Opinion: With a creative approach, the public sector can still find sufficient employees

The shortage of personnel is a major social problem. Especially in the public sector, as an article recently stated de Volkskrant to see. And that problem is presented as something that cannot be solved. After all, the ‘market’ will not solve it and the role of the government in this is also limited. What remains is a kind of dismal conclusion that it is a ‘wicked problem’ that is inherently unsolvable. But that despondency leads nowhere and there are many solutions.

Many problems with staff shortages can be solved at the level of labor organizations themselves. By making clearer choices about what you do and what you do not do, through targeted automation and the use of AI and through forms of social innovation. Many companies and labor organizations have been ‘spoiled’ for decades by an almost inexhaustible ‘new’ supply of labour, by women who started working (more), by older people who continued to work longer, by the influx of migrants, especially from Eastern Europe.

Dutch labor organizations have often forgotten how to deal with ‘scarcity’ of the production factor labor. Further training is necessary. In the field of technology: how do you effectively implement labor-saving innovations? In the field of social innovation: how do you organize more productivity through new ‘configurations’ of labor and capital?

Learning culture

There are good examples of interventions that work. An innovative company with a thriving learning culture can do more work with the same number of people and people enjoy the work more and therefore stay longer. Such a company has fewer retention problems and therefore fewer recruitment problems.

Smart choices in strategic personnel policy at Tata Steel, for example, have ensured that they experience far fewer shortage problems than comparable companies, as we show in the book Scarcity does not exist. And Brabant hospitals in the border region, in collaboration with hospitals in Flanders, have managed to significantly reduce the workload of operating room assistants, resulting in more job satisfaction and therefore fewer recruitment problems. From recent TNO research shows that the potential of technology to combat staff shortages in healthcare is very great.

Energy transition

The fact that these types of interventions work is especially important for companies that play a major role in the energy transition and the process of digitalization of the economy. Progress must be made in these companies and productivity gains must therefore be achieved. Do more with fewer people. And the same applies to (semi-) government organizations. Productivity needs to increase there too, but there is a major problem with how we measure productivity and output.

British-American Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton points out that we calculate the contribution of the healthcare sector to prosperity as the amount of money we spend on it or as care provided. But that is not a real contribution to prosperity, let alone to broad prosperity. Care provided is not directly proportional to a higher level of public health, especially in the US. And ‘more health’ is the real prosperity gain, you want to measure that output.

Meaningless

This analysis also applies to other government sectors. We measure output, defined as a contribution to prosperity, by looking at the number of FTEs and how much money it has cost. Because in the public sector we measure output with input, the productivity measurement there is meaningless at best.

Another problem with this way of measuring productivity is that healthcare workers, teachers and government servants spend a substantial part of their working time – in nursing home care up to 35 percent – collecting accountability information that is intended to monitor whether they are working productively. is becoming. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this is actually counterproductive.

Better care

Productivity in government work is much more likely to be found in the perceived quality of the work. A nurse knows very well when he or she is contributing to better care and better patient outcomes. A teacher knows very well when she is effectively contributing to the development of students. A civil servant also knows very well when she is doing something useful. And when these public servants themselves experience utility in their work, they experience a higher quality of that work and are more productive, in the sense that they contribute more to the ‘benefit of the common’ in the same time. Especially when no more time is lost with ‘accountability chores’.

This approach, based on the skills of workers, based on confidence in professionalism and focused on the quality of work, is a promising way to tackle the shortage problems in the labor market, including and especially in the (semi-)governmental sectors. Especially when technology is used on a larger scale based on these principles. There will also be more opportunities to deploy people who are currently still considered ‘unsuitable’. A combination of technical and social innovation and inclusion can put an end to the despondency about the labor shortage on the labor market. The solutions are there.