Flexibel durch die Krise: Handlungsempfehlungen für die lokale Verwaltung
Crisis situations require an enormous amount of flexibility from local administrations. Flexibility in the sense of changes in decision-making structures, the recruitment of personnel and organizational processes, which lead to greater freedom of action for the actors involved. This practice paper summarizes the findings of the HybOrg research project and, based on its scientific results, it presents six recommended actions for successful and flexible administrative action in times of crisis.
This practice paper presents findings from the research project «HybOrg - the emergence and social impact of hybrid organizations in local crisis management», a joint project of The Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, the Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich, and the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich.
Recommendations for action in brief
1. Practice an appreciative and accessible management culture: The political and administrative leadership should regularly communicate their recognition to the administrative staff, especially in times of crisis, and signal to them that they can be reached out to.
2. Strengthen communication and cooperation: In crisis situations, the cooperation between different administrative units makes a decisive contribution to success. Links that already exist in advance make it much easier to set up these structures, such as crisis units. For this reason, communication and cooperation formats should continue to exist even after the crisis and established structures should be retained in an adapted form.
3. Joint exercises: Crisis management with a long-term perspective requires the planning and implementation of regular crisis training courses with the involvement of all (relevant) specialist departments. It would make sense to cooperate with similar municipalities so that smaller cities / municipalities can also implement this.
4. Maintain newfound pragmatism: After the crisis, there should not be an automatic return to the status before the crisis. Instead, it should be weighed up which simplifications can be retained in order to implement more efficient administrative action overall and still ensure transparent and comprehensible administrative action.
5. Expand horizontal and vertical communication: Networking should be recognized and prioritized as an important crisis mechanism. Districts can, for example, inquire with higher-level or neighboring authorities or actively participate in innovation and networking offers. This requires financial and time resources so that districts can get actively involved in their environment.
6. Anchoring knowledge management processes: Administrations should systematically save their past experiences and findings and make them usable in order not to have to reinvent them in every crisis situation and thus staff change does not or to a lesser extent lead to a loss of knowledge. To do this, they can use established methods of knowledge management.