New public management (NPM) has been a driver of organisational change in many countries, and some Australian governments have been aggressive in pursuit of reforms in the name of NPM. Changes to service delivery frameworks often lead to changes in work practices and HRM employment frameworks, sometimes with dehumanising effects on both the citizens and staff involved in services. This paper examines the effects of organisational change in one Australian public service agency – the Department of Human Services (DHS) – whose functions include provision of social security benefits.
Since 2014, the Abbott/Turnbull conservative governments committed to ‘better management of the social welfare system’, to achieve the NPM aims of efficiency and budget savings, with the political benefit of appearing tough on welfare recipients. In brief, the reform involved automation of previously manual systems for data-matching of actual income per annum with fortnightly welfare payments. The 2016 Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) was able to send automated letters to 200,000 people in a three month period – about 20,000 per week for 3 months, requiring more information or generating a debt that needed to be repaid. The automated nature of the system led to it being known colloquially as “robo-debt’. The high error rate of these automated letters led affected citizens to mobilise in a way unusual for vulnerable people on income support (including whistle-blowing to the media, and a social media backlash on a website called #NotMyDebt) and led to a Senate inquiry to investigate the matter.
This research focuses on a less-studied aspect of the robo-debt case, being the effects on DHS staff. It examines the organisational change process, which sought to create value through automation of complex decision-making, by excluding staff and outsourcing decisions to citizens, but then requiring staff to resolve the extensive implementation failure. It will provide a normative framework for organisational change, and draw on secondary documents (including media, hansard, senate, and union reports) during the period. The findings include: the failure to consult expert staff in design of the changes; the lack of testing and quality control before the change was implemented; the downsizing and reduced capacity of remaining staff to answer the exponentially increased volume of phone calls and complaints; the stressful nature of dealing with justifiably angry citizens; the effects of the perceived failure of the reform and its reflection on DHS staff. The Senate inquiry also suggested that staff were afraid to voice their concerns to management, as they had little faith that public interest disclosure or whistle-blower mechanisms would protect them, and that they believed their emails and Facebook accounts were being monitored. As well as reflecting on the failure to implement a sound organisational change process, the research will consider the effects of such a case on professional public servants and their employment frameworks in the face of NPM reform and attempts to create value through robots.
Organisational change and the organisation of public sector work
