vision RH is a newsletter published by the French Directorate General for Administration and the Civil Service (DGAFP).

It draws on information sources and reports issued by public administrations, the private sector, international organisations and the press, in several different languages.

It aims to provide a broad view of current human resources and civil service initiatives. .

Against the backdrop of the recasting of government departments, competency management is central to the upgrading of employment in the civil service. Increased familiarity with staff’s profiles provides the ability to support them throughout their careers and to better foresee changes to organisational structures.

Like France since 2011, almost all OECD member countries have, to date, drawn up a benchmark document (general framework, dictionary, directory) setting out the skills required for public sector jobs. In a number of countries (Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands), only chief executives are concerned. In Switzerland, the document drives a staff development programme.

Although, in most cases, these documents were drafted in-house by groups of experts, three countries (Belgium, Canada and South Korea) designed them using a collaborative approach involving HR departments,  professional bodies and qualified persons from academia for instance.

Having competency guidelines makes it easier to describe and classify positions. By using a structure based on the level and detail of skills that can be leveraged by the validation of professional experience, standard career paths can be modelled to fit in with strategies which may vary considerably. This has happened recently in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. As part of the overhaul of its HRM system, the Dutch civil service is providing staff with an app which, using algorithms, allows for career development simulations that are highly flexible in terms of mobility. For its part, the British civil service, drawing on its updated Civil Service competency framework, has elected to define professional sectors (digital technologies, information and communication systems, HR, fiscal) and is looking to retain staff by recognising their qualifications through certification.

Besides mobility requests at the initiative of civil servants, competency management needs to become proactive in order to successfully match staff with jobs. This fresh step will require HR departments to use information in officials’ profiles to offer them appropriate positions.  

In Germany, staff are strongly advised to update their skills in order to comply with the mobility requirement (every five years), which was implemented pursuant to the Federal Government Directive concerning the Prevention of Corruption.

Several countries already make enhanced use of data and carry out data linkage to identify high-potential candidates and to place them in pools. This method may offer a potential solution to fill positions for which it is difficult to recruit: the Canadian Federal Government’s new “Talent Cloud” staffing platform is pursuing this very goal.

Estonia, which is always at the cutting-edge of new technology use, has announced that it is analysing the opportunities afforded by artificial intelligence to streamline a number of internal administrative processes, including staff recruitment. The country’s Civil Service Act contains a provision which authorises any official, twice during his/her career, to transfer to another authority for the purpose, inter alia, of increasing his/her skills.

On 1 January 2019, a new Law on Civil Service will take effect in the Baltic state. The changes include centralised recruitment with the requirement to publish details of all positions, overhauling compensation by including certain qualification-related bonuses, and appraisals. Mentoring agreements, with a maximum two-year term, will be offered to pensioners (aged 65 and above) who will pass on their know-how.

Historically, Austrian civil servants have been entitled to a special scheme but now the calculation of their pension entitlement is changing. This will affect staff born after 1955. For those born prior to 1976, the current calculation method will remain in force for the years up to 2005 and the new arrangements will apply for the following years. For staff born after 1976, all the acquired rights will be transferred to this new system (already applied to contract staff).

The OECD has conducted its first review of a national public sector innovation system in a country which is constantly seeking to develop a culture and practice of measurement, evaluation and innovation in programme and policy design and delivery. At public service level, the “Free Agents” program and the inter-organisational leadership policy deserve to be mentioned.

New recruitment provisions are set to amend public sector employment legislation and should streamline human and financial resources within the administration. The INA (Directorate General for Training) will become the centralising body. It will be tasked with publishing calls for applications, standardising selection procedures and establishing recruitment panels.

To meet increasing demand whilst factoring in the limits imposed by its reception capacities, the Berlin Academy (which is tasked with training the Land’s 110,000 civil servants) has opted for the blended learning method which it ties in with the flipped classroom strategy: theory is taught remotely with classroom sessions being devoted to practical group exercises.

Australia’s largest city is committed to a bold gender pay equity policy which is yielding results. To lessen the financial repercussions of taking time out from a career to look after children, which mostly affects women, the city is extending parental leave benefits for superannuation to cover the period of unpaid leave (34 weeks out of 52). It is interesting to note that the city’s Lord Mayor, CEO and Director Workforce & Information Services are all women.

In January 2019, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will roll out a new system (Certification 2.0) which relates to performance appraisal and performance-based compensation for senior employees. Federal agencies, which will comply with annual data call rules, will no longer have to submit performance plans and will have greater headroom to decide upon and award annual performance-based compensation.

The government is set to change the way senior executives are managed. Job selection will become the remit of the National School of Public Administration. Appraisal of skills and experience acquired will carry the same weight whether candidates come from the public or private sector. Another measure is that abnormally high absenteeism will come to represent managerial misconduct and will have an impact on the individual’s career path.

To outline its HR policy and manage staff, the South Korean government has adopted a combined information system (policy-making and management). In order to cater for new requirements from both managers and their staff, it has developed a mobile app which is guided by the same principles and which allows managers to steer their unit’s HR as well as providing staff with access to the most frequently-used functionalities.

The civil service is looking to help employees (the number of which has been identified as 23%) who have to combine work and caring for a family member or friend. To this end, a “Carer’s Passport” has been introduced. It is provided to civil servants and documents the flexibilities needed to support the carer. The aim is to minimise the need to re-negotiate these flexibilities every time an employee moves post, moves between departments or is assigned a new manager.

This working paper was drafted by the International Labour Organization as part of the Global Dialogue Forum on Challenges to Collective Bargaining in the Public Service and analyses the regulation and practice of social dialogue in the public service within EU Member States, with a focus on the forms of social dialogue and their evolution after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis.

Staff working for this département in the Greater Paris Region are being invited to respond to an “innovative premises” call for projects to revamp the Council’s headquarters which date back to the 1980s. Once all the proposals have been submitted, six will be pre-selected and the teams will receive support to work on their projects for four months. Three of these proposals will be chosen and work will begin in the summer of 2019. The Council has earmarked €500,000 for this initiative.

Teaching high potential staff the special techniques used by startups, which are often called “innovation laboratories”, is the rationale behind the intensive course developed by Carrefour, the European mass retail market leader, for training its future senior executives.

The two-year course has four steps:

 • Following a two-week long integration seminar, the trainees carry out a nine-month assignment with the company during which they work on e-commerce, customer-oriented and service projects

 • They then leave for a six-month placement abroad during which they are involved in projects focusing on new uses for digital technologies

• When they return, the future executives join a partner startup for three months to learn how to work using more agile methods and how to speed up the group’s digital and managerial development

• Lastly, they work for a group department for six months during which they use their new skills in the field

Throughout the training course, they receive customised coaching and support from a mentor.

As consideration for providing this comprehensive experience, the group expects them to pass on this rich culture, which helps transform the business.

With the third oldest population in the world and with a fairly high proportion of the workforce in general government employment (24.9% in 2017), Finland has, for more than two decades, been focusing on maintaining a high quality of working life in its government administration for staff in the twilight of their careers. Notable results have been obtained through an innovative pension reform together with bold plans for keeping seniors in the workforce.

Finland replaced the statutory retirement age (previously set at 65) with flexible retirement between the ages of 63 and 68, without a reduction in the amount of pension, but with the introduction of an accrual rate linked to the person’s age: 1.5% between the ages of 18 and 53, 1.9% between the ages of 53 and 63, and as much as  4.5% between the ages of 63 and 68.

In addition to the revaluation of years worked to calculate pensions, the government – which is primarily banking on voluntary decisions to keep working – has rolled out an action plan in the public sector (central government and local authorities) with an eye to meeting the specific expectations of this category of staff.

As an offshoot of the FNPAW¹ (the first such guidelines in Europe), Kaiku occupational services provide support for developing wellbeing in the government workplace. Overseen by the State Treasury (tasked with buttressing HR reforms), they comprise:

• training (age management in teams, non-discrimination, knowledge transfer) for managers and the 200 work organisation correspondents

• information meetings and one-to-one consultations for staff having requested adjustments to their positions or assignments

The programme draws on a number of research works (Kesto, Tykes and Veto) directed by three ministries – Social Affairs and Health, Labour, Education – which are respectively centred on healthcare, the quality of working life and the skills of ageing workers.

These initiatives have had a quantifiable impact. Owing to this strong incentive policy, the proportion of civil servants over 55 years of age has been rising constantly and stood at 30.9% in 2017, which is 6 percentage points above the OECD average.

The first-ever Global Silver Economy Forum will convene in Helsinki in July 2019.


¹ Finnish National Programme for Aged Workers