The government’s tax collectors have for years occupied the bottom slot in the civil service’s staff morale rankings. Colin Marrs learned how managers have changed tack in order to tackle deep-seated problems
In July 2009 Nita Clarke, director of employment engagement organisation IPA, co-wrote a report looking at staff engagement across the civil service. The report’s recommendations were of particular interest to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which consistently performs badly on morale in workforce surveys.
Speaking at CSL, Clarke said that during her research she’d spoken to a large number of HMRC employees. “There was a disconnect between employees and organisation,” she said. “People felt that the organisation didn’t value or respect them.”
During the same session William Meehan, HMRC’s employee engagement senior manager, admitted that the organisation did lose its way. “We hit rock bottom in terms of engagement and trust,” he said. “It will take years to reverse that completely.” Both he and Clarke blamed a “command and control” style of management which had alienated staff. “This culture needs to be consigned to the 20th century,” Meehan argued.
In the aftermath of the 2009 report, he explained, attempts were made by senior staff to engage with employees around the country. But he admitted that these attempts were piecemeal, and failed to substantially improve the situation. “We didn’t talk to everybody at that stage,” he said.
Now, though, HMRC has embarked on a new, more comprehensive listening exercise. “Our new permanent secretary has been very clear,” says Meehan of incoming chief executive Lin Homer, whose approach he characterises as: “‘Get out there and get on with it. I am not going to give you more instructions’.” Managers are now collating feedback from community forums on the agency’s intranet, and appointing ‘change reporters’ who will monitor progress.
Clarke supported HMRC’s efforts to get staff on board with change programmes, arguing that all staff need to understand that they are equally responsible for culture change. “We need to move away from a situation where everybody thinks it is someone else’s responsibility to act on this agenda,” she said. HMRC intends to use an impact assessment tool to test the potential impact of proposed policies on staff morale.
The approach has become much more focused, said Meehan: “We are asking: ‘What are the big five things that we can do to make things better?’” And this narrower focus represents an important advance on HMRC’s previous efforts, in which action plans often pointed in too many directions. “One area of HMRC had 97 actions in their plan,” he recalled. “What is the hope of them doing a handful, let alone all 97?”
There are signs that the agency’s efforts are bearing fruit, said Meehan: “In surveys, we have seen a shift from ‘strongly disagree’ [answers in response to positive statements] towards the middle. We are in the place where lots of people in HMRC have heard this is going on, but lots of people think: ‘Convince me!’.”
Quite how many people are unconvinced was demonstrated by the one administrative officer during the session’s Q&A segment. “I have seen some change, but there is still a culture that says: ‘If you put your head above the parapet, you get it shot off’,” she said, to a loud round of applause from the HMRC staff in the audience. “People have got to stand up and say: ‘This is wrong and we won’t be treated like this’,” said Clarke.
While the agency’s managers work to get staff on board, added Clarke, the political world is also changing in ways that give HMRC workers a moral – if not a morale – boost. “If I had said five years ago that a Conservative chancellor would say that tax avoidance is morally repugnant, you would have thought I was nuts,” she pointed out. “But that statement in itself is a very empowering fact for staff in HMRC.”