At the risk of sounding like Mike Myers’ creation Austin Powers, we’re having to increasingly ’be-have’ in the public sector.

Behind this light-hearted introduction is mega serious stuff. The government has commissioned a specialist advisory team accountable to Number 10 to consider influencing behaviour in citizens following the work of psychologists like Robert Cialdini (The Six Weapons of Influence). This work is often referred to as ’nudge’ by the government in other words influencing residents to change behaviour. It ranges from persuading people to drop less litter, preserve energy, change energy consumption, eat more healthily, be more self-sufficient, and the like.

Arguably, this is a philanthropic strategy however, it also saves resources and money in these austere times. It is a veritable mix of humanitarianism and efficiency.

The issue of citizen influence has gathered pace heralding the most radical political and social change in decades. Since the Beveridge report of 1942, the UK has been founded on being a ’Welfare State’. The ’big question’ is: does the welfare state foster a set of dependency behaviours in some sections of our communities? Turning the welfare state paradigm on its head, The Big Society promotes behaviours of interdependence, self-liberation and community self-help.

What’s all this got to do with recruitment? Quite a lot, actually. Let me explain…

As a consequence of the welfare State we have recruited legions of service providers, consisting of employees with the mindset and behaviours of dishing out services and state benefits to citizens. In this increasingly post-Beveridge society our public sector workforce has to transform the whole approach to service delivery and interaction with citizens. This means the transformation of service delivery, our employees and our recruits, with budgets passing from council employees to residents.

Our focus has been on a heavily task-focused, competency-based approach to recruitment (as befitting the national target-driven agenda). Thus the focus has been on ’what’ people do and ’what’ skills and knowledge they offer. In a Big Society era we have to consider the behaviours and in particular customer service behaviours. At the same time, I appreciate, private sector readers, might be thinking “we’ve being doing this for ages”.

Fair enough, it’s now really relevant to the public sector to change workers’ behaviours (from traditional service provider to enabler, commissioner, or liberator) and for many citizens from dependency (on) state to liberation. With £81bn cuts to be found, as the debt from the banking collapse was passed to public services, there’s an awful lot riding on this. Let’s hope we’re let off for good behaviour.