There’s lots of things that catch you off guard as a first-time parent. The cost of strollers. The flood of advice from friends, family, and strangers. The hundreds of parenting books. And of course, the government forms.
When I became a parent over a decade ago, I distinctly remember an evening with my wife as we became increasingly frustrated, trying our best to navigate the Service Canada website in order to apply for the employment insurance (EI) maternity and parental benefit. We sifted through countless web pages of lengthy bureaucratic text and struggled with the identity and login requirements of the time.
“Why is this so hard?” my wife exclaimed. “How many university degrees do we have in this house?!?”
We laughed, but it wasn’t funny. We have privilege: we are both university educated and literate, with secure housing and good jobs. Yet, we faced challenges in understanding how all of this worked. We worried about completing the application incorrectly and felt uncertain about where the process started and ended. It all felt unnecessarily difficult. Our trust in government was diminished.
For a few dark winter evenings, sitting at our kitchen table and staring at a laptop, the experience only added to the general stress in our lives as we awaited our newborn’s arrival.
Now to their credit, the Canadian federal government experience in 2024 looks and works a lot better than this previous generation of digital service delivery. The updated platform provides some clear expectations of stages and steps, effectively guiding soon-to-be parents through the process of accessing their benefits. Service Canada has come a long way in addressing some of the usability challenges associated with this primary digital touchpoint and its role in what to expect when you’re expecting…
Citizen frustration, confusion, and friction gets a name
The everyday citizen experience of accessing a key government service, like EI benefits, is often characterized by having to overcome obstacles and challenges, digital and non-digital alike. Poorly designed websites and forms, waiting in lines for hours at government offices, and cancelled appointments all contribute to underwhelming service experiences.
Thanks to US public policy scholars Pam Herd and Don Moynihan, that effort, time, and frustration experienced by citizens when trying to navigate crucial government services and receive benefits has a name: administrative burden.
Herd and Moynihan describe administrative burden as the often-overlooked costs citizens face when interacting with government services. These burdens are more than mild inconvenience, they affect people's lives. The consequences of burdens can impact effective service delivery and the immediate policy outcomes of a particular program (e.g. whether parents are successful or not in receiving the EI maternity benefit). They can also have larger impacts beyond the experience of any particular service, knock-on effects that can influence much larger outcomes like participation in elections or overall citizen health.
Herd and Moynihan define administrative burden’s costs falling across three main types:
- Learning costs: The time and energy citizens spend finding and understanding a benefit or service.
- Compliance costs: The “hoops” to jump through, like gathering eligibility documentation, traveling to offices, paying fees, and filling in forms.
- Psychological costs: The emotional toll, including stress, shame, or feelings of helplessness surrounding the service.
For vulnerable groups, such as those with limited income, mobility, or literacy, these barriers can be overwhelming. When accessing services becomes burdensome, it risks excluding those who need them most, undermining their health, financial stability, and trust in government.
Administrative burdens are constructed as a result of government actions. Some of the burden is intentional and by design, like the costs or friction required to ensure program integrity and prevent fraud. But other burdens are unintended consequences of policy design and implementation, the accidental byproduct of competing incentives within a policy or not understanding human behaviour and its social context.
Society bears the costs of failed services
I have my own bit of jargon that I use when working with service designers and talking about the government’s monopoly on certain services: the “mandatory task dynamic.” It’s short for the idea that many people interact with government services not by choice, but because they have to and there’s no other option to receive that service. Government has a monopoly on many different types of services.
For-profit customer experience designers often discuss concepts around friction, channels, and failure demand; the impact of the difference in cost between serving customers online versus by phone or in-person, when one channel fails to deliver and the customer shows up in a more expensive one. I once sat in on a call centre listen-in, where a customer struggling with a website reservation function called the organization to “Find out if I’m in the system… I’m not very good with computers and I just wanted to see if my reservation went through.”
The failure demand of a $0.25 web transaction turning into a $15 phone call is a significant concern for many organizations.
For governments, the stakes are even higher: if citizens cannot access or understand a service, complete necessary forms, or determine their eligibility, society bears the cost of failed services. There is no other service provider option. This could mean a person doesn’t receive needed care, misses out on child care subsidies or income assistance, or loses access to programs that could provide them with new skills. In some cases, their failure to access a government service might mean being evicted if they can’t make rent or missing a court date and facing a warrant for their arrest.
Bridging policy and people: addressing administrative burdens
Administrative burden is not a new concept. Academics and public policy scholars have been studying and writing about it for over a decade. Herd and Monyihan’s book Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means was published in 2018, and it's been cited over 1000 times in academic journal articles since then. In the USA in 2021, the Biden administration enshrined the concept in the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government.
Jen Pahlka (Niskanen Center and founder of Code for America) wrote about it in her 2023 book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Earlier this year, the first chapter of Richard Pope’s (former UK GDS and Harvard Kennedy School) 2024 book Platformland is entitled “Burden Eliminated” referring directly to Herd and Moynihan’s work.
Yet, here in Canada, when people use the words “administrative burden,” they often refer to two different concepts, somewhat distinct from the citizen-facing version described and adopted elsewhere. The first is the Canadian federal governments’ activities related to counting the requirements in regulations and related forms that impose administrative burden on businesses. That work stems from the 2012 Red Tape Reduction Action Plan, as a result of the Harper government of the time.
The second use of the term is in the advocacy work of the Canadian Medical Association and associated provincial doctors associations against the unnecessary forms, charting, and sick notes that consume an increasing amount of doctors’ time which they claim is leading to doctor burnout and risking access to care.
While businesses and doctors do experience a form of administrative burden through their experience of regulations and red tape—and they are citizens, after all—I believe it’s important to refocus our attention on the everyday services provided by government at the federal, provincial, and municipal level.
In an era of growing distrust towards government institutions, with many calling for their complete dismantling due to persistent service failures and bureaucratic frustrations, addressing administrative burdens is crucial for rebuilding public confidence and demonstrating that government can effectively serve its citizens.
The good news is that much of this work is familiar to those who have been designing and improving service delivery in government. We can evaluate the learning, compliance, and psychological costs of services. We can collaborate and co-design with the people applying for and receiving benefits. We can make requirements less onerous by bridging policy and delivery teams. And, most importantly, we can acknowledge the human being on the other side of the service—and design and deliver services with care.
Building public trust through less burdensome services
So, where do we begin in trying to address these issues that are leading to ineffective programs and policy that doesn’t deliver? We start by using this common language of administrative burden and citizen costs and by noticing how it shows up in our services and programs today.
That’s why OXD is working on our administrative burden assessment tool. We’re designing it to provide service owners, product owners, policy analysts, and service designers an on-ramp to start thinking about their government service offerings using the ideas of administrative burden and how to recognize it across the different types of costs.
The assessment provides recommendations and methods to reduce burdens, like service design methods to help describe the service journey in more detail, or detailed interviews and fieldwork to research the service in action.
We hope it will be the starting point for organizations and service delivery teams to take the next step and work with their citizen-users, their policymakers, and their data teams to dig deeper into service improvement. By taking a proactive and data-driven approach to administrative burden, teams can create more efficient, effective, and equitable public services that benefit both citizens and the government itself.