Transforming the State Without Losing the Meaning of Public Service

The fight against market abuse, money laundering and customs offences has one thing in common: it aims to establish a stable and healthy economic framework for the overwhelming majority of citizens, consumers, savers and financial institutions… I aspire to a public service that regulates and serves a useful purpose without becoming an “administration that merely administers”.

As head of the interregional human resources division within Customs, I came to understand the sensitivity of this function, which manages an institution’s most valuable resource. It involves major issues at every stage of a career: attractiveness, mobility, promotion…

More than that, the managerial dimension is the cornerstone of success for a head of department and their team. At every level, each manager must give meaning to the work of their team, with conviction and consistency. This requirement, like a permanent challenge, has driven my pursuit of increasing responsibilities.

Working for Tracfin and the French Financial Markets Authority allowed me to operate in multicultural environments, alongside colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds, while remaining grounded in the realities faced by economic actors. To understand its operating environment and be understood by it, the administration must connect with it and foster a genuine culture of openness among its staff.

My career and university education have made communication an essential managerial lever in two respects. Internally, it recognises the value of teams and contributes to overall cohesion. Externally, it helps explain our work and enhances the attractiveness of our professions. Knowing how to do the work is no longer enough; we must also make it known.

Just as there is no universal company, I do not believe there is a single model of administrative operation. Given differences in size, status and geography, how could one imagine a standardised representation? The caricature of the civil servant is unbearable to me. It is not only unfounded; above all, it makes no sense. One thing unites public servants: the notion of public service. That commitment delivers quality of service and helps sustain the resilience of our model of society.

On the ground, I see a strong commitment from our teams, with managers working tirelessly to meet the demands of often ambitious public policies in a constrained budgetary environment. It is indeed our duty to make the best possible use of public funds.

Changing tools, practices and culture admittedly takes time. Yet we should recognise the administrations’ capacity for innovation. Did the Public Finances administration not carry out a major shift with the introduction of withholding tax? Did Customs not reinvent itself after the disappearance of the European Union’s internal borders and then the fading of the digital border? These are just a few examples illustrating the remarkable capacity of our administrations and their staff to modernise and provide an appropriate service.

Finally, we should not overlook the extraordinary complexity of our environment. Every policy involves a wide range of public and private actors and a complex legal framework… so while the administration may sometimes appear slow, it acts above all as the guarantor that its missions are carried out.

I do not wish to present an idealised picture of a perfect civil service, but I prefer to defend a model in which I believe. Committed to the common good, fully engaged in its missions and resolutely focused on the future: that is my view of the administration.

Our institutions create a framework for public policy action, with a legal system and resources designed to achieve objectives. Yet the hardest part remains: putting those policies into practice and reaching out, so that each ambition is carried through to the last mile.

We must work with the diversity of territories and with the opportunities and constraints specific to each environment.

The disability law celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year. Very substantial investments have been made, involving many adjustments in property, digital services and simplification… Yes, there is still room for progress. Because mobility-related disability has often been prioritised, as it concerns the greatest number of people and addresses multiple issues, including dependency. Because disabilities are being identified more accurately. Because the administration is gradually expanding its arrangements.

In practice, needs must be studied and people working on the ground must be heard. Our sign-language reception service evolved within a few weeks because we quickly identified several obstacles. Whether cultural or practical, they reflected the gap between our perception of the problem-and-solution pairing and the actual expectations of the people concerned. Let us build responses for service users, but, in concrete terms, let us build them with them.

Digital technology, in its broadest sense, has enabled enormous leaps in service quality and efficiency. It provides a powerful means of offering solutions adapted to a very wide range of user needs.

Some groups, for various reasons such as disability or digital illiteracy, cannot rely on this single channel. Similarly, digital tools are not suitable for complex or isolated questions, for which the cost-benefit ratio is unfavourable.

This is why the Public Finances administration offers a multichannel reception service, giving everyone a means suited to their question and circumstances. Through its own network and with its partners, particularly France services centres, the Public Finances administration maintains substantial territorial coverage. Its telephone service handles a wide range of taxpayers’ enquiries, particularly during tax-filing campaigns.

Digital technology is not intended to eliminate direct human contact. It meets most needs and offers many advantages—availability, speed and simplicity—but it cannot be the administration’s only response. It can even improve direct exchanges, for example by proposing reformulations of staff messages. Such a module exists within the Public Finances administration, but it never replaces the employee, who alone is authorised to approve and send the final message.

Tomorrow’s challenge will lie in combining these channels. Together, let us devise new solutions and build on arrangements that have already proved effective. For example, let us further develop administrative appointments by video from a smartphone, so as to reconcile mobility, modernity and the availability of public services as effectively as possible.

A framework is essential. Hierarchical approval, the use of resources, confidentiality measures… Every public servant must know which rules must be respected in order to protect our work, our data and our users. That framework must be clear and broad enough for the following three ingredients to come together.

Initiative depends on a climate of trust. Managers play a decisive role in the dynamic they create within their teams. Someone who knows that they have the trust of their manager will not hesitate to put forward ideas. That trust must be deliberate and monitored, but above all it must be sincere and clearly expressed.

For an initiative to be useful, whether individual or collective, it must then develop or make use of a skill that adds value to the service provided.

Finally, this culture of initiative draws on each person’s interests and motivations. This is the most powerful intrinsic driver of motivation. Yet in large organisations, including major administrations, this dimension is often neglected in favour of employees’ technical expertise alone.

In Dijon, a colleague expressed her particular interest in sign-language reception services, having already undertaken training on her own initiative. A project was considered in order to create the conditions for an experiment arising from that momentum. We then supported her further training. The lessons from this initiative will still need to be assessed over the longer term, as part of a continuous improvement approach.

In summary, within a clearly defined protective framework in which everyone feels trusted, giving expression to people’s interests can generate valuable initiatives and support the development of skills that serve a collective approach to innovation.

It is inconceivable to implement our public policies uniformly throughout the country. Decentralisation itself already reflects the need to adapt institutions to the local fabric.

Although decentralised State networks guarantee the continuity and unity of the State, they cannot perform effectively without analysing the environment in which they operate.

Accordingly, not every local initiative is intended to be deployed identically across the country. In the same spirit as the approach described for encouraging them, central administrations can support such initiatives by establishing a framework conducive to their emergence, yet robust enough to guarantee overall coherence.

These local variations also make senior regional positions more attractive when their holders enjoy genuine autonomy in carrying out their duties. More broadly, recognising a local experiment is a genuine managerial lever for highlighting a team’s performance and commitment.

Finally, this responds to the expectations of users who want answers adapted to their daily lives. Local administrations must then explain why responses may differ from one area to another.

Depending on the policy concerned, it can be difficult to assess this distancing from public services or the non-take-up of rights.

We offer a sign-language reception service that, by its nature, is intended for people who use sign language. Yet not every deaf or hard-of-hearing person signs. And, like other users, not every person with a disability encounters difficulties with their tax procedures. Accurately assessing the need is therefore challenging.

Our experiment began with observations from the ground. Few deaf or hard-of-hearing people came to our reception desk. Through the local voluntary sector, we knew that this communication barrier could lead people to disengage from administrative formalities.

At every interview in French Sign Language, we took care to ask users why they had come and to collect their comments and observations. We quickly understood that this arrangement complemented the existing tools. We already offered digital accessibility solutions. This reception service expands our range and is fully aligned with the multichannel policy of the Public Finances administration.

As part of their service-quality commitment under the Services Publics + programme, administrations throughout France organise local improvement committees to involve users directly in the development of public services. These meetings should provide an opportunity to address accessibility issues.

More specifically, with support from the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation, administrations are increasingly thinking in terms of user journeys, targeting specific stages of life and processes that cut across several administrations. Removing disability-related obstacles is a valuable approach.

In the past, the vast majority of civil servants were recruited through competitive examinations and shared an initial period of training in public-service schools. That pathway helped to develop a shared culture, which differed from one administration to another. Recruitment has since modernised, with redesigned examinations, sometimes shorter training programmes, contract-based recruitment and inter-administration mobility throughout the year. Moreover, recruits may be in their second or third career and do not necessarily envisage a long-term path. This necessary development addresses many challenges, including attractiveness and the diversification of profiles and skills, but it also raises many questions regarding integration.

Similarly, our internal policies long relied on seniority. Since the 2019 Civil Service Transformation Act, ministries and directorates have had management guidelines to support employee mobility and promotion. These developments still need to be consolidated, including among senior managers.

We are therefore at a turning point. Choosing public service means adopting an unusual position in our society: serving others and the common good. Depending on its history and missions, each administration also has a more or less distinctive culture. The institutions in which I have served all embody that specificity.

Given the changes in careers and aspirations described above, we must modernise our human-resources policies without destabilising our administrations or their members, whose profiles are varied, so as to guarantee high-quality public service. This goes beyond the issue of intergenerational management alone. It encompasses questions of status, career paths, recognition and merit…

We must now identify the levers that will maintain the right balance, allowing us to renew our culture of public service without ever losing sight of the meaning of our individual commitment: our collective usefulness.