Sometimes my friends, family, colleagues, or online communities ask me this question:

"If you could wave a magic wand to make one change in public service, what would it be?"

I'd create a new tool for managers in government called "displacement". Here's how it works.

Disclaimer

The opinions here are my own and not the opinions of my employer or government.

The Problem

Dismissing a permanent (indeterminate) public servant for poor performance is so burdensome that many managers who want to simply never try. A dedicated manager must make it their personal mission for months or years. They must suffer an enormous burden of paperwork, meetings, and anxiety. They risk their careers if there's retaliatory complaints. That's why it can be a rational decision for a manager to simply ignore the problem so that the they can accomplish their bigger mandate.

Note "manager" here means anyone with hiring authority and above including directors, director generals, etc.

Proposal: Displacements

Only a few times per career, managers of a sufficient level can "displace" a public servant from their team. The public servant isn't fired, but the manager never has to work with them again. If there is an appeal, the manager isn't involved. Even if the appeal succeeds, the manager still doesn't need to take them back.

Filing a displacement is easy. A manager just fills out a one page form describing the employee's performance history and why they're displacing them.

Appeal

A public servant that is displaced has options. The employee can collect attestations of their good work from colleagues and submit an appeal with help from their union. The appeal is reviewed by an arbitration committee, who are randomly selected from a pool of public servant volunteers that don't know the appellant. Some possible outcomes:

• Cleared: The appellant seems like a reasonable public servant. They are placed on a priority hiring list (this infrastructure already exists for veterans, spousal relocations, etc). There's no record of the displacement.
• Recorded: The poor performance seems real. They are placed on a priority hiring list and there's a permanent record of the displacement that new managers can see before hiring.
• Dismissed: Extremely poor performance. Dismissed with severance.

Rare

Managers must feel this is a rare and valuable ability, not to be squandered. That way everyone involved respects the seriousness that a manager chose to use it. Non-management public servants will also worry less because displacements are so rare. Other staff changes like transfers or retirements will be far more common.

Perhaps one displacement action is granted to a manager every 5 years of service as a manager. Perhaps there's a minimum team size like 20 or 50, since some managers and directors have small teams.

Unions

Convincing unions will take some work, but this can be win-win.

The government can offer higher pay and benefits for union members in exchange for agreeing to the system. The cost is recovered in the salaries of dismissed employees and improved service delivery. This is politically neutral whether you like or dislike the public service, because pay goes up but so do dismissals.

The government can also agree to the common union demand to convert more temporary hires to indeterminate union hires.

Nuance

There's lots more nuance to explore here. There's team morale, optics, hierarchy like only displacing direct reports, and privacy in the appeals process. But this page is already long enough.

Conclusion

When organizations get big enough you need systems thinking. Even with the right people, a bad system guarantees bad emergent behaviors over time. Whereas smart systems allow the right people to effect smart change, on average, in aggregate, over time.

Mistakes will be made. Some good public servants will be "displaced". But overall as a system I think this may be the single greatest change I can imagine for the public service.

Thanks for reading!

See Also

• A Proposed Point System for Government WFH
• My First Union Event