The chief secretary to the government’s recent measures to institute discipline and efficiency in the public service will surely stir the bureaucracy from its inertia. Beyond this stirring, the public service can profit from reforms to spur it to a higher standard of excellence. Here are five ways to take a holistic approach to enhancing efficiency in government.
FIRST, personnel distribution across the public service requires re-examination. There is no authoritative study on the appropriate size of the public service. Some suggest that, at the ratio of one public servant (excluding the armed forces) to 20 citizens, we are adequately sized and comparable to that of other jurisdictions.
Notwithstanding, there is room for some restructuring of staff size across the bureaucracy.
Sometimes, a good officer who is not given much to do will have little to report and, accordingly, score low on his performance. Keeping staff occupied will enable them to keep working and improving their performance. It will also give them, at the end of the working day, a great satisfaction that they have delivered and have earned their keep.
The service should therefore ensure that its personnel are fully occupied and have challenging tasks to do. Idle staff should be transferred to areas that are overwhelmed with work.
SECOND, is the strengthening of the public-service culture. Public servants must be made to internalise the nobility of their profession. They must be made to realise that they did not join the service to become rich. Rather, they joined the service to serve society while earning a decent income. As Jack Lew, the current US secretary of the treasury, memorably said: “I think there’s no higher calling in terms of a career than public service, which is a chance to make a difference in people’s lives and improve the world.”
Public servants must know the meaning and purpose of their work. As Jack Welch says in his book Jack: Straight from the Gut: “When you can make work a meaningful purpose, you’ve hit the jackpot for people. When you can make them love coming to work, proud of their work, think it has a purpose, that’s what it’s all about.” Sometimes this noble virtue is lost among public servants who think that the public service is the place to enrich themselves by means fair or foul — invariably the latter.
The public-service values of incorruptibility and service must be indoctrinated from the time a public servant joins the service. Indeed, an applicant should be vetted for these characteristics at the outset of the recruitment process. Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great that it is about getting the right people on the ‘bus’.
This is being done. And the recruitment net should be recast to catch those who should rightly belong to the public service while giving others not attuned to its ethos the slip. Making the code of conduct mandatory reading and training in ethics are helpful. So is miniaturising the code to the size of a credit card to fit the wallet or pocket for easy carrying so that the officer is constantly reminded of his oath of service. However, the exemplary conduct of superiors will speak volumes to young and impressionable minds. “Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.” So said Jane Addams, the pioneer American social activist.
The existing work targets with their biannual review and the recent introduction of KPIs for public servants are laudable initiatives to further enhance the culture of performance. The proof of their worth is in the ensuing regular performance dialogue, beyond the current biannual review, between the superior and the subordinate.
What performance management in the public service most requires is a weekly or a monthly review of a subordinate’s progress, in the same manner that the prime minister, or his deputy, sits with and reviews monthly his ministers’ KPI achievements. A public servant must be periodically told what he did right and how he can right his wrong. Done consistently, the annual review will be that much more transparent.
THIRD, career development in the public service should be equally transparent. Few, if at all, are told where their career is headed. Fewer still are told where they would be in the bureaucracy in, say, five or 10 years. Some can guess that they are slotted for higher positions in the way they are assigned to particular jobs and or sent to career-development or leadership courses. Even then these putative high-fliers can come unstuck in their career if they are starved of effective feedback over their performance.
Despite the opacity, the public service largely gets it right in promoting the right individuals to the right jobs — the second principle of Jim Collins, that is, to get the right people seated in the right places in the ‘bus’. However, given this age of transparency, the confidentiality in promotions needs tweaking. It requires a certain amount of openness if the process is to ignite efficiency in the public service. Knowing where you are headed is a sure way to blow the embers of passion for work into a conflagration.
In making promotions transparent, the public service can open up promotional posts for application from those within. These posts can be advertised and those in the service who consider they are eligible can compete for such positions.
Hiring from the outside for such posts may not be a viable option. For one, public-service pay scales may not be attractive. For the other, even if one from the private sector is recruited, he may face ‘tissue rejection’. He may not be attuned to the public-service way of doing things or its culture. As such, he may face dejection. That might affect his performance.
FOURTH, life-time employment, too, should be reviewed. As in Australia and other jurisdictions, public servants can be put on limited-term contracts. That way none will take his career for granted. He will be working furiously for the next contract renewal.
FIFTH, the public service culture should also empower those at the lower levels of authority. These staff should be enabled to air their views as to how a service should be rendered.
As a microcosm of the larger societal culture, the public-service culture is highly deferential to authority. While this is a virtue in most circumstances, unquestioning deference in matters of public policy can make the public service tired with negative consequences to public services. Not only will such empowerment equip the officers with self-confidence, it will also foster a learning culture. Jack Welch, the CEO who helmed General Electric for 20 years, exhorts: “It totally is in a learning culture that you create an atmosphere where everyone is looking all the time to do things better.”
Datuk Dr John Antony Xavier is the Head of the Strategic Centre for Public Policy at the Graduate School of Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia