Future of public service work

GOVERNMENT will implement a pilot project for a remote-work policy for the public service in November, according to Public Administration Minister Allyson West.

"We will be looking to see how the remote-work policy impacts the productivity of the public service," she told the Senate on October 24.

That's a disappointing position to take after talking about planning a work-from-home policy for more than two years.

To commit to an extended pilot project suggests that the government learned nothing from its years of forced remote work.

Did the government fail to monitor productivity and workflow during that difficult time? What did managers and supervisors oversee? Is the government really committed to making remote work…work?

Underlining the government's lip service to using technology to improve efficiency in its operations was Ms West's assertion that graduating 1,500 people annually from the public service academy was inadequate to serve a civil service of 40,000 workers and a public service of 60,000.

Those numbers are well below estimations of government employment and suggest a calculation meant to minimise the widespread reach of the State in employing citizens.

It's unclear, for instance, whether contract workers and employees at state enterprises are included in that count. The minister plans to increase training at the academy to produce a cohort of between 6,000 and 9,000 people per year.

Extensive state employment is a seductive palliative for the economy, reducing unemployment while it also stifles innovation and entrepreneurship. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) records that Caribbean countries with a high percentage of public employment (as of 2018) include Guyana at 22.1 per cent of its population, Barbados with 23.6 per cent and TT with 25.9 per cent. That's quite some distance from Ms West's total, placing TT at six per cent state employment, making it clear that 100,000 is only a fraction of the State’s extended payroll.

Planning to increase public service employment is making a push in exactly the wrong direction.

It's a tacit admission that talk of improving efficiency and automating systems in the name of digital transformation is just bluster while the State plans to throw more surly employees at an already under-served public.

The Ministry of Public Administration should, instead, be advocating for increased self-service options for the public that take advantage of readily available online processes and extending deployment of those services to user-friendly kiosks at TTConnect centres.

Re-engineering the public service should be focused on building well-trained employees capable of working independently in a system that is customer-focused and accountably monitored.

Instead, we're planning to shove more people into a broken system.

How can that make any sense at all, Ms West?