Delivering Policy Impact in the Civil Service – Four-Day Training Course
This is an in-house training course. For further information and pricing contact [email protected] or phone on +44 20 7661 7817.
Day One Leading a Policy Team
Day Two Delivering Public Good
Day Three Policy Communications / Monitoring and Evaluation
Day Four Modifying Behaviour through Policy
Overview
This four-day training course has been designed to focus on practical approaches that you can use to work with your civil service colleagues to deliver impact.
The course starts by looking at how to work well together as a team, focusing on shared objectives and goals to achieve your aims. It then examines in detail methods and approaches for delivering public good through your policy interventions, which is the fundamental purpose of policy programmes, but which can often be blurred by the difficulties of successfully rolling out policies in the real world.
It will then examine the importance of communications in the policy development stages, as well as the crucial necessity of communicating policies to the public once they are being implemented, if they are to succeed. Monitoring and evaluation are also key in terms of properly assessing impact and analysing the need for potential modification or further steps that may need to be taken to ensure that outcomes and intended impacts are achieved.
On the fourth day, we shall examine how policy can be used to modify behaviour, and how civil servants can make use of methodological approaches and psychological insights to improve the potential impact of their policy implementation.
Who is it designed for?
This training course is designed for public servants working on all aspects of policy. It is particularly useful for team leaders who want to ensure that they are fully equipped to leads their teams to achieve their full potential in terms of impact, and it is also designed for team members who are seeking to work collaboratively to deliver their policy goals.
How will you benefit from attending?
Over the four days of this programme, you will develop and sophisticated and practical range of skills and breadth of knowledge about how to develop, implement and measure impact through policy, to better achieve your overall policy goals and objectives.
Learning Outcomes
- Learn how to establish policy visions within your team
- Understand the roles of experts and stakeholders in policy-making and implementation, and how to manage the process of working with evidence provided by outside input
- Analyse and understand how to delegate
- Understand the importance of the concept of public good in economics and policy making
- Be able to use cost-benefit analysis and other tools, and understand how to use your resources to make the greatest strategic impact
- Learn how to sharpen communications to improve policy development and decision-making, and to increase the positive impact of policies
- How to use monitoring and evaluation to improve performance management, impact assessment and future planning
- Analyse and learn how people’s attitudes and behaviour can be understood through research, and how to apply this to your policy scoping and formulation
- Examine and learn how to maximise policy impact through behavioural awareness and building-in psychological insight throughout the policy-making cycle
Day One Leading a Policy Team
Welcome and Introductions
Session One Policy and Strategy
- Policy and strategy: sharing understanding of definitions
- Analysis of models
- Building in versatility to manage processes within the team
- Sharing delegates’ experiences
Session Two Group Exercise
- Establishing policy visions
- Ensuring effective communications and buy-in within your team
- Facilitated discussion
Session Three Leaders, Teams and Experts
- Examination of the roles of leaders, teams and outside experts
- Ensuring clear lines of communication between these component team members and stakeholders – procedures and approaches
- Delegate input
Lunch
Session Four Leading through Uncertainty
- Approaches to leading your team and colleagues through different kinds of uncertainty
- Identifying methods to predict, mitigate and manage uncertainty
- Influencing skills
- Discussion of delegates’ views and experiences
Session Five Delegation Skills and Leadership
- Delegation skills and leadership in the policy context
- Considerations and techniques
- Sharing of delegate input and review of the day
Close
Day Two Delivering Public Good
Session One Defining Public Good
- The Ideal – The UN’s SDGs and other supra-national initiatives
- National initiatives and case studies
- Education, welfare, pensions
- Public good and Covid
- Discussion and sharing of delegates’ experiences
Session Two Cost Benefit Analysis, VFM and Quantifying “Good”
- Analysis of key concepts
- Defining and evaluating cost, efficiency, waste, benefits
- Discussion of the concept of competition
- Procurement processes and tensions
- Chief Accounting Officers and monitoring the audit trail
- Discussion and analysis
Session Three Managing the Tension Between Public Good and VFM
- Tension between VFM and public good – how to quantify and manage this – why strategy is crucial in this process
- Politics as the manifestation of differing policy priorities
- The complex mix of party political, departmental, ministerial and government agendas – how to achieve the seamless transition from ministerial will into successfully delivered policy outcomes
- Policy intervention, political expediency and the electoral cycle
- Discussion and sharing delegate views
Lunch
Session Four Building Public Good into Policy Development and the Delivery Process
- What does policy aim to achieve?
- Fundamentals of the public policy
- Improving citizens’ lives, reducing inequality, providing support, achieving societal cohesion
- Action planning delivery-focused policy development strategies
- Analysis of the characteristics of successful, robust delivery-focused policy development – what seems to work well, and why? What does not seem to work and why?
- Discussion of delegates’ own examples
Session Five Practicalities and Action Planning for Policy Delivery Beyond VFM
- How to effectively bridge the Policy/Operational delivery divide
- Focus on practical policy development
- The evidence base and other approaches to successful policy formulation
- Bringing in the operations and project managers early in the policy cycle
- How to move seamlessly from policy decisions into project planning and delivery
- Facilitated final discussion
Close
Day Three Policy Communications and Monitoring and Evaluation
Session One Communicating Policy – The Principles
- Where effective communications fits in the Policy Cycle
- What, why and to whom to communicate – Purpose, Audience and Effect model
- The need for flexibility – marrying the political/policy agendas and short/long term communication strategies
- Key differences between oral and written communications
Session Two Communicating with Internal and External stakeholders
- Writing for busy people – what they need and why
- The importance of ABC – Accurate, Brief and Clear
- Segmenting your audience
- Stakeholder management – who matters most and what to do about it
- Working with Press Office – Lines to Take, core messages to get across
- Building relationships with the media
Session Three Communication Campaigns
- Using campaigns to change behaviour
- Successful communications supporting successful policies – and the reverse
Lunch
Session Four M&E
- Definitions – what is meant by monitoring and evaluation
- Where it fits in the Policy Cycle
Session Five Monitoring
- The importance of early planning
- Making it integral to policy design
- Developing a monitoring framework
Session Six Evaluation
- Key reasons for evaluation
- Types of evaluation
- What should be evaluated
- Using Monitoring and Evaluation to improve future policy development, to assess the need for policy modification, and to plan next stages to ensure successful impact over time
Close
Day Four Modifying Behaviour through Policy
Session One Policy-Making and the Limits of Rationalism
- Behavioural change from social marketing to nudge theory
- Delivering a political agenda and implementing strategic objectives
- Shaping behaviour and outcomes
- Rational and emotional responses
- Information and belief; values and priorities
- Facilitated delegate discussion
Session Two Understanding the Psychology of Behaviour
- How can policy design take into account the vast range of everyday human characteristics?
- Understanding drivers of motivation in behaviour
- Self-interest and altruism: familiarity and comfort zones; habits and routines
- Social sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics
- External influences on behaviour and attitudes – media, upbringing, social milieu, culture, family, peer groups, work colleagues
- Delegate experience sharing
Session Three Measuring and Tracking Awareness, Attitudes and Behaviour
- Quantitative research: polls, surveys and panels
- Qualitative research: interviews, focus groups, deliberate events
- Awareness: what people know
- Attitudes: what people think and feel
- Behaviour: what they do
- Delegate discussion
Lunch
Session Four Marketing and Communications as Policy Tools
- Audience segmentation and profiling
- Targeting and channel strategies
- Brand, advertising and PR
- Price, incentives and promotions
- Loyalty and advocacy
- Discussion
Session Five Barriers to Behavioural Change
- Compliance, uptake and personality profiles
- Hard to reach and resistant groups
- Resources: risks of under-investing in behavioural change
- Time: the need for intensive long-term intervention
- Opponents: competing and conflicting voices
- Backlash: libertarianism, ‘health and safety madness’ and the nanny state
Our L&D ethos
Close of the Course
- We’re here to enable you to perform better
Our L&D team
- All former practitioners, now professional trainers, our L&D team have provided open and bespoke solutions for more than 100,000 public servants from 120 countries
Our L&D seminars
- A vast reservoir of international, transferable knowledge and perspectives about effective, delivery-focused approaches to working smarter in the public sector
This is an in-house training course. For further information and pricing contact [email protected] or phone on +44 20 7661 7817.
