New Zealand's civil servants are well regarded. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The Labour-led coalition Government has embarked on an ambitious policy platform. Its public sector agencies are critically important partners in taking the lead on public engagement and implementation of change.
For the Government's programme to succeed, these organisations need the confidence of the public. So how do they measure up in the eyes of everyday Kiwis?
Let's begin with institutional trust. The OECD recommends measuring trust on a zero to 10 scale where zero equals not at all and 10 equals completely. If someone scores an organisation between seven and 10, we say that person "trusts" it. If they give a score of zero to three, we say they "distrust" the organisation. Four to six means they are indifferent or neutral.
Colmar Brunton has just released the results of its Public Sector Reputation Index for 2018. As part of the public sector reputation study, a representative sample of 2000 New Zealanders was asked to rate certain groups or institutions using the trust scale.
Those groups (with their scores in brackets) were: People they know (family and friends) — 82 per cent trust, 2 per cent distrust; the police — 68 per cent trust, 8 per cent distrust; most people (we'd call that the general public) — 53 per cent trust, 10 per cent distrust; Parliament — 27 per cent trust, 29 per cent distrust.
Our Parliament being polarising is consistent with global findings. For example, a key conclusion of The Leaders Report published by WPP Government and Public Sector Practice last year was that "citizens fear change, distrust globalisation and disregard politicians".
But in New Zealand, this disregard does not extend to the wider public sector, with 41 per cent saying they "trust" the civil service and only 8 per cent saying they "distrust" it. For New Zealanders, this is strategically significant.
Given the high level of trust in the public sector generally, the Public Sector Reputation Index then delved deeper into the performance of individual agencies and found a consistent result.
This year the index benchmarked 45 national public sector organisations against the four pillars that contribute to reputation: leadership and success, fairness, social responsibility, and trust.
Fire and Emergency took the top spot for the third year running.
There were two notable newcomers, MetService and Tourism New Zealand, included for the first time and coming in at second and fifth respectively. The Department of Conservation held on to last year's spot of third, and the Customs Service gained two places, moving up to fourth.
With the global RepZ framework used in the survey, an index score of 105 or higher is considered "superior strength", and organisations that achieve this score are considered to have a more resilient reputation, which means when things go wrong people are more likely to view adverse events as one-off occurrences.
Our results show that public sector performance is healthy, with 33 per cent of the organisations scoring 105 or higher. In addition, New Zealand public sector agencies are strongest at "trust" and "leadership", with 38 per cent and 36 per cent of our public sector agencies scoring 105 or higher in these pillars respectively.
We also found that reputation is driven in one of three ways: through personal experience; through information received via the media; and through general impressions or hearsay about the agency.
Most agencies strongly gravitate to one of these influences and those whose reputation is driven through the media have a greater chance of having "superior strength" across the pillars and RepZ, compared with those whose reputation is driven by perception or experience.
The Public Sector Reputation Index shows that New Zealand's public sector agencies are trusted leaders. Their reputational strengths should be respected and used constructively by the Government in the process of connecting, communicating and implementing policy change with everyday Kiwis.
• Grant Bell is group account director for Colmar Brunton.