The article was initially published in The Mandarin on August 29, 2024.
Public service staff are burning out at speed. This topic was discussed widely at The Mandarin’s recent Rebuilding Public Service Trust and Integrity conference, which I attended in Melbourne.
Execs looking to tackle staff burnout usually focus on fostering healthy team relationships. For frontline staff there’s also a focus on insisting their clients show them respect. So far, so good.
But there’s another, less visible, relationship that causes outsize burden. It fuels the grumpy clients, and worse.
It’s the relationship between the general public and what they think the public service is.
You know your agency’s work deserves respect. Across your agency’s lifetime, lots of key indicators have headed in the right direction, haven’t they? They wouldn’t have if you and your diligent team weren’t around.
Why doesn’t the public understand that?
As a long-term public servant, I’ve asked myself this question 1,000 times. Sigh.
We’re told to stifle this frustration. After all, as a departmental secretary recently said to me, “the people who need to know our worth, do”.
With respect — no, they don’t.
Because the people who need to know your worth include every single member of the public.
Not just so that they show respect to frontline staff. (And not just so that they complain to their local MP when your agency faces yet another cut.)
The public needs to know your worth so that your staff can hold their heads up high.
The psychological stress of feeling judged by the world at large affects nearly every public servant. I’d know.
Introducing the grumpy uncle
This nasty truth revisited me at a recent family barbecue when I overheard a grumpy uncle railing against a government infrastructure built near his house. His gripes were just plain wrong, but he wasn’t interested in learning the truth. (Feel familiar?) It was enough to send me fleeing to the garage to fume privately.
Eventually, I flung a vent post onto LinkedIn, stapled on a smile and went back to my snags.
Imagine my surprise that night to discover a flood of messages from public servants around the country. Their feelings were summed up in one word — YESSSSS!
They’d copped sprays from their own grumpy uncles. Scorn from their mates who couldn’t fathom why anyone would choose government service over industry profit. Shook their head as giant tax cuts were cheered on by the same neighbours complaining about potholes and hospital queues.
I’m sick of your work going unnoticed and unappreciated, so I did something about it
So when I saw the theme for TEDx Cecil St — Rebels and Renegades — I knew I had a rebellious idea worth spreading.
The message in my TEDx talk is simple — when it comes to solving the problems we face as a species, there’s a hidden army of helpers ready to get to work. But they need citizens to back them.
You’re in that army. You and 2 million other Aussies who go to work each day in the public sector.
My TEDx talk lays out — to the public — the simple but easily missed truth that the public sector delivers what society needs in order to thrive. Not what individuals want — that’s what the private sector is for. No, you deliver what we need.
Then I ask them to imagine what they could do if every citizen insisted that their army of helpers be properly funded, trained and supported. Forget about “doing more with less” — what about getting out what we put in?
You may wonder how I can vent on LinkedIn and deliver TEDx talks – am I trying to get sacked? No!
I still work for government, but not quite as directly as I used to. Now I speak, write, and train on how to create extraordinarily effective public sector teams.
And every chance I get, I’m also out there challenging outdated notions of what government is and isn’t. What it should be and what it could be. What citizens should demand, and what they need to do in return.
I’m just saying what I know to be true, after more than 20 years of service. I suspect you and I have that in common. (We probably have a lot in common!)
But we also have some big differences.
- You’re bound by social media policies. I’m not.
- You’re tasked with a hundred complex deliverables. I’m not.
- You’re answerable to an elected government. I’m not.
So I have the means, motive and opportunity to say publicly what you can’t.
But for all that I like talking to citizens, I like talking to public servants more. Especially the young ones — they haven’t clocked up the decades of experience it takes to work the hard stuff out.
That’s why I wrote a book for them, and it’s why I post videos and content on social media that discuss how to thrive in government.
So, send your staff my TEDx talk and encourage them to follow me — it’s free, and it’ll do more than you think to sustain their psychological health.
Here’s my final word.
You and your people deserve to be dripping with pride at what you do. And you deserve to have your friends and family pat you on the back at your next barbecue. People tend only to notice government when it fails, not when it succeeds. But that can change, and my mission is to make it change.
So next time your grumpy uncle — or neighbour or footy coach — bags government, don’t retreat to the nearest garage. Send them my TEDx Talk instead, and I’ll make sure that the people who need to know your worth, do.