Public Sector Strategy: Fixing CAB Staff Issues

Introduction

Contemporary society is more demanding than ever, and competition among individuals has increased dramatically over recent decades. This competition includes enrolling children in the best schools, securing the best jobs, and buying the best homes. Regardless of their personal goals, individuals need guidance, assistance, and protection of their rights. The Citizens' Advice Bureau is the provider of these services, meaning the role it plays within society is pivotal. For the institution to function at its maximum potential and achieve the most successful outcomes, it must be internally strong and united. This leads to high performance and increased client satisfaction. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the analyzed Citizens' Advice Bureau. The following pages offer a strategic solution to resolving the issues identified within the organization.

Problems and Goals

The Citizens' Advice Bureau is currently facing four problems:

The ultimate goal of the institution is to resolve these matters and ensure the organization functions properly for the overall benefit of citizens. This goal is a broad one and must be divided into smaller objectives, each corresponding to one of the problems identified. The CAB should therefore strive to achieve the following:

The Role of Strategic Management

Various definitions of strategic management have been proposed in the specialized literature, though no unified definition has been agreed upon. In its most simplified form, strategic management is the art and science of identifying problems and implementing solutions that support an organization in reaching its overall goals (David, 1989). The most common features of strategic management include pragmatism, planning functions, innovation and creativity, the ability to link customer benefits to organizational capacity, the ability to reduce resistance to change, and the ability to develop and implement an efficient course of action (Joyce and Woods, 2001).

The concepts of strategic management were primarily developed and implemented by the business community — specifically, by for-profit organizations seeking to maximize revenues. The beneficial results they obtained were visible at various organizational levels, including customer and employee satisfaction, increased quality of products and services, and greater operational efficiency. This motivated public sector institutions to consider applying these concepts within their own operations.

Organizations in the public sector have experienced both success and failure in their use of strategic management. The major benefits within the public context include better delegation of responsibilities, a superior decision-making process, and more effective allocation of resources in response to clients' needs. The limitations of strategic management for the public sector revolve around a lack of proper understanding of the concept (it is often conflated with strategic planning), the complexity of the processes involved, a lack of strategic perspective among public managers, the difficulty introduced by the political dimension, and the fact that the public sector tends to expect short-term results when strategic management is fundamentally concerned with long-term problem resolution (Prowle, 2000).

The Proposed Solution

As established above, the problems encountered by the Citizens' Advice Bureau are multifaceted, and a single strategy would be insufficient to resolve them. The proposed solution is therefore a combination of four simultaneous strategic approaches, each addressing one of the four identified problems.

Increasing the appeal of the job is a strategy that depends on other courses of action. A job will be considered appealing if the tasks are challenging, if staff members are properly remunerated, if the working environment is pleasant, if the corporate culture is supportive, and so on. Essentially, a job's ability to attract employees is determined by the internal characteristics of the organization — namely its reward plan, the treatment of staff members, and the features of the role itself. Reward plans and employee treatment will be addressed in the sections below.

In terms of job requirements, these must be clearly detailed and presented to potential employees. All candidate questions must be answered, and the interviewing process must be straightforward yet relevant. To increase the success of the recruiting process, managers at the Citizens' Advice Bureau should develop and implement a media campaign aimed at attracting more candidates. Advertisements could be broadcast via radio, television, the internet, labor-specialized periodicals, or even street banners. They would highlight the major role the public sector plays in supporting community development and emphasize that individuals have the opportunity to make a difference. Ultimately, candidates would be assured that the job is challenging, the working environment is friendly, and the employer will support their professional development through training programs and specialized assistance.

Absenteeism (often combined with procrastination) reduces operational efficiency and generates additional costs. To reduce these, management must first understand the causes of absenteeism. The most common reasons include legitimate illness, family responsibilities, lax attendance policies, poor work ethic, undesirable schedules, legitimate injuries, inconsistent application of attendance policies, feelings of alienation or unimportance, lack of systematic attendance training, low morale, abuse of family leave provisions, outside work commitments, lack of flexibility, excessive overtime, peer pressure, or simply the desire to extend the weekend (Volinski, 1999).

The appropriate courses of action depend heavily on the root causes identified. For instance, if a study revealed that a large proportion of employees were young parents struggling to find adequate childcare, the CAB could provide on-site day care services, allowing staff members to bring their children to work and leave them in the care of qualified caregivers.

Another approach is offering more flexible schedules to employees for whom rigid hours are a contributing factor. Ultimately, all strategies aimed at reducing absenteeism share the common purpose of increasing employees' on-the-job satisfaction through the provision of various incentives.

A general rule for addressing absenteeism, regardless of its cause, is to offer rewards for perfect attendance. While this may motivate some employees to reduce procrastination and absences, it will not apply equally to all staff types (Cascio, Boudreau, and Ramstad, 2008). The best course of action therefore remains identifying root causes and developing customized solutions based on the characteristics of each situation.

Similar to absenteeism, high employee turnover rates are generally driven by underlying causes that must be identified before an effective solution can be formulated. Major causes of turnover include job-related stress, receiving a better offer from another employer, resignation in search of greater job security, and general job dissatisfaction related to working conditions or compensation. The following propositions are offered for reducing employee turnover at the Citizens' Advice Bureau:

Unlike the previous three issues, low staff morale and lack of motivation are root causes that generate negative effects such as increased employee turnover and associated costs. Most often, lack of motivation and low morale result from systemic failures. To address them, managers at the Citizens' Advice Bureau should engage in the following process:

This approach has the direct benefit of involving employees in the decision-making process, making them feel they are valued assets to the organization and thereby increasing their morale. To further ensure that staff members improve their performance, CAB leaders should offer a wide range of incentives. These could include, but are not limited to: wage increases, premiums and bonuses, more flexible schedules, more extensive benefit plans, opportunities for promotion, training and professional development programs, on-site day care for children, and additional holidays or personal days.