In my previous article, "Caring for assets", I had emphasized the need for safeguarding of human resource as the most precious input in any organization. The question is how can we ensure caring of this peculiar form of assets, without significant financial implications?
Specifically, in case of government organizations, this question is more relevant to the perpetually cost-cutting economic regime. We therefore need to device a new way of caring for this precious resource.
One of the critical aspects of good governance is to maintain a fine balance between responsibility and authority in employee activities. Even a slight disharmony among these two prime attributes can give way to serious operational distortions leading to misuse of organizational resources. We already have a net-work of institutions to check the judicious exercise of authority vis-a-vis responsibilities.
The National Accountability Bureau (NAB), being one of the major accountability institutions, has made tremendous contribution in recovering billions of rupees of the nation's plundered wealth. According to NAB's annual report 2003, it recovered Rs3.63 billion through plea-bargains and voluntary returns.
The Bureau has not only made history in nabbing astounding cases of corruption, but has also proved to be a potent deterrent for the self-perpetuating corrupt tendencies. Getting engaged in corruption is thus no more an easy task. However, the Bureau's competence and jurisdiction are seriously constrained in the case of employees who do not work at all.
Our well-structured discipline rules have also failed to curb inefficiency. First efficiency, being a relatively intangible attribute, is difficult to measure due to absence of adequate performance indicators.
Secondly, inefficiency has not yet been regarded as a serious offence by the administrative structure. It is only corruption which is normally considered as a crime. Consequently, the government agencies continue to be plagued with corruption and inefficiency.
This is crucial because only one class of employees have been targeted, that is, the non-conformists. The good ones are totally ignored in all evaluations and investigations.
Undue empowerment of employees relative to their incomes and positions has been yet another major contributory factor behind aggravation of this social evil. For instance, in departments like police and income tax, the operational staff has extraordinary powers as compared to the status and responsibilities of even high-level executives.
Another problem is that in government organizations, there still exists a traditional style of budgeting where last year's expenditure is simply extended in the form of next years requirement.
Consequently, there is a perpetuation of the existing stock of over-employed people, who do not contribute in operational activities. Despite office automation, organizations continue to employ supporting staff to work on the manual systems.
Excessive over-employment is not clearly recognizable mainly because system designing and formalization of job description is still not fashionable in most of the organizations.
This has given rise to a situation where a selected number of employees literally work on behalf of the others. In this regard, even our annual performance evaluation system has failed to allow domination of good workers over the inefficient ones. Except for being used as a partial barometer in departmental promotion committees, they do not have any significance in good governance.
On the average, about 10 per cent of the public sector employees work efficiently to produce quality service to the public. Rest of them are mostly engaged in useless and unproductive activities mainly because they think that either it's not their job or they are not being adequately paid for the assigned tasks.
In his book "Total Management Thinking", Sultan Kermally has quoted an interesting illustration of de-motivation which closely matches of our working environment. This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done to improve service and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it. But Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody, when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
Unfortunately, our society does not have any arrangement to encourage the honest and dedicated employees who actually make this world a better place to live. Every government has been allocating substantial proportions of the budget on high profile accountability agencies to penalize the corrupt and non-conformists. But despite government's serious regulatory measures, dishonesty, corruption and plundering of national wealth continues unabated in the society.
On the other hand, there exists no incentive system for the morally upright employees. In advanced countries, good behaviour is rewarded in the form of social benefits emanating from a progressing economy in a cause-and-effect fashion.
That is, good moral behaviour gives rise to a richer economy leading to higher living standards which in turn motivate continuation of such a performance to gain from the economic benefits emanating from individual efforts.
In Pakistan, there is lack of such a cause-and-effect system of efforts versus benefits among individuals and the society. Over-employment in the public sector has led to inefficiency, corruption and drainage of substantial part of the budget in the form of establishment charges.
According to the federal budget 2003-2004, out of the total current expenditure of Rs.645.2 billion, almost 16 per cent has been allocated for expenditure on "running of the civil government" and "pension".
Due to rising pressure on the government's payroll bill, incomes of the employees have virtually been capped in real terms in order to control the upward trend in the overall expenditure.
Such compulsive " cost-cuts" on account of human resources are primarily rationalized as a necessary economy measure to satisfy performance criteria defined by the donor agencies.
In reality, the aim of the donor agencies is to simply promote regulation of expenditure in relation to revenue generation capacity of the economy rather than enforcing across-the-board reductions and restrictions in expenditure.
Since 1994, salaries of government employees have not been inflation-indexed and the modest pay revisions have not been sufficient to compensate the employees for persistent rise in prices of essential commodities.
The burden of over-employment and relatively lower revenue performance in the public sector has thus resulted in reduced incomes of lower and middle income groups, in real terms. The working environment is thus extremely inconducive to the requisites of modem organizations which require knowledge networking and group performance.
Amazingly, despite the growing deviation between income and real needs of the employees, there exists a class of people who are contented with whatever they possess and are essentially engaged in keeping wheels of the economy moving.
They are serving the society with highest levels of integrity. In reality, every organization has a small bunch of people who work hard with utmost sincerity and honesty in order to ensure achievement of organizational goals.
Miraculously they manage to survive simply by controlling their needs rather than incomes. Such highly spirited employees, who demonstrate control over their expenses instead of expecting illegitimately high incomes, to be rewarded not necessarily through monetary incentives but through simple recognition and encouragement.
They usually have very simple needs which deserve to be addressed by authorities. It's high time the government starts encouraging and promoting such employees. The stock of this class of human wealth has to be expanded at the expense of inefficient and corrupt, as part of the good governance strategy.
This could be done through some special free of cost measures. One option is to carry out pay structure reforms through rationalization of incomes on the basis of real needs. However, this will remain an elusive objective for quite a long time in view of the long term economic constraints.
Besides, this is not practicable in view of the macro-economic constraints. Another option is to conduct marked downsizing of organizations, accompanied by proportionate income compensations to the remaining employees.
But, drastic layoffs will be socially undesirable since there is lack of absorption capacity in the economy. On the other hand, maintaining status quo would obviously be disastrous for the society in the long run.
The best option is therefore to institutionalize motivation of the "good ones" in organizations, explicitly and publicly. It is quite serious that our existing system of governance has been grossly undermining the critical aspect of encouraging good deeds.
We have been focusing on only one side of an important prescription of the Holy Quran, Amar-bil-Ma'aroof wa Nahee-Anil Munkar. If this continues, employee loyalty and satisfaction will start rotting away permanently and the efficient ones may stop contributing productively.
According to Surah Al-i-Imran, Verse: 104, "Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong". It's high time we implement this critical aspect of the divine law.
We need to initiate a formal system of patronizing employees who show excellent performance within their meagre incomes. Introduction of the concept of encouragement can virtually change lives of the employees, with far reaching implications for the society as a whole.
To achieve this, we need to adopt a lateral alternative, that is, the government should establish a 'national encouragement bureau" (NEB) with the prime mandate of identifying, encouraging and recommending incentives for efficient and honest employees.
Initially, it should be instituted as a very small setup in the shape of a sub-organization of the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB), deriving its operational inputs from its nodes in various government agencies and institutions. At the same time, the NRB should enforce a formal system of job designing and development of performance measures in all organizations.
Besides, the Bureau should carry out a special exercise, in conjunction with NEB, to review manpower requirements of the government agencies on the style of zero based budgeting. That is, employment thresholds of departments should be evaluated afresh on the basis of genuine needs. It is extremely essential that the Bureau should be administered at the level of other supreme institutions of the country in order to ensure its effectiveness.
Modus operandi of the NEB should be to seek special reports from the government agencies about their employers in terms of special performance indicators including targets vis-a-vis achievements, employee of the month report, identification of employees performing over and above their normal sphere of duties. The last criterion is usually used as a basis for granting honorarium to the good workers. This could be applied for non-monetary incentives as well.
In the first stage, the Bureau should issue special letters of acknowledgement to the efficient employees and attend to their petty adjustment problems which are not normally addressed by their organizations.
After conducting thorough surveys, the Bureau should make specific recommendations regarding rational empowerment and re-allocation of the employees in the context of advancement, commitment, involvement and assumption of responsibilities.
Such measures would certainly help in making most organizations a better place to work. Institutional de-recognition of inefficient employees will automatically play a very positive role in effective implementation of the down-sizing policy through automatic weeding-out of the real dead-wood, without disbalancing the organizational harmony.
This will not only help in increasing general productivity of the economy but would also help in implementing the downsizing strategy in the right direction through dominance of efficient employees over the "dead-wood"
In the first phase of its implementation, activities of the Bureau should cover major accountability institutions of the country. The model should then be replicated in all civil service organizations for ultimate implementation in autonomous bodies and public sector corporations.
