Who wants to be a …………..public servant?
We seemed to have moved over a few short decades away from any sense of valuing “society” - I too can recall Mrs Thatcher making clear that no such concept exists, but it was news to me at the time. I heard a social commentator on the radio recently saying that we have moved, dangerously he suggested, from a culture where financial penalties for failing to adhere to club rules have mutated into “fees” for an additional service. The example he gave was where a “fine” for picking up a child late from nursery has turned into a “fee” payable by parents for an out-of-hours service. You can see it, can’t you? Everything has its price.
This sounds okay, and all consistent with free-market Britain, until we think about the services which the individual family does not need, but which the taxpayer is required to pay for: such as child protection, residential care for older people, mobility services. In a civilised and mature society, these things are essential, but no one is prepared to pay a fee for a service they seemingly do not need themselves.
So I worry about where this leaves the social worker, the police officer, the fire fighter, the nurse, the benefits clerk, the housing manager, the care worker,…..even the politician………..those jobs we don’t seem to want to pay for, because we don’t seem to need them personally. The social fabric we all enjoy, that keeps our lives comfortable and safe, has to be woven at a price we no longer feel inclined to pay. The people who do these jobs are citizens too, who want to take pride in their work and who are (usually) committed to their vocation. They are no longer respected by the society they serve, and they are vilified when things go wrong.
So what else can HR managers do to attract people into these jobs. They are not well paid; they are plainly not valued by society (by which I mean everyone who holds jobs other than these) and they are not in the public, celebrity-focused eye. The challenge for HR is to attract the right people to apply for these jobs out of a sense of self-worth, pride and social conscience; to exploit the concept of vocation and to build organisational cultures that uphold and sustain it. They need to create the public service “club” atmosphere, where doing the right thing is applauded and celebrated; to give the servants a sense of well-being and reward that cannot be counted in money, but which sustains them enough to look another day in paradise in the face.
Sounds trite ? A bit “wet”? Well, maybe. But it’s not sexy to serve democracy, collect taxes, wipe bottoms or deal with the angry dispossessed on a daily basis. We need to try anything at all to protect the social fabric that we still have and will always need. HR has its work cut out to come up with creative and robust solutions. It would help if we all developed a better sense of social responsibility and started to value the public goods we may not need ourselves as individuals, but need as a “society”.