Fellows Roundtable – Public Sector Report with Roni Ajao 

Extract from the Public Sector Report

In this closing address, specialist consultant Dr Roni Ajao sums up the current state of the public sector – and what sort of skills its leaders will need to meet incoming challenges

In the thick of the pandemic in 2020, it was public sector workers – not big corporate executives – who were on the sharp end of delivering solutions. It’s fair to say that in the past decade, governments around the world had largely taken their public sector staff for granted. The reality is, the pandemic revealed how important public sector workers are, and what a valuable contribution these workers make to society: Covid has no doubt created the need for governments to respond rapidly to an ever-changing landscape. One sign of this sea change is the attitude that public sector leaders now have towards wellbeing. While physical and mental health had garnered increasing recognition as HR issues before the pandemic, I don’t think the same level of attention and intensity had been devoted to staff wellbeing as that we are seeing now. Employers have begun to acknowledge that wellbeing is key to getting the best out of their staff – and if we are looking for silver linings to the pandemic, as hard as that may be, then bringing wellbeing to the fore as an asset that will help sustain public sector workforces into the future is certainly one.