Performance management overlooked?

Oct 11, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
Those of us who reflect on the past while contemplating current institutional behaviour, cannot help noting the substantive difference in some employment procedures, moreso in the public sector which is obviously more exposed than the private sector counterpart.
Management practices over the last decade or two in the public sector, and substantively the public service, declined in direct relationship to that of the authority of the Public Service Commission – a constitutional entity hardly known to the generations recruited into the service in this century; and even to some Ministerial incumbents.
Contrast this scenario of exponentially increasing contract employment (inherently assured irrespective of performance) with the times when annual performance of the employee was mandatory, and was the only basis for an individual salary increase within the relevant grade. For the many who have only experienced across-the-board increases such exposure would be anathema – particularly to ‘managers’ who have been appointed on other than performance criteria. It was if there were a national charity, which indeed reduced certain hypersensitive employees to being mendicants.
So when under a new dispensation there is talk about productivity, it not only jars the listening if those embedded in the ongoing culture, but also commits visionary managers to find new (and perhaps old) ways of incentivising performance.
What is also interesting is that for the longest while little thought seems to have been given to a recruitment process which includes measurement of the physical health of the employee to discharge duties to be assigned. (One wonders whether this is the case in the health sector, with particular reference to the recruitment of nursing capabilities).
Actually it was at the Public Hospital, Georgetown (PHG) that I was examined by an (Italian) doctor who pronounced me fit to work in the ‘civil service’ after ascertaining that I drank the same brand of rum as he did. It was on such a foundation that I was able to progress from a Temporary Class II to a confirmed Class II Clerk after one year’s service.
Such lowly progress was nevertheless public information since a Public Service Staff list was published annually up to sometime in the 1960s.
The conundrum was however, that despite the insistence on promotion strictly on seniority there was still the consistent implementation of the performance appraisal process at that time.
More recently there has been the perceived correlation between (contracted) promotion and virtual mendicancy.
Take your choice for change!
E.B. John

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