“The pur­pose of any or­gan­i­sa­tion is to en­able com­mon men to do un­com­mon things...The or­gan­i­sa­tion is, above all, so­cial. It is peo­ple…” wrote Pe­ter Druck­er. The suc­cess of the civ­il ser­vice, the State’s ex­e­cut­ing arm, like the suc­cess of any or­gan­i­sa­tion, rests on the in­te­gra­tion of three pil­lars; peo­ple, process and sys­tems.

To op­er­ate ef­fec­tive­ly the three pil­lars must be ap­pro­pri­ate­ly aligned. Even when these three are aligned, there are two ad­di­tion­al com­po­nents to en­sure suc­cess; these are lead­er­ship and man­age­ment.

Gov­ern­ment ob­jec­tives are broad­er than the nar­row­er in­tent of pri­vate sec­tor en­ter­pris­es. There­fore, per­for­mance bench­marks in pri­vate sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tions are eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy as they are fo­cused on few­er de­liv­er­ables than the civ­il ser­vice. How­ev­er, giv­en that re­sources are al­ways scarce even for the State, both the pri­vate sec­tor and the pub­lic sec­tor must be con­scious of achiev­ing their ob­jec­tives ef­fi­cient­ly. Viewed from this per­spec­tive the prin­ci­ples of man­age­ment are the same for both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors as are the tools and tech­niques they em­ploy.

In Part 5 of this se­ries last week, we re­ferred to the main find­ings of a di­ag­nos­tic con­duct­ed in 2018 spon­sored by the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) and re­port­ed in the pub­li­ca­tion en­ti­tled “Build­ing Ca­pac­i­ty in the Caribbean: The State of the Civ­il Ser­vice in T&T”. That re­port eval­u­at­ed the ef­fi­ca­cy of the hu­man re­source man­age­ment (HRM) sys­tems in the civ­il ser­vice us­ing a method­ol­o­gy em­ployed by the IDB in oth­er Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries.

Notwith­stand­ing the ex­is­tence of the Pub­lic Ser­vices Com­mis­sion (PSC), the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer and the Di­rec­tor of Per­son­nel Ad­min­is­tra­tion, the re­port con­clud­ed that the hu­man re­source man­age­ment ca­pa­bil­i­ty was un­der­de­vel­oped. This re­sult­ed in an em­pha­sis on per­son­nel ad­min­is­tra­tion rather than the more strate­gic ap­proach of hu­man re­source man­age­ment with its em­pha­sis on fore­cast­ing the civ­il ser­vice needs and con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor­ing and ad­just­ing its sys­tems. Man­ag­ing peo­ple goes be­yond emol­u­ment con­cerns or the abil­i­ty to hire, fire and dis­ci­pline. Man­ag­ing peo­ple is­sues al­so re­quire lead­er­ship, man­age­ment, plan­ning and train­ing. 

For ex­am­ple, job de­scrip­tions used by the Ser­vice Com­mis­sion to fill es­tab­lished po­si­tions date back to the mid-1960s when the last com­pre­hen­sive job eval­u­a­tion ex­er­cise was done. There­fore, the job de­scrip­tions do not in­clude the com­pe­ten­cies re­quired to suc­cess­ful­ly per­form the job or re­fer to skill sets that are no longer rel­e­vant. To man­age a de­part­ment suc­cess­ful­ly, jobs must be aligned and hi­er­ar­chi­cal­ly or­gan­ised in ac­cor­dance with the re­quire­ments of in­di­vid­ual de­part­ments.

This is not easy as there are over 70,000 civ­il ser­vants, min­istries are struc­tured dif­fer­ent­ly in ac­cor­dance with work­flows, and re­quire dif­fer­ent skill sets to achieve the de­part­ment’s ob­jec­tives. This has been recog­nised, and there is cur­rent­ly an on­go­ing job eval­u­a­tion ex­er­cise, a by-prod­uct of which is to re­do the job de­scrip­tions across the pub­lic ser­vice to en­sure eq­ui­ty.

The re­port al­so not­ed the de­pen­dence on con­tract em­ploy­ees not­ing that the con­sol­i­da­tion of 35 in­to 21 min­istries in 2015, led to a mar­gin­al re­duc­tion in em­ploy­ment num­bers. The re­duc­tions were as­so­ci­at­ed with the elim­i­na­tion of cer­tain con­tract work­ers and/or va­cant po­si­tions. The re­port al­so notes that while min­istries were con­sol­i­dat­ed, they were not in­te­grat­ed to achieve ef­fi­cien­cy gains.

 Nei­ther the re­port nor the PSC has de­tailed the num­ber of con­tract of­fi­cers. How many con­tract of­fi­cers who are pub­lic of­fi­cers on sec­ond­ment or leave of ab­sence is un­known. But it is a reg­u­lar prac­tice. Re­ly­ing on con­tract of­fi­cers points to two weak­ness­es. The first is the in­abil­i­ty to plan the de­part­men­tal staffing lev­els. Sec­ond, the high­er man­age­r­i­al or tech­ni­cal lev­els of the ser­vice are un­der­manned, whilst the low­er lev­els are over­staffed as not­ed in the re­port. Con­tract of­fi­cers are there­fore a mech­a­nism used to fill va­can­cies and pro­vide ser­vices which are es­sen­tial to the ex­e­cu­tion of the Gov­ern­ment’s core func­tions.

Train­ing de­fi­cien­cies com­pound weak hu­man re­source plan­ning. Mod­erni­sa­tion means changed work process­es, re­quir­ing the new pro­ce­dures to be con­sis­tent and con­sis­tent­ly ap­plied. The new CROS re­quire­ments at the Com­pa­nies Reg­istry in the Min­istry of Le­gal Af­fairs ex­em­pli­fy how easy it is to com­pli­cate busi­ness ba­sics mak­ing it more un­friend­ly and bu­reau­crat­ic. Whilst forms are on­line, it re­quires in-per­son vis­its to sort out mat­ters and the in­struc­tions are of­ten con­tra­dic­to­ry.

At more se­nior lev­els, train­ing is as­so­ci­at­ed with for­eign cours­es the ben­e­fits of which are re­strict­ed to the per­son. This is of lim­it­ed val­ue as the ben­e­fits are not wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed. Suc­cess­ful op­er­a­tions en­sure that the mis­takes of the past are not re­peat­ed or com­pound­ed. This can on­ly be achieved if mis­takes are ac­knowl­edged and used for train­ing to en­sure that the lessons are learnt, and sys­tems ad­just­ed. The Com­pa­nies Reg­istry is an out­stand­ing, but un­for­tu­nate ex­am­ple of how things can go wrong.

Sim­i­lar­ly, on-the-job ro­ta­tion­al train­ing is an un­com­pli­cat­ed way of en­sur­ing that se­nior of­fi­cers un­der­stand de­part­men­tal func­tion­al­i­ty. An in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gine has about 2,000 mov­ing parts which must all work seam­less­ly if the car is to func­tion smooth­ly. The same is true of in­ter­de­part­men­tal/min­istry co­op­er­a­tion which reg­u­lar­ly mis­fires. In­di­vid­ual lead­er­ship and man­age­r­i­al com­pe­tence be­come ir­rel­e­vant if staff are not pro­fes­sion­al­ly trained or don’t un­der­stand their jobs and the sys­tem does not co­here.

Mar­i­ano Browne is the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the UWI Arthur Lok Jack Glob­al School of Busi­ness.