Giving more visibility to workplace best practices in Chile’s civil service

Since the start of the pandemic, workplaces have had to keep adapting to new organisational challenges – which have sometimes proven to be unique opportunities to think outside the box[KC1] and shake up the status quo.

That includes government employers, which have also played a part in this major shift, issuing advisories and recommendations to their departments and publishing guides and manuals.

Taking it a step further, Chile decided to collect all the resources developed by experts across the civil service under the hashtag #CuidemonosEntreTodos (1), building a bank of workplace best practices from across the OECD country. The objective was twofold: to shine a light on often low-profile initiatives and to share the details of real success stories in context.

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The aim is to instil a sense of friendly competition between different professions, sectors and branches of the civil service that may be facing similar problems. It’s an initiative that had previously been promoted to government departments in a presidential memo.

Within each ministry and in local governments, committees are tasked with going out in search of best practices. To make the list, which is broken down into eight categories, initiatives have to be innovative and reproducible. A contact person, someone with expertise on the subject, is also designated for each project in order to answer any questions or provide assistance.

The idea behind the best practices, which focus on the work environment and workplace relations, is that they should help improve, simplify and streamline day-to-day work without formalising any new rules, particularly at key employee milestones such as onboarding and integration, professional development, promotions or job changes, and retirement. Special attention is given to initiatives that improve the image of the civil service as an attractive place to work.

In addition to contributing to a code of best practices included in the HR library, the bank has sparked interesting discussions and led to the creation of numerous multidisciplinary networks dedicated to the topic.

And because the initiative was designed to be collaborative above all else, employee associations are consulted at various steps of the process to provide their feedback.

¹ "Let’s take care of each other".