitment for the Civil Service used to rely on entrance via exams, or through the junior administration grades, and then slow internal promotion. This was usually done by a centrally managed HR cadre which moved people around roles and posts to meet their needs, and those of the service. Faster promotion was open to those who joined on the Faststream as a graduate recruitment scheme that would accelerate them to the very top of the system.

This system is long dead, yet people believe the myth that the Civil Service is a closed shop. In reality, as a result of policy decisions taken over many years, almost all recruitment is now run as an ‘external’ campaign for most jobs. In other words, when a job becomes available for recruitment, it is advertised via the Civil Service jobs website, and anyone can apply for it.

This means that anyone can apply for roles ranging from entry level administration clerks through Senior Civil Service positions, and stand a chance of getting the role. One only has to look across LinkedIn to spot a huge increase in recent years of people making the jump from the private sector into the public sector at all levels, bringing experience and different perspectives with them.

The suggestion that the Civil Service is a closed shop at any level is utter nonsense – there are hundreds of jobs on offer daily that anybody can apply for if they wish to go for them. The challenge is persuading people to make this move.

One reason why people may be reluctant to move is the perception that the Civil Service is a London based organisation. While it is true that Departmental HQ’s (and Ministers) are based in London, in recent years there has been a significant expansion outside of London across the country.

Increasingly Civil Service hubs are appearing in cities across the UK, like Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow and so on.  Departments are opening major hubs in these cities, creating long term opportunities to work there and progress.

Whitehall is increasingly denuded of Civil Servants, and the Government estate in central London gets smaller every year. 30 years ago the MOD owned over 30 buildings in the Whitehall area – today there is just one. This downsizing is matched by most departments which are consolidating and decreasing their footprint, and moving out to other cities.

The advantages of moving are legion – cheaper office space is a key draw. But equally so to is the cheaper cost of living and ability for staff to own a house where they may previously have struggled to rent a flat. By moving around the UK it taps into talent pools who may never have been able to afford to move to London,  but who can now work in a meaningful way in the Civil Service and have a stretching career too.

The other issue that has changed is that COVID has revolutionised the way that the Civil Service works. One of the unsung heroes of COVID has been the IT departments that almost overnight enabled their departments to move to an almost entirely remote working set up, and without falling over.

That normal administration and work has continued without disruption, even during this difficult time, is huge testament to the often forgotten IT and digital teams who keep the networks running, even in the most significant of disruptions.

A year of working remotely has, arguably, shown that the huge estate previously needed can easily be pared back further and reduced if needed. In future the idea of recruiting someone to move to London to come into work every day just because they need to be at their desk seems unlikely to happen.

Instead the future model of the Civil Service is likely to be that of regional hubs, with office space dedicated to people from all sorts of departments coming together to use floorspace to work as needed – perhaps with teams built using staff drawn from across the country, but who only physically meet as a group two or three times per year.

This is incredibly exciting because it fundamentally changes the pool of people who can apply for jobs. People who, for example, live in Northumberland and who want to work in an Whitehall policy job could now apply for it knowing that they can work at home, at a local hub in somewhere like Newcastle and that they don’t have to move to London unless they want to.

This utterly changes the game and could lead to a huge influx of new idea and talent as long as the means exist to give them a credible career. There are challenges ahead, for example how do you build a career network by working virtually, but these are resolvable.

Given all of this, what are the lessons that the British Armed Forces could draw from the Civil Service and change how they work for the better?

The first lesson to consider is whether the current model of appointments and career management still works? In the Civil Service, anyone can apply at any time for a job that is advertised on promotion – they may not get it, but they have the sense of control over their own destiny.

If you contrast this to the military career management approach, much of it relies on both secretive annual promotion boards, and a career management system that relies on directed appointing.

Each year people are told whether they have been selected for promotion or not, but they have little input in the process. They are reliant on the words of others for their performance reports, and they cannot appear before the board to plead their case. The results of these boards are a source of anguish to many, who do not understand why they have not been promoted, or what more they need to do – feedback is not available, nor offered.

This creates a career management system where people rely on guesses and interpretations, and have to make an annual assessment of whether this will be ‘their year’ and make serious life decisions around whether they may, or may not, promote. For example, do they take a posting offered to them as a hope this will give them ‘visibility’ or do they do the job they want to do and which they may be very good in, but which is a career blocker.

This seems a curious way to manage a talent pool of people who will peak at different times and be driven by different motivators. The Civil Service system works by giving people the illusion of control – you may not be ready to promote, but there is nothing to stop you trying to go for it, and the feedback you get may help positively shape your career development.

Has the time come for the Armed Forces to look to consider allowing people to apply for posts on promotion, and be interviewed to state their case as to why they are ready to do so? There are always vacant posts, which means that there is nothing to stop someone giving it a shot  - but why make someone wait for an annual assessment of their performance by two other people to let them go for promotion?

In the Civil Service the link between annual reporting and promotion has been severed. This is a real change from even 25-30 years ago where these forms and appraisals were similar to the OJAR process.  Your performance assessment plays no part in promotion or appointment discussions. This means that the only person who can influence or shape your promotion prospects is you.

The result is that people can apply when they are ready, and are not held back by the vagaries of a bad reporting year, a CO who doesn’t know them, a ‘competitive cohort’ or having a falling out with a reporting officer who feels you are a ‘B- DEV’. It also stops one or two reports from previous years shaping your future – you make the case as to why you are the right person for the role.

The system still disappoints people, but in different ways. Not getting a job you wanted, that you applied for and did everything you could to get feels very different from discovering that an anonymous promotion cell has, for reasons unknown to you, decided you cannot be promoted. Having personally experienced both systems, the author can attest that the illusion of control is extremely powerful as a retention tool – far better to dust yourself off, learn from feedback and then go again, than to become bloody minded and resentful – the military system seems designed to breed anger, retention issues and demotivate people.

So the first lesson is perhaps ‘is it time that the military cut the link between OJAR and promotion’ and let individuals apply on their own merits, not the assessment of others’?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

This neatly segues into the second view, which is that the Civil Service has shown it is possible to work in a truly remote and dispersed way. Has the time come for the armed forces to do likewise?

Every two years there is an enormous round robin as staff officers around the country move to different stations or posts and sit at a new desk with the same IT system as the last one. Sometimes this makes perfect sense – if you are in a command or leadership post, or working on a physical asset then you need to be present – engineers for example cannot service aircraft virtually.

But, there are many thousands of posts that are, at heart, office jobs. They can be done anywhere, and do not need people to be in office to do them. So why does the military persist in moving people around, and uprooting families or paying for accommodation if it doesn’t need to?

Part of this is the ‘presenteeism’ culture that is engrained in large parts of the system. It’s the desire to be seen, to build the network and to physically have face time with the boss or get the network to enable the construction of an OJAR legend. This is reinforced by a promotion system that relies on assessments of an individual, and if your 1 or 2 RO doesn’t know you, then your chances of promotion are slim.

If you stepped away from this though, then why not do things differently? Why move people just to go to work on a site to do staffwork they could do at home? Or, if you live in Scotland, why not use Civil Service hubs to go and work, using your IT?

It would be great for improving the links between the civil service and military if desk officers worked at these hubs. Rather than physically move to HQ LAND in Andover, why not still live in Manchester, keep the family there and work daily from the local civil service hub?

The challenge is that the military doesn’t seem to have quite moved on from the idea of being physically present, or that somehow if you aren’t behind the wire, with multiple layers of security protecting you, that you aren’t working. There still seems a reluctance to embrace this – speaking to friends in the military, one is left with the impression that remote working is seen as a temporary embuggerance to be endured prior to going back to working together, not something that is an opportunity to change for the better how we do things.

The fact is that you could do things very differently if so minded – a future MOD could rely on staff from around the country working virtually, and occasionally coming into their main HQ location if needed, but having a sensible work/life balance and spending time with families and loved ones. It would enable them to work alongside civil service peers, learning and sharing best practise and embedding the military as a key part of government work – not an aloof one.

The prize on offer is enormous – it could improve retention, make people look differently about applying for roles and feel far more in control of their career, and in turn more likely to stay in. Of course this wouldn’t work for every post, and there will always be some that need both a fixed location and physical presence to be done, but why not look at the staff officer roles as a chance to do things better?

Image by HMG; © Crown copyright

Of course for all the talk of shaking up Whitehall and moving on to a leaner meaner commercial footing, there are two key constraints that prevent this. The first issue is that people demand that the Civil Service be run more like a business, and that it should be more business focused and agile.

This is a sound idea, until you consider that business generally gets less agile the larger it gets. The small tiny companies which do one or two things very well can be agile and speedy, precisely because that is how they work and are constructed. They fill a clearly defined niche and fit well into it.

The big companies are not agile and fast moving. They do amazing things but it takes time and money to do them, and do them well. It is better to think of Civil Service as a group of very large companies, all working in close collaboration with one another, but all of whom have vast interests and responsibilities, and also one where you cannot stop doing something that is slow or a loss generator just because you want to – there are many things government has to do that it must do, that no company does. Comparisons with business are unhelpful in a way because the Civil Service is not one – it is the fabric which leads, governs and enables the nation to operate in order to allow industry to flourish.

The second challenge is that for all the desires to break the ties with Whitehall and see a national civil service, the fact remains that Ministers are accountable to Parliament. Trying to persuade a Minister to work in a city that isn’t London will be a challenge for as long as you need them to step up to the dispatch box and take an Urgent Question.

Ministers want to be in London to be close to Westminster - This in turn drives other behaviours, such as keeping the policy departments close to brief Ministers on progress or prepare them for their session in the chamber. This in turn requires office space and presence to enable staff to be able to brief Ministers, which keeps the centre of gravity firmly in Whitehall. This is even before you consider the wider crisis management functions and reasons for bringing departments together, or facilities like COBR.  

If a Government was serious about breaking the link between Whitehall and the Civil Service then arguably it needs to look more widely. It needs to break the link between Ministers and the physical dispatch box, and enable a Minister to take questions virtually from their office, wherever that may be.

Perhaps the answer to the problem of what is needed to reform the Civil Service and its Westminster fixation is to instead see what reforms Parliament wishes to adopt, and then support these instead. This is opening up an entirely new debate, around the accountability of Ministers and how they are held to account by MP’s. But to break the link and ensure a Minister can be virtually present would change the game – a Ministry could be housed in Wolverhampton or Aberdeen and joined virtually to others to enable a truly joined up government.