Beyond efficiency: a relational perspective on public service productivity
By Katherine Long from the Scotland Productivity Forum
The TPI-funded project Joining Up Services for Children in Glasgow: Exploring New Models of Collaboration and Integration is examining how productivity is understood and experienced in public services. The project is a collaborative partnership between the University of Glasgow, Glasgow City Council, Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, and Children’s services. Using a participatory research approach in Glasgow’s South-Central area, the project works closely with practitioners, managers, community organisations and families to explore how services can collaborate more effectively to support children and young people.
Rethinking Productivity in Public Services
The research raises important questions about how productivity is defined in public services. For several decades, productivity has largely been understood through the lens of economic growth and efficiency, with success often measured through outputs, cost reduction and performance indicators. While these measures remain important, particularly in market-based settings, they do not fully capture the contribution of many public services, including health, social care, education and the voluntary sector. Increasingly, researchers and practitioners are asking whether productivity should also be understood in terms of the quality of relationships, collaboration and the experiences of service users. Recent discussions, including those emerging from the Towards Relational Public Services conference, have highlighted growing interest in these broader perspectives on productivity
A relational perspective shifts attention from what organisations achieve individually to what they can achieve collectively. This is particularly important where people’s needs are complex and require support from multiple services. Across Scotland, integration initiatives such as Integrated Joint Boards have sought to improve coordination between services, yet challenges remain. Differences in organisational language, data systems, resources and operating practices can all hinder collaboration. Our research suggests that strong relationships between services are a critical foundation for overcoming these barriers and supporting more coordinated forms of care and support
The Value of Relationships and Collaboration
Alongside questions of productivity, our research is also exploring how practitioners understand valuable work. Through collaboration with community partners, the research team has found that value is often associated with activities that enable staff to build and maintain relationships: spending time with families, providing direct support, developing trust across organisations and communicating effectively to address challenges. By contrast, practitioners frequently describe duplicated processes, fragmented communication and poorly coordinated systems as activities that limit their ability to deliver support. These insights suggest that productivity is influenced not only by the resources available to services, but also by how effectively organisations work together.
Our early scoping of the research context suggest that a relational perspective may offer an important complement to conventional understandings of productivity in public services. While efficiency, outputs and economic outcomes remain important, a relational approach draws attention to the role of trust, collaboration, communication and coordination in enabling services to work effectively together. These are factors that are often recognised by practitioners as essential to delivering positive outcomes for children, families and communities, yet they are not always captured in traditional productivity measures.
As this research is still in its early stages, we are continuing to explore how relationships shape frontline practice and how relational forms of value might be understood alongside more established measures of productivity. By examining how organisations collaborate, share knowledge and build trust across service boundaries, the research aims to contribute to wider debates about what productivity means in public services and how it can be supported. A relational approach does not replace existing measures of productivity; rather, it has the potential to broaden our understanding of the conditions that enable productive work to take place and the forms of value that public services create for individuals, families and communities.
