Why culture matters as much as technology or strategy in government
Darren Tierney, the ONS permanent secretary. Photo: ONS
In this article for Global Government Forum, Darren Tierney, the permanent secretary of the UK Office for National Statistics, shares his leadership lessons from a year spent rebuilding confidence in an organisation facing significant internal and external challenges
The success of any organisation ultimately comes down to something very simple: its culture. If people stop speaking honestly, if leaders stop listening to difficult news, or an organisation loses sight of focus, performance inevitably suffers.
I’ve been reminded of this lesson since arriving at the Office for National Statistics: an organisation with deep expertise and a vital public mission, but one which had significant challenges. Externally, confidence had been affected by a series of well-publicised issues, while debates about office attendance had become a visible symbol of wider concerns about the organisation’s effectiveness and culture.
What I found when I arrived a year ago was an organisation that had lost belief in itself. An independent review described a culture where difficult messages were not always heard, where novelty was sometimes prioritised over necessity, and where trust between leaders and colleagues had broken down.
The challenge was not simply to improve statistics. It was to rebuild the conditions that make good statistics possible, to rebuild the ONS as the proud national statistics institute it once was. This has meant breaking with some of the leadership approaches of recent years and undertaking an overhaul of how we operated.
Looking back on the last year, we’ve been on a significant journey. We have built on our existing technical capability by strengthening our leadership team with expertise hired from organisations including the Bank of England and Barclays, to bring fresh perspectives on transformation and delivery, while harnessing the deep experience and skill already present across the organisation.
We have also placed greater emphasis on openness and accountability. When an operational issue affected Labour Force Survey data collection earlier this year, we were upfront about what had gone wrong, its impact, and the action needed to address it. This more honest approach means we can be publicly held to account for our delivery and performance as an organisation.
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Just as importantly, we have become more disciplined about prioritisation, with a renewed attention to quality over quantity. We have sharpened our focus on the core economic and population statistics that matter most to government, businesses and the public, reducing planned statistical outputs by 10% so that resources are concentrated where they create the greatest value.
One of the biggest tests came in our long-running dispute over office attendance. Rather than allowing positions to harden, we listened to colleagues, rebuilt dialogue with our trade unions and agreed a set of new hybrid working principles. These principles replaced arbitrary individual targets with a commitment to value-adding office attendance, enabling colleagues to come together in ways that support collaboration, innovation and building a stronger sense of community. This approach recognises both the flexibility of hybrid working and the value of colleagues spending time together, while ensuring we maximise our existing estate, which is configured for 40% attendance. With the dispute coming to an end in March 2026, we are now seeing attendance levels moving in the right direction. Across the most recent reporting period (April to June), our new recording tool, which takes into account absences and working patterns, shows that organisational attendance was 27%, improving from 23% in April to 30% in June. We’re not yet where we need to be, but this is substantial progress since the beginning of the year.
This progress is reflected more broadly in how people inside and outside the organisation view the ONS. Our most recent internal ‘pulse’ survey indicated we are making progress transforming our culture, with higher scores across all five employee engagement questions compared with last year. The results saw a higher proportion of staff recommending ONS as a great place to work and reporting that they’re proud to work here (both up around 13 percentage points). These findings provide a useful indication of positive sentiment among colleagues and emerging trends over time. In addition, our 2025/26 stakeholder satisfaction survey found that 88% of respondents agree or strongly agree that the ONS is a trustworthy organisation.
We’re also seeing that the right culture really can support delivery. Over the past year we brought a number of programmes and innovations to fruition. These include publishing our first inflation estimates using grocery scanner data, moving business price surveys almost entirely online, deploying generative AI in the production of official statistics and recovering Labour Force Survey response rates. We have also reinstated producer price statistics, secured IMF recognition for meeting its highest data dissemination standards, and completed the transition away from the International Passenger Survey towards using administrative data for measuring migration numbers.
None of these achievements happened because we simply rewrote an organisational chart or because we are adopting new technology. They happened because talented people were given clearer priorities, stronger leadership, a more open environment and a renewed sense of purpose.
Culture is often described as a soft issue but building a culture of trust, accountability and high performance is one of the hardest jobs any leader faces. Without it, almost nothing else works. We are proof that rebuilding culture is not separate from improving performance. It is the foundation on which performance is built. This mirrors the wider direction of the civil service under cabinet secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, who has emphasised the importance of high performance, accountability and a relentless focus on delivery. At the ONS, our experience has shown that culture is the foundation that enables all three.
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The progress we have made is encouraging, but no one should mistake it for the end of the journey. There are still challenges to overcome. Sustaining this progress will require us to keep listening, especially as senior leaders. One of the lessons of the past year is that organisations perform best when difficult messages are heard, not avoided, and we must continue creating an environment where colleagues feel able to speak openly and challenge constructively. What gives me optimism is not that every problem has been solved, but that we have built the foundations for lasting success.
When the ONS performs well, the statistics that underpin decisions across government, business and society are stronger too. Much remains to be done, but I am confident that the ONS is moving in the right direction and that we can reestablish ourselves as a proud, first-class statistical institute once again – with these cultural changes at its heart.
