Civil Servants in Cyprus and the United Kingdom: An Evaluation - Thesis Proposal Example

1 Introduction This research proposal contains information pertaining to a proposed paper on a discussion and comparison of the evaluation of civil servants in Cyprus and the United Kingdom. Of particular importance is the connection between public policy and the methods and goals of evaluation. A preliminary thesis statement is: “The methods and goals of the evaluation of civil servants in both Cyprus and the United Kingdom are a more a reflection of the political values, than simple human resources methods to improve job performance”. As training is strongly linked to evaluation, a discussion and comparison of workplace training of civil servants in both countries will be included where appropriate and/or where information exclusively on evaluation is not available. Though both countries are members of the European Union, they have quite different histories. Cypruss past has been more turbulent in the past several hundred years than the UK. Great Britain was, of course, the most far reaching empire in the world – as such it developed an extensive civil service during the Victorian era. The UKs civil service has undergone many policy changes over time. This papers focus will be on the changes and administration of the past half century, especially that from 1993 to the present year. The rational for this paper is to propose and guide future research. As such a preliminary literature search has been completed. Other steps and methods in this research process will be discussed in this paper. These steps and processes may include: (1) further literature search, particularily intenal government doucments and reports, and internal civil service literature such as departmental newspapers, (2) one or more suverys, and the analysis of those surveys, and (3) interviews if and where possible. This paper begins with a discussion of the details of the preliminary research, then continues on to discuss the three other steps and approaches above. Literature Search Cyprus Scholarly information on Cyprus is much more challenging to find than that on the United Kingdom. Several sources have been found however. These include: Compliance Report on Cyprus by GRECO, and the article Tacit knowledge in an age of reform by Peter Mann published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management. As information is limited on Cyprus, a discussion of training methods of civil servants will be included as a way to further understand the evaluation of civil servants in Cyprus. Information on Cyprus, like the United Kingdom has gone through several changes in human resources management training and evaluation practices since the 1960s (Mann , 2001). Using information from Manns 2001 article, and from sources that Mann cited in that article, this paper will discuss three topics for each time period. The first topic will be the reason(s) that training is provided (What is the purpose of training?) (Mann , 2001). The second topic will be how the training is designed (What approach is taken to training?) (Mann , 2001). The final topic will be what the training covers (What is the focus of the training?) (Mann , 2001). More attention will be given to the last topic, as it is at the heart of what the civil servants will be evaluated on later. United Kingdom An inital literature search was done on the United Kingdom, as the orginal plan for the research was to compare civil service evaluation methods between Cyprus and the UK. However, like many research processes, the orginal plan has changed to just focus on Cyprus. The information on the UK will still be used on occasion in the finished paper and so has been included here – both to document the work completed to date, and to discuss information that might be used in the final paper. There is a wealth of information available on the civil service in the United Kingdome. Of particular interest to the proposed paper are: Tony Bovid and Ken Russells 2007 article in Public Administration “Civil Service Reform in the UK, 1999-2005: Revolutionary Failure or Evolutionary Success?”, information on Evaluation Policy from the online policy hub from the National School of Government, and online information pertaining to the computerized Job Evaluation and Grading Support system. The latest civil service reform in the UK occured in late 1999 when an internal reform programme was adopted by the UK Civil Service Management Board. Instead of continuous change, the programme was designed to bring about step change. Bovid and Russell concluded that this goal was only partially achieved (2007). One of the improvements that is still at an inital stage of change is the performace management systems. These in fact have taken over twenty years for civil servants to accept them. The British civil service, being an institution steeped in tradition, is not known for radical leaps or steps of change. Change has and does tend to occur in a continuous evolving fashion (Bovid and Russell, 2007 ). One of these changes is the computerized Job Evaluation and Grading Support (JEGS) (Job Evaluation and Grading Support, 2008). “JEGS is a computer-based, analytical, job evaluation methodology, which provides a systematic and consistent means of evaluating roles, below the Senior Civil Serrvice, within a Department, Agency or NDPB.” (Job Evaluation and Grading Support, 2008). It was developed by an organization outside of the UK government for application in various organizations. Built into the computerized system is the ability for the design to be adapted to an individual organizations specific evaluation needs. JEGS uses seven key factors: Knowledge and skills , Contacts and communications, Problem-solving, Decision-making, Autonomy, Management of resources, Impact, and Fair and consistent job evaluation (Job Evaluation and Grading Support, 2008). The computerized system was implemented with the goal of avoiding bias in performance evaluation, by removing the subjective, human component. This is especially important where certain legislation, such as diversity and human rights, coinscides with job performace evaluation. A guide has been made available to civil servants to demonstrate how to avoid biais: The “JEGS - Best Practice Guide”. Training has had to be given to staff managing the system inorder to have the quality of the system inputs be high enough for the evaluations to be relevant, and to avoid biais. Policy on evaluating civil servants is done by the Government Social Research Unit which is part of the Cabinet Office. This Unit was created in 2002 “to provide strategic leadership to social research across government.” including research on evaluation policy (Policy Hub, 2008). Several papers and documents produced by and/or for the unit are available for use in the proposed paper. Futher Literature Search More information can be obtained by further scholarly literature research, as well as via searching out relevant government documents and internal literature. Further scholarly research could include asking experts and existing researchers in the field for their recommendations for journal articles, books and reports on the research topic. Relevant government documents could include internal reports on the results of surveys of civil servants and their work, internal census of demographic employee composition by year and department. Internal literature would be departmental and union staff newsletters. The first bit of further literature search will likely be the easiest to obtain. While every effort will be made to obtain both relevant government documents and internal literature, either or both of these source types may not be available with the resources and time given. Surveys Surveys can be a useful research method, particularly as they gather new, primary source information that is geared to cover areas of the research question. Survey methods, even simple ones have several issues that must be attended to in order to be both valid and useful for analysis. Further research will be done on survey methods prior to and during the creation, administration, and analysis of the surveys. An initial online literature search has been done covering survey methods, including scaling and statistical analysis. The sources have been identified in a subsection of the bibliography. Most still have to be retrieved, but an older copy (1994) of one of the resources – Research Methods in Anthropology by H. Russell Bernard - is on hand and is proving to be quite useful and comprehensive on the necessary topics, even though it is a book designed for another field. There are several methods for administering surveys. This research will focus on the use of “self-administered” surveys as they “allow a single research to gather data from a large, representative sample of respondents at relatively low cost per datum.” (Bernard 1994, p.260). In addition, there are four other benefits of using surveys: no interviewer bias, ability to ask complex questions – more complex than in interviews, long lists of boring questions are possible to ask1 , and finally,“Respondents report socially undesirable behaviours and traits more willingly (and presumably more accurately) in self-administered questionnaires than the do in face-to-face interviews.” (Bernard 1994, 260). The composition of the survey has yet to be finalized. The sample size would need to be sufficient to avoid having to apply small-sample statistical analysis such as the Students T-Test (www.statistics.com). As the minimum sample size for this to occur is 30, the initial number of surveys sent out would have to be large enough that the returned responses number 30 or more. We will work with an initial assumption that 50% of the surveys are returned (giving an initial sample size of 60), and do more specific research to determine recent response rates of similar surveys. Three survey administration methods are possible for this study: mail, fax-back, and email. An additional benefit applicable to fax-back and email surveys is the speed of response possible. Detriments of using fax-back and email survey administration methods include email ending up in the “spam” box of the recipients email account, and recipients not going to the effort to get up and use the fax machine2. The benefits of mail surveys is the increased likelyhood that they will reach the inital person that it was intended for, yet people are less likely to mail back a survey than to fax or email it back. Mail based surveys are more expensive than email surveys, and can (if the sample is local), be more expensive than fax-back surveys. Email surveys are probablly the best to use for a single researcher as the returned information is already in digital form3. The reciept and return rates could be increased through phone calls to the recipients both to verify their email addresses prior to sending the surveys out, and to confirm reciept of the email and encourage responding. At this point this author and researcher must do more research to learn more about scaling and statistical methods for surveys. This research must be done prior to the creation of the surveys and the respondant lists. The researcher will look for one or two experienced researchers to consult with during this process in order to verify that the actual survey follows what this researcher will learn about survey creation and statistical analysis of surveys. Interviews Telephone interviews, and if possible, in person interviews of one or more civil servants may be used if time, resources, and contacts permit. As with surveys there are many specifics to interviews that should be taken into account prior to approaching any respondant requesting an interview. If this were a large study with substantial funding many staff could be interviewed, the results transcribed, coded and statistically analyzed. As this is not the case, if interviewing is ultimately used for this research it will be more of a case-study to illuminate and illustrate parts of the research. The person(s) interviewed may or may not be the same one(s) as were surveyed. Interviewing techniques range from highly structured interviewing, through to informal interviews. Structured interviewing involves having a predetermined set of written questions for each and every informant to answer. Informal interviews are more like taking the person to be interviewed out for coffee and having a nice chat about the research subject. This researcher prefers the middle ground of unstructured interviews that are “based on a clear plan that you [the researcher] keep constantly in mind, but are also characterized by a minimum of control over the informants responses” (Bernard 1994, 209). The initial proposal for this paper was a discussion and comparison of the evaluation of civil servants in Cyprus and the United Kingdom. A wealth of information for the proposed paper has already been found for the United Kingdom, some has been located for Cyprus, and research efforts of this author will focus on finding one to two more relevant Cyprus sources prior to the writing of the paper. These sources will be located using the bibliographies of the Cyprus sources already located, and by using Google Scholar, WordCat4 (the online world library catalogue) and the government of Cyprus’s website. However, the direction of the research has been narrowed and focused to just that of Cyprus. The information gathered on the UK will be used as general information on the evaluation of civil servants and may be used in conjunction with more research on other areas of the world. Research methods include: an initial and further literature search, surveys and interviews. Each of these methods has benefits and detriments which were outlined in the preceding pages. As a result of the preliminary examination of those research methods, this research will probably use: literature search, email surveys and if possible one or more semi-structured interviews. The research to date supports a thesis statement of: “The methods and goals of the evaluation of civil servants in Cyprus are a more a reflection of the political values, than simple human resources methods to improve job performance”. The author expects to find that methods and issues surrounding the evaluation of civil servants in Cyprus lies in the history and traditions of the civil service in Cyprus. Bibliography Literature Search Bovid, T. And K. Russell. (2007) Civil Service Reform in the UK, 1999-2005: Revolutionary Failure or Evolutionary Success? Public Administration. London: Jun 2007. Vol. 85, Iss. 2; p. 301 Critchley, T. (1951). The civil service today / by T.A. Critchley ; with an introduction by Lord Beveridge. London, Victor Gollancz. DU SAUTOY, P. (1957). The civil service / by Peter du Sautoy. London, Oxford University Press. Job Evaluation and Grading Support (JEGS) (2007) 17/12/2007 http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/cs_policy/employment/jegs.asp Gianakis, G. The Promise of Public Sector Performance Measurement: Andonym or Placebo? (DATE) Journal Name (PDF) **Need Web Access Address!* Megaw, J., SIR. (1982). Inquiry into civil service pay: report of an inquiry into t he principles and the system by which the remuneration of the non- industrial civil service should be determined. London, H.M.S.O. Monck, B. (1952). How the civil service works / by Bosworth Monck. London, Phoenix House. Norris, P. (2007) Still a Public Service Ethos? Work values, experience, and job satisfaction among government workers [online PDF of draft chapter] ksghome.harvard.edu/~PNorris/Acrobat/Public%20Service.pdf Policy Hub (2008) Evaluating Policy National School of Government February 2, 2008 [online] http://www.nationalschool.gov.uk/policyhub/evaluating _policy/ [accessed: May 14, 2008). Wilson, D. (1993). Disentangling the Purposes of Staff Appraisal. International Journal of Lifelong Education. 12, 177-90. Research Methods BERNARD, H. R. (2002). Research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative methods. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press. BERNARD, H. R. (1994). Research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative methods. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press. BERNARD, H. R. (1994). Unstructured and semistructured interviewing. Research methods in anthropology. [Offprint]. MCCOLL, E., & THOMAS, R. (2000). The use and design of questionnaires. Master classes in primary care research, no. 2. London, Royal College of General Practitioners. RAND CORPORATION. (1990s). Rand books and publications. [Santa Monica, Calif.], Rand Corp. http://www.rand.org/Abstracts/abstracts.html. Read More