Public Administration Minister unsatisfied with public service productivity

PUBLIC Administration Minister Allyson West is not satisfied with the level of productivity in the public sector and is making moves to address the issue.

Responding to questions in the Senate on March 19, West said productivity was multi-dimensional, with factors like employee engagement, job burnout, work attitudes, job resources, leadership and work-life balance having an impact on employees' performance.

While the ministry does not have a mechanism to measure productivity, she said it relies on other indices. Those include the global competitiveness index and the ease of doing business rank. Those, she said, provide an overview of the country's productivity.

However, she said the ministry was part of the National Productivity Council, which was reconstituted in October. As part of its work, she said, the council will develop national policies, strategies and interventions to target employee performance and productivity, quality and competitiveness and create key productivity indicators for the country.

In the meantime, to boost productivity, she said, the ministry is focusing on staff supervision practices, the system of staff appraisals, rewards and recognition systems and the introduction of new ICT platforms to monitor the achievement of work targets.

She said various leave entitlements were tracked by respective ministry human resources departments, and if unauthorised leave could be accounted for, it would incur penalties such as deductions from employees' salaries.

To that end, she said the ministry was working on introducing software that helped track and analyse absenteeism.

"The ministry has acquired and embarked on the implementation of modern, intuitive, enterprise human-capital software that will be able to efficiently analyse and produce trends and periodic reports on such absences that can be incorporated into supervisory management practices to support performance management at both strategic and operational levels across the civil service."

Additionally, she said the ministry's public service academy was focused on providing training opportunities for the entire public service to improve job performance.