# **Experience of the Civil Service**

Civil servants surveys allow us to ask officials about their personal experience of the civil service. We have outlined the scale, characteristics and positions of their colleagues, and sketched the scope, resources and management practices of their organizations, but what constitutes the everyday culture in which officials work? How would civil servants characterise the experience of working in the civil service?

Table 4 provides summary descriptives of questions relating to whether officials believe it is ‘prestigious’ to work for their department/organization and whether they are ‘proud’ to work in the civil service. 71% of Ghanaian civil servants believe that their part of the civil service is a prestigious place to work, but only half of them are proud to work there. In contrast, while Indonesian civil servants are far less likely to state that their organization is a prestigious place of work, they are far more likely to state that they are proud to work there.

The Pakistan survey allows us to understand how the experience of the service varies within the same umbrella organization, but across sub-offices. In Pakistan, across the four locations of the Federal Board of Revenue, there was a relatively homogenous belief in the prestige of the organization. However, we find substantial variation across organizations in the other countries for which we have data, implying a pecking order within the civil service’s organizations. In Indonesia, only a quarter of officials at one organization believed their office to be prestigious, while in another department of government, 93% of their colleagues believed in the prestige of their place of work.

However they feel about their workplace, how do they feel about their colleagues? Given the prevalence of team work in bureaucracies, bureaucrats are often said to value trustworthiness in their colleagues. To what extent do officials believe their colleagues are trustworthy? Table 4 provides details of the extent to which officials agreed with the statement “Most people in your organization can be trusted”. We see that in those surveys where the question was asked, between half and three-quarters of staff agree with the proposition. How stable is this statistic across the service? In Indonesia, where we have both questions on trust and a significant number of organizations, we can look at how the proportion of officials who state that they trust their colleagues varies across organizations. Even the organization with the lowest levels of trust in the Indonesia survey has 40% of officials stating that they trust their colleagues. The rest of the organizations are relatively evenly spread between 40% and 90% of respondents stating that most people in their organization can be trusted. Officials were also asked whether most people in government (so outside of their specific organization) can be trusted, and the proportion of officials that agree falls by about 20 percentage points in each case compared with the trust in their organizational colleagues.

We can compare these levels of stated trust to a similar question in the World Values Survey, a global research exercise to measure people’s values and beliefs.<sup>21</sup> Though within-firm data would be more appropriate, the World Values Survey has been used to approximate firm-level trust levels given the paucity of other data (Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen, 2012). In Pakistan, only 22% of respondents in the 2010-2014 wave agreed that “Most people can be trusted” and in the Philippines, it was a mere 3.2% of respondents. The average for all countries available is 24%. This figure is stable even if the question is restricted to ‘your neighbourhood’ or to ‘people you know personally’. Thus, trust within the service, and particularly within organizations, is far higher than among the population as a whole.

Another important part of the service is a common belief that officials are treated fairly; with a single interpretation of the public service rules. Thus, how officials perceive the punishments they receive is key element of public service culture. Table 4 presents average responses to questions relating to whether ‘punishments are applied appropriately’. The surveys differed on how they assessed punishments, which

> 21For more information on the World Values Survey, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

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