Keeping local public servants in the picture: The 21st century public servant

Abstract

Local public servants are facing a range of challenges including recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, austerity, the cost of living crisis, and rising awareness of systemic inequalities. They have to work with partners in complex systems to support people holistically and inclusively. This article summarises research done in 2014 and again in 2024 to understand what it means to be an effective public servant. As well as sharing our key findings, the article highlights how the use of rich pictures to present the work to the sector gave the research a formative rather than summative quality. The work changed and insights deepened through ongoing dialogue with people working in local government, police, fire and health services. Across five projects (two with public servants, two with councillors and one on Covid-19), the common theme has been storytelling as a form of knowledge exchange.

Most public services are experienced as local services. People encounter them in their neighbourhoods and towns. They are the housing, health, care and education services. They are libraries and playgrounds and recycling centres. People often pay their taxes and get their passports at a national government level and much of this is now done online with no human interaction. The public service that is human is usually local, making it essential that local public servants have the skills and values to work effectively.

In 2014 we undertook research with local public servants in England. This was an ESRC Knowledge Exchange grant in which we partnered with Birmingham City Council. We built on the findings of the University of Birmingham Policy Commission into the ‘The Future of Local Public Services’ (University of Birmingham, 2011) which identified the need to pay attention to the changing roles undertaken by public servants and the associated support and development needs. As a Knowledge Exchange project, our work was a dialogue with the sector from the beginning, with a research design shaped by partners in local government. We interviewed public servants to ask about the skills, roles and values which they felt were important to work effectively across local public service systems. Some of these interviewees were employed by local government. Others worked for the police, fire service or the National Health Service. We also included interviews with people delivering public services in the for-profit and non-profit sectors. The sample was small (40 people) and opportunistic (drawing on initial suggestions from our local government research partner and a snowballing approach to extend to other organisations and across the West Midlands).We saw the project not as a summative piece of research about how everyone felt working in local public services but as a starting point to generate dialogue in the sector about what it meant to be an effective public servant. In 2024 we repeated the research to reflect the challenges of the last decade, including the Covid-19 pandemic, austerity, the cost of living crisis, and rising awareness of systemic inequalities.

The research findings in both Phase 1 and Phase 2 highlighted the pressures facing local public services. In response to challenges, interviewees recognised the need for new roles and skills, such as being able to ‘think whole system’, foregrounding relational skills and shared sense-making. They needed to be curious about new data and digital possibilities, and adapt to hybrid working practices. They needed to be able to prioritise self-care and self-development as well as service to communities. We developed these insights into 10 characteristics for the 21^st Century Public Servant which we set out later in the article.

We illustrated the 2014 and 2024 versions of the research with a set of ‘rich pictures’. We also created facilitation resources including playing cards. These modes of dissemination were suggested by our non-academic collaborators (in particular Nick Booth and Laura Brodrick), although we are aware there is a broader academic literature on rich picturing (e.g. Bell and Morse, 2013; Kado et al., 2023) and gamification (Armstrong and Landers, 2018; Triantafyllou et al., 2025). Working with the graphic facilitator (Laura Brodrick) enabled us to develop visual representations of the project findings. We avoided the ‘HR-speak’ of competency frameworks and job evaluations and reported the findings using metaphors (e.g. ‘resource weaver’) and the language used by the interviewees (‘municipal entrepreneur’). The combination of images, language and artifacts shaped the ways that we shared the findings, the enthusiasm of the sector for the research, and the development of the learning over time. As we discuss below, this iterative and longitudinal storytelling approach brought a methodological contribution alongside the contribution from the findings themselves.

In both 2014 and 2024 the research was well received by public service bodies. We were invited to present at local, regional and national events, and have been presenting the research a few times each month across the decade. In 2015, following the initial sectoral interest in the research, the Local Government Association (LGA) convened a national 21^st Century Public Servant steering group with the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), the Public Services People Managers Association and representatives from health, police and fire organisations, along with ourselves. ¹ At a 21st Century Public Servant conference run by the LGA in 2018, over 100 councils shared examples of how they used this work. We were prompted to do research on elected politicians, to complement the focus on professionals, and conducted work into the 21^st Century Councillor in 2016 (which we then repeated in 2025).

Whilst the fieldwork was done in England and the findings particularly relate to the English context of local public services, the research resonated more widely. Close to home we were invited to share the research findings and run workshops in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Further away we shared our findings with the Office of the Prime Minister in Singapore, which had conducted similar research around the workforce needed for successful public service redesign. We were invited to Australia and New Zealand by ANZSOG (the Australia and New Zealand School of Government) for a speaking tour to public servants in four cities. With two Australia-based academics, Helen Dickinson and Helen Sullivan, who had been involved in earlier phases of the work, we produced an edited collection (Dickinson et al., 2019). The book highlighted how our work resonated with the challenges facing public servants in Australia, including changing citizen expectations and the opportunities (and risks) of technologies.

Below, we share the findings from the two phases of the research and also consider how the presentation of the work became part of the research process. More detail on methods including sampling and analysis is available from (Needham and Mangan, 2014; Needham et al., 2024).

Phase 1 of the research, 2014-2020

The initial research, published in 2014, highlighted that public servants were dealing with a range of contextual challenges. Below we look at these first before going on to research themes and dissemination.

Context

The most intense of these challenges was what we called ‘perma-austerity’. The 2010-2019 Coalition and Conservative governments imposed unprecedented cuts on local authority budgets in the UK. Government funding for English local authorities fell by 49.1% in real terms from 2010-11 to 2017-18, equating to a 28.6% real-terms reduction in spending power (National Audit Office, 2018). The grant cuts were compounded by cost pressures and by long-term growth in need for services, driven particularly by population ageing (Bailey et al., 2015). In response to austerity in the 2010s, councils adopted various approaches, which Hastings et al. (2015) label as efficiency, preventative, and retrenchment approaches. Local authorities often began by prioritisising cuts to ‘back-office’ services and the use of technology to reduce costs (efficiency). Later more strategic approaches were required – for example, seeking to increase revenue and prioritising ‘preventative’ services to reduce future demand. Gradually over time there came to be more diluting of services, withdrawing from certain activities, or transferring responsibilities to other organisations such as museum or leisure trusts (examples of ‘retrenchment’ approaches) (Bailey et al., 2015). Many councils also adopted commercialisation approaches such as investing in solar and wind farms or commercial property (Essex County Council, 2023; Jones and Comfort, 2019; National Audit Office, 2020).

Spending cuts led to massive job losses in local public services. Massingham (2018) show that the resulting loss of knowledge in local organisations lead to organisational problems around productivity (due to low worker morale), strategic misalignment of the workforce (capability gaps), resource cuts, decreased work quality and quantity (due to inexperienced workers), outputs not being used (due to customer mistrust), and slow task completion. The middle layer of managers in councils and other public services were removed through restructures, creating future risks as they play an important strategic role in public sector organisations, crossing professional frontline and managerial domains (Burgess and Currie, 2013).

Responding to this context: Skills, roles and values

In the original fieldwork we undertook in 2013 some interviewees expressed the impact of austerity in very negative terms: ‘There’s a narrative of doom…..it’s all about survival’. For others there was a potentially positive aspect to the financial context: ‘The cuts are forcing us to confront change. In public service, change doesn’t necessarily happen unless there is a crisis or a disaster, or it happens very slowly.’ Interviewees told us that citizens wanted to engage more actively with public services than in the past. They wanted more immediacy (through new forms of communication) and some wanted to co-produce services. This partly reflects greater affluence and education levels. It is also about demographic changes such as the increased incidence of long-term health conditions about which citizens have time to develop a level of expertise. New technologies are changing expectations about how and when citizens engage with the state, as well as fostering the emergence of ‘scientific citizenship’ which challenges existing notions of professional expertise (Durose et al., 2018). Our interviewees expressed the anticipation that public servants of the future would ‘be more human’, engaging with the ‘whole person’ and working with citizens as equals. They themselves reported changing the ways that they worked. They needed to be ‘municipal entrepreneurs’ as one put it. They recognised that working effectively was as much about a generic skill set as it was about a distinctive set of specialized professional skills. Citizens required public servants to be good at relationships – the ‘soft skills’ – rather than only having the professional skill sets of the public service domain. Holistic ways of working need to be embedded throughout public services rather than using front-door triage services to funnel people to specialized professionals.

Linked to this was the impetus to break down silos and work across service domains. Expressing frustration at the constraints of internal barriers, one interviewee said, ‘We are trying to be 21st Century public servants in 19th Century organisations.’ There was a sense of the ethos of public service changing, of public servants needing to take a harder commercial approach to address austerity. As one interviewee said, ‘If staff in local government don’t have the commercial skills they won’t be employable.’ The graduate trainees that took part in our research were not seeing local government as a career for life in a way that previous generations might have done, and sought transferable skills that would equip them for other roles. Interviewees called for new models of leadership – more distributed, more community oriented – and a recognition of the importance of place and identity. As one interviewee put it ‘The kind of system leadership which is required now is seen to favour a different skills set to the “fix it” leadership of the past’.

These public service changes - structures fragmenting, citizens demanding authentic interactions, careers requiring much greater self-management, commerciality and publicness being reconciled and expectations of leadership being dispersed across the organisation - required time and space for public servants to reflect. Our interviewees expected their organisations to recognise and support the emotional labour of public service work. Staff wanted working practices in which they were able to be ‘whole people’, as a necessary precondition for working with the public in more holistic ways. Staff also reported concerns about how to manage the boundaries between professional and personal selves when using social media. There were calls for personal development processes that were less about completing a form and more about opportunities for learning and growth.

Dissemination and iterative methods

The themes from the research were developed into a set of rich pictures, working with graphic facilitator Laura Brodrick. Following the launch of the research in 2014, we began to receive regular invitations to present at local, regional and national events for local government, fire, police and health. We developed a set of playing cards as a prioritization game that people could play around tables at events, which included images from the research and a series of prompt questions. It was clear that the pictorial representations of the findings in the slides and the playing cards was a key part of people’s interest in the research. This was evident in three ways:

(1) Most straightforwardly people told us that they could put themselves into the research more easily in the ways that they interpreted the pictures. The research had an open quality that would not have been present if we had relied on words on PowerPoint slides (Bekker and Clark, 2018). People appreciated the sense that the findings were not a ‘how to’ guide or a Human Resources toolkit. The aspirations set out in the 21^st Century Public Servant report (Needham and Mangan, 2014) were much more likely to be achieved through personal reflection, internal organisational dialogue, external networking and peer learning than through job evaluation processes.

(2) As we spoke to the pictures rather than presenting written text, the presentation was different each time and more able to adapt to local settings and service domains. For example, when presenting at the NHS Confederation annual conference we were able to give different emphases and illustrative examples than at the College of Policing event. Through the card game, people were able to apply the research themes to their own dilemmas and challenges in dialogue with colleagues. For police officers, this prompted discussion about how to deal with repeat callers to 999. For children’s social workers, it was about the skills need to negotiate access to homes when parents were wary or hostile.

(3) People told us their stories during these sessions and that feedback became the stories and examples we used when sharing the research elsewhere. That meant that the research ‘bulked up’ over time as a dialogue with the sector rather than as a set of static findings. This fits into the understanding as storytelling as a method of knowledge exchange (Stella, 2014), with a particular link to arts-based methods for research storytelling (Christensen et al., 2018). Our interpretations of the images prompted reflections from the audience that deepened our own insights into what it felt like to be a public servant. For example, in conversation with the fire service we learned about how much the service was moving into the preventative/public health space as the incidence of house fires decreased. This led to a side project with them on the emotional labour of home safety checks and how that work was different from crisis situations, and in some ways more challenging (Needham et al., 2021). The series of sessions we did for public servants in Australia and New Zealand helped us understand how depictions of ‘rural and remote’ in England needed to be adapted and rethought for the Australian landscape and the inclusion of First Nations.

Extending the work to councillors

The parallel project that we did on the 21^st Century Councillor work initially stemmed from an officer in a local council asking from the floor: ‘Are my elected members going to come on this journey with me?’ We began a new piece of work, again based on interviews, so that we understood the challenges and ways of working that councillors felt were key to effective working (Mangan et al., 2015). This work was in partnership with North West Employers, a regional organisation supporting local authorities, which assisted us with the access and reach of the work. Having done the councillor research we were able to give more emphasis to the distinctive political environment of local government in understanding the roles of public servants. We found that councillors were experiencing many of the same challenges as public servants, although the language and roles were different: councillors talked about being stewards of place, catalysts and orchestrators, and about needing to be buffers to protect citizens from the worst of the cuts. The 21^st Century Councillor findings were used in councillor induction and training by the Local Government Association and regional employer bodies.

Phase 2 of the research 2020-

The Covid-19 pandemic was a major transformation point for public services, as it was for society more generally. Here we set out the research that we did from 2020 onwards, which captured the impact of the pandemic and the recovery process, and resulted in a refreshed version of the 21st Century Public Servant and 21st Century Councillor.

Context

During the first lockdown (spring/summer 2020) we did research with North West Employers to track how public servants were responding to the pandemic (Needham and Mangan, 2021). That work captured the shifts in where and how people worked, which skills were valued and also the rapidity and flexibility with which the sector was working. Within local government, people were working around the clock to arrange care packages and Personal Protective Equipment. Much of that activity was coordinated by people working from home (whilst managing caring responsibilities), but many service workers were still out on the frontline, risking infection to protect vulnerable people. Leadership was shifting – there was a renewed emphasis on command and control, but also more on the role of leaders in building a narrative for communities, on being able to help people make sense of the Covid story without knowing how long it would last and how it would end. Staff were being redeployed and there was positive learning here too about how a focus on skills rather than directorates or qualifications could lead to people making a positive contribution well outside their usual domain. There was a positive story more generally about local government – about its capacity to lead, and also to work in partnership with community groups and local leaders, to act quickly and effectively when it mattered (Needham and Mangan, 2021).

The impact of the pandemic – how it changed lives, left trauma, exposed inequalities and shifted conceptions of how and where to work – reshaped public services in myriad ways. As we moved out of the pandemic phase we were approached by LGA, SOLACE and West Midlands Employers with the suggestion that we develop a new iteration of our 21^st Century Public Servant research. As before we used a combination of literature reviewing and interviews to capture how local public servants were feeling, what the key issues were, and how those were being addressed (for methods see Needham et al., 2024).

We found that there were five areas of challenge which had intensified since the 2014 research:

(1) The deepening of austerity: austerity remained the most pressing challenge for public servants. In the original report we highlighted how the initial ‘do more with less’ phase of austerity, was moving into something more traumatic with services being cut and jobs lost as ‘efficiency savings’. More strategic approaches have since been required with councils seeking to increase revenue, sharing services, developing greater co-production or transferring responsibilities to other organisations such as museum or leisure trusts. Most recently, councils have struggled to meet even statutory requirements. For the first time in twenty years, some local authorities have issued Section 114 notices – indicating severe financial crisis – with other councils likely to follow. This requires local authorities to pare back to basic services and may necessitate the closure of amenities such as libraries and leisure centres. The local authorities that had been praised for commercial ventures a few years ago were shown to be exposed to excessive risks and failed projects (e.g. Nottingham City Council’s energy company (BBC, 2020)).

Hence ‘perma-austerity’ now not only means fewer resources and fewer colleagues for public servants to work with, but, also means taking on extra roles without pay increases. In the interviews people told us of the false economies this engendered. As one interviewee said: ‘Many local authorities did the bare minimum… it drove the innovation out, but it also drove the relationships out as well because we weren’t just cutting ourselves, we were cutting our relationships with the voluntary and community sector by reducing their budgets as well. It was absolute false economy because the only thing it did was it drove statutory demand much faster to the doors of local authorities.’

Cuts to staffing also meant that people had smaller teams and were routinely working long hours to try to keep up with the workload, and still not being able to get through the work: ‘So they’re constantly behind three to four weeks anyway at the time. And then that puts pressure on the officers below them, puts pressure below them and it’s just that vicious circle.’

(2) Communities in distress: The austerity of the decade from 2010 resulted in profound social damage including an intensification of poverty and destitution (Etherington et al., 2023). These effects were further intensified by the pandemic from 2020 and the cost-of-living crisis from 2022 onwards (Patrick and Pybus, 2022). Public service reductions, welfare cuts and the long-running effects of deindustrialisation have all impacted disproportionally on certain places and communities (Etherington et al., 2023). Climate change and extreme weather are also creating new risks for communities. Flooding, extreme heat and coastal erosion sit squarely within the remit of local public services.

For public services, the consequence has been more demand for services and more complexity in the cases that are coming forward. As services become more transactional, to cope with cost-cutting and manage demand, they become less suited to deal with the complexity of those cases. One interviewee talked of services becoming ‘finance led’ with short-term solutions rather added value: ‘Everything becomes acute, has to be done in the moment and all that matters is your bottom-line figure’. This leads to a feedback loop of crisis management with issues being only temporarily resolved.

(3) Incivility in public life: A lack of confidence in public institutions, along with the new levels of distress that communities are feeling, are the background for a lack of trust and increased public scrutiny, particularly online (King and Brown, 2007; Montagu and Maplethorpe, 2024). For employees in public facing roles, it becomes more difficult to perform effectively as emotional stress and concerns about personal safety undermine delivery and wellbeing (Davidovitz, 2024). Interviewees talked of awareness of the increase in abuse and harassment in public services, and the need to keep a low profile on social media to minimise the risks: ‘In my own organisation there are only two of the corporate leadership team who are active on social media in a corporate capacity, in a professional capacity. Because the level of abuse and harassment is so significant’.

(4) The rising profile of equality, diversity and inclusion: There is much more awareness than 10 years ago of systemic inequalities in public services. Movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter have fueled debate across the sector and led to demands for more awareness and training. However, reduced resources mean that there is less time spent with citizens and can reduce the attention paid to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) issues. The politics of culture and identity are also more complex, requiring public servants to be trained in cultural competency and identity awareness. As one interviewee put it: ‘you have to be so, so much more culturally literate and culturally intelligent than you did 10 years ago.’ This is a difficult political terrain as there has been pushback from some political leaders and some aspects of the media against a perceived ‘woke’ agenda; with criticisms made against training around EDI issues and funding EDI roles in public sector organisations.

(5) Changes to place: Place is a key lens for local public servants - part of people’s identity as well as shaping legal jurisdictions. What place means, and who speaks for the place, is in flux in response to the development of regional authorities, the establishment of mayors and the redrawing of municipal boundaries. For public servants working in regional authorities, or the proposed new ‘strategic authorities’, they have to develop ways of working that reflect new organisational terrains and with weak democratic mandates (Roberts, 2020). ² Current proposals to remove district councils and establish new larger authorities will lead to a stripping away of the level of government which is closest to local populations (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2024).

Responding to this context: The characteristics of the public servant

In recognition of these contextual shifts over the decade, the 2024 interviews were used as the basis for exploring the roles, skills and values that would be needed to thrive in this new setting. We had found from Phase 1 that audiences had particularly connected with the role descriptors (e.g. ‘resource weaver’ and ‘municipal entrepreneur’). Hence for this phase, we framed the research around ten characteristics of the 21^st Century Public Servant.

1. As self-service and Artificial Intelligence (AI) take away much of the ‘easy work’, so public service work is increasingly complex – we describe this as working at the thick end of the complexity wedge. This can refer to organisational complexity in addressing issues such as homelessness that require partnership with other services – such as the police, housing associations and crisis support. It can also be individual complexity, as people present at the frontline with a range of challenging issues, reflecting the increasing pressures they face. Tighter eligibility criteria for public services mean that people are not visible until they reach a high level of need. Every conversation with residents becomes a ‘difficult conversation’ when the easier low-level work is now done online or not done at all.

2. Thriving cities, towns and regions require a whole system approach, in which local authorities work with other public service partners and communities to develop and embed a vision for change. In a resource-constrained context, this also provides a way to consider new ways of operating across the system which can reduce costs over the long-term. Thinking whole system requires public servants to recognise that they are working in complex adaptive systems which have emergent properties. Workers can seek to influence change but the interactions within the system will themselves shape outcomes in ways that they may not anticipate. Leaders cannot pull a lever and expect change to occur in a predictable way. Public servants need to develop strategies for the long-term, whilst being ready for short-term volatility and unforeseen outcomes.

3. Sense-exchanging recognises that the public servant’s view of the world should not take precedence. It is important to appreciate how the world looks from the perspective of others. The role of public servants is not to be lone problem solvers but to work with citizens and partners to develop shared understandings of what the key issues are and how they might be addressed. Sense-exchanging offers a different way to talk about some of the difficult boundary issues in public services – be it NHS and social care disputes over why patients are stuck in hospital, or the police withdrawing from mental health call outs. Starting from a position of ‘how does the world look to them’ can open up different conversations and offers a basis for developing trust. It requires being willing to express vulnerability and to recognise that public servants only have partial understanding of complex challenges, to be curious, to want to see the world through the eyes of others. To understand why some communities don’t trust public services we need to understand the legacies of exclusion and discrimination. This widening of perspective can underpin the allyship with marginalized groups which we know is crucial to inclusive public services.

4. Responding to the challenging context requires a commitment to putting relationships first, hence we talk about being a relationship curator. Relationships are the job, they are not the ‘nice to have’ bits at the edges. Public servants often prefer a relational approach when working with communities, but the gatekeeping and transactional processes of their organisations prevent that. In cash-strapped public services, it can be hard to make time to get out into communities and get to know people, but this is key to building effective relationships. The pandemic led to innovative and intuitive approaches to engaging residents, highlighting the benefits of and need for public engagement to build strong relationships with communities. There is scope to build on these if the central importance of relationships is acknowledged, rather than treated as an add-on.

5. We use the language of being ambidextrous to highlight that public servants can no longer choose between being a specialist and a generalist, they must be both. Public services will continue to need planners, lawyers, accountants and commissioners, and to recruit people on the basis of excellence in a professional domain. However, the importance of whole system and relational approaches means that we cannot foreground professional competence and ignore the so-called soft skills of engaging with citizens and collaborating with partners.

6. Being multilingual is important both for working with citizens and for working across organisations and sectors. By this we mean being able to speak different organisational ‘languages’, acting as interpreter and meditator. This kind of multilingualism is learnt from diverse careers, where people have spent time working in different organisational cultures, but also from acting as a good organisational ‘neighbour’, spending time with other organisations and helping out with projects and events. It incorporates the ability to be understood in public settings, as well as being able to tune into citizen conversations. Increasingly, being multi-lingual will also mean being able to communicate with AI, knowing how and when to use it, how to support citizens to use it and the ethical implications of its use.

7. The austerity context facing public services has deepened over the past decade to the extent that many local authorities are at the point of financial crisis. Among our interviewees there is less optimism now that innovation can be a ‘burning platform’ for change, and more awareness of the way that insufficient funding degrades people’s capacity to experiment, build relationships and think creatively. In this context, interviewees conveyed to us that all that is possible is what NESTA have called frugal innovation (Newton, 2016), weaving together bits of resources from across the system. Generating income from external funders becomes a key role, horizon scanning for pilot projects and funding opportunities. As one interviewee put it, ‘We apply to everything and everyone’. However, the effort of chasing small pots of money is also recognised to be a drain on core resources, impeding strategic and long term thinking.

8. The 21st Century Public Servant has to be ready to embrace the opportunities presented by data and digital. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data are already transforming public service by offering improvements in decision making and service delivery (Pencheva et al., 2020). Public services can be improved by using data to make them context-sensitive and tailor them to users’ needs and streamline bureaucracy (Larsson and Skjolsvik, 2021). Interviewees talked of being able to use data in ways which was ‘light years’ ahead of what was possible when we wrote our initial report ten years ago. Public servants now have access to a range of real-time data which can paint an accessible picture of what is happening for communities, enabling rapid adjustment. There are a set of data analysis, policy and ethical skills which underpin this, and we need to be sure that people joining local public services are supported to access those skills. Equally where people have the skills to mine data effectively we need to ensure that they aren’t thwarted by councils’ systems and processes that aren’t yet able to deliver such granular, accessible data. AI capabilities are moving at such a rate that there is also a need to support people through the turbulence that this brings – including the threat that AI could be taking their jobs in the near future. There may be a generational divide here between younger and older workers in terms of digital literacy and AI-awareness, with scope for reverse mentoring to share skills.

9. Most public service organisations now have some hybrid working. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of remote working, such that the office is no longer the default location for much public service work. It is likely that this hybridity will continue – with some time spent in the office, some at home, and some out at face-to-face meetings in the community or with partners. What is less settled is what the ‘new normal’ should be, to ensure that people can combine flexible working with team building and sustaining a supportive organisational culture. Some local authorities are selling off office space and encouraging home working – often for financial reasons. Others are mandating a return to the office, with the message that working from home is not considered ‘proper work’. For many workers, remote working has positive impacts, enabling them to achieve better work-life balance; although for many there is also a blurring of boundaries between work and home life (Taylor et al., 2021). The loss of an on-site work community has unsettled their sense of being part of a team and left them dislocated. We know that this is a particular challenge for people joining a new organisation, where there may be limited opportunities to meet face to face.

10. With all the challenges facing public servants, they are required to be like hardy perennials (i.e. plants that can survive winter frosts and keep going year on year). In our original 21st Century Public Servant report in 2014 we highlighted the need for self-care and resilience. After such a turbulent decade, we know that public service workers are struggling more than ever before. We have therefore characterised the resilience of public service work as that of a hardy perennial, keeping going despite adverse conditions. There may be times when the contribution is less visible, as people scale back to their core tasks. At other times people are able to flourish and be visible, as they build their links and profile across the whole system. The plant metaphor also brings a reminder about being rooted within the purpose of public service work, and within the communities that are served. The public service ethos remains an important touchstone for many working in public services, which isn’t limited to the public sector. It is about finding common purpose with multiple partners around improving the lives of citizens. To ensure that people can thrive within this work, we need to recognise that they don’t just need qualifications and training. They need coaching and supervisory models that enable reflective practice and learning. They need opportunities to access spaces where they can learn with peers from other parts of the system, and in ways that recognise and value diversity and inclusion.

Extending the work to councillors

As in 2014, following the publication of the 21^st Century Public Servant refresh, we undertook a parallel piece of work with councillors (Mangan et al., 2025). Many of the same challenges were evident for councillors as for officers – coping with deep and sustained austerity, changing citizen expectations, new technologies and new modes of working. Councillors appreciated the flexibility of online meetings but missed the opportunity to talk to officers in person. A distinctive challenge for councillors was managing the publicness of their role. They are elected as representatives of communities, with an expectation of visibility and access. Some still had their home addresses published on councils’ websites. Many maintain a social media presence to connect with constituents, despite the abuse and trolling that this generates. Councillors talked about the threats to their personal safety and their mental health and how to keep safe whilst also remaining connected to communities. One described their role as being a ‘lightning rod’: providing a channel for citizens’ frustration while themselves remaining grounded and protected.

Dissemination and iterative methods

As before, we are taking the learning from the refreshed 21^st Century Public Servant and 21^st Century Councillor projects on the road (and increasingly onto Teams). We have developed a slideset of rich pictures. We have also developed a pack of coaching cards which people can use to link the characteristics to their organisational challenges and personal development goals. We will use the visual imagery as the basis for storytelling, with the ten characteristics being deepened and enriched through the conversations we have. We see the characteristics as conversation starters, ways to encourage public servants to tell stories which we can then build into the shared and iterative learning. There is no formula or toolkit for change.

As we talk to people about being ‘frugal innovators’ and ‘hardy perennials’, we have to be mindful of issues of complicity. Orr and Bennett (2021) analysed four ‘austerity imaginaries’ involving ‘shared understandings of the role and potential for local government during times of acute fiscal pressure’. They warn against ‘complicity in the enduring influence of neoliberalism, and the sidestepping of a more radical challenge to underlying assumptions about the what, why and how of political change’ (p.15). Our work is about supporting public servants to cope with the challenges facing public servants, but it cannot shore up an underfunded system. Councils cannot fix multi-million pound holes in their budget by everyone being a ‘frugal innovator’. People can’t keep pushing up as ‘hardy perennials’ when their working environment is barren and degraded. Jaunty metaphors are not a substitute for political challenge to the financial devastation that has been wrought on local government, and we are alert to this in our engagement with public servants.

Conclusion

For over a decade we have worked with public servants to share our research, hear their stories and together understand what it means to be a 21^st Century Public Servant. This has been an iterative and longitudinal process, in which the themes from each phase cumulatively add to the learning. Along the way, as we have presented the research through arts-based and story-telling approaches, we have gathered new insights and stories and built them into the way we have shared the findings. We have heard from public servants about intense pressures and distress as they watch austerity rip out vital services and we have heard positive accounts of whole system working to give citizens the holistic support that they need. Councillors are part of the story and we have talked to them about the distinctive challenges of being a politician in local government, as they contribute a lay voice into public service reform debates.

The research provides a vocabulary and a framework for public servants and councillors to use in their personal and organisational development. When struggling with common issues, such as budgetary pressures, system complexity, climate fragility or social media abuse, the themes in the research offer ways forward. On system complexity, for example, the message is not that complexity is something that you need to ‘get on top of’, rather it is about being able to tolerate the uncertainty and inch forward through building trust and dialogue with affected parties. The research calls for more awareness of how hybrid forms of working are reshaping workforce dynamics, and an appreciation that the ‘real work’ of public service is not just the processing of tasks but also the building of networks and relationships.

The work has many limitations: we have not spoken to citizens, the interview samples are small and drawn from English public services. Many of our interviewees had worked in public services for many years and we have not sufficiently reflected the perspective of newer generations coming into local government (we have begun work on this, see Mangan et al., 2024). In pulling together themes from the research we had to flatten the differences between types of public service, between geographies and between struggling and thriving organisations. Themes of diversity, and the experience of working in public services whilst experiencing forms of discrimination, are underplayed and require more attention.

What we have done, across five projects (two with public servants, two with councillors and one on Covid-19), is to appreciate the benefits of storytelling as a form of knowledge exchange. Interviewees have told us their stories and we have thematized those and told them back to the sector. We have done so in the spirit of: does this resonate, does it connect, how does this show up in your working life? Tell us your stories. Over 15 years of austerity these are stories of strain, of making things work despite rather than because of the political climate. Our hope – for public servants, for services and for communities – is that better times lie ahead.