Turning towards an effective and efficient public service

Once upon a time, the public service in Sri Lanka was totally made up of men and women who possessed a high degree of professionalism. They had the ability to assist the country's leadership to set standards in managing human, financial and material resources to achieve effective good Government. Things have become different today. The current Sri Lankan public sector is guilty of gross mismanagement of the public interest. In other words, the largest employee group in our country has shown the least concern for worker productivity.

(In spite of this situation, however, there is still a small number of public servants who work unflaggingly towards the common good of the people.)

Official statistics reveal that by 2012, the proportion of employees in the public sector in Sri Lanka went up to 15.4 percent, and for every 16 citizens, there was a public employee. In India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Nepal both the number of public employees and Government expenditure was less than in Sri Lanka. Continuous recruitment to public institutions irrespective of staff requirements has inflated the public sector.

Newspapers also reported recently that a study has found 60 per cent of the public sector employees waste at least two hours per day browsing social media.

At a time when the Sri Lankan economy is going through a period of fiscal challenges, these news are distressing. This is the time the Government is looking at new possibilities which will allow us to remodel our economy into a modern one. In this process, the public service has an important role to play to ensure that sustainability is not jeopardised in the Government's development programme.

Both President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have repeatedly addressed public servants on their home grounds to seek their involvement in the national development efforts. They have explained the intended changes in policy, procedure revisions, and new measures to be adopted to re-engineer the transformation of public services.

Challenges

The Government is currently under tremendous pressure to change the methodology of administration and delivery of our public service. In fulfilling this mission, it is facing the challenge of building the human resource capability to meet new opportunities and provide for a effective public service in the future. Persistent and on-going effort is required to address these challenges.

Sri Lankans expect the public service to be more open and transparent in its aims and operations. They expect explanations of what it does, why, and at what cost. Transparency and openness do not mean "reporting everything". Sheer volume would make that impractical for everyone concerned. Rather, meaningful accountability includes reporting what is relevant and in the public interest, with other information made accessible on request to anyone who needs it. Only when citizens and public servants better understand each other's situations will it be possible to move toward an informed dialogue and to make changes that meet common expectations.

Performance

The public service, regardless of its size and composition, must remain contemporary in its approach to management systems and procedures. Its recruitment, the use of technology, and the push to administrative efficiency need to be in line with those of other large private sector organizations in Sri Lanka.

In this context, this writer believes, four areas require particular attention: (1) Rejuvenate the work force in the public service, (2). Remove barriers to the management of people, (3) Deal fairly and effectively with individual shortfalls in the context of overall performance, (4) Demonstrate perseverance in direction, and congruence between words and deeds.

The public service is part of a larger system of governance and, as such, it affects and is affected by the other elements of this system. The government makes public policy and the public service manages its implementation. In a democracy such as ours, the making of public policy is the responsibility of the political heads - mobilizing, focussing, articulating, and compromising among the interests of individual Sri Lankans through the mechanisms of the media, political parties, special interest groups and the electoral process. All these should be within a framework of political institutions and traditions.

The major role of the public service is to support the Government by carrying out policy analysis and bringing forward policy proposals designed to achieve government objectives by translating policy decisions into action. These actions may be carried out by the public service itself or combination with others. Another role is to deliver a wide range of services, and apply the regulations that result from public policy decisions. On any given day, public employees deliver many services, from customs services to waste management, and from agricultural research to food inspection. These represent some of the goods and services that Sri Lankans, as represented in Parliament, have decided to provide for themselves through delivery by the public service.

The third role of the public service is to deal with issues that never make their way onto the public and political stage. These administrative practices are developed in the context of the administrative framework legislated by Parliament.

New concerns

While discussion and debate about the size of public sector and the range and extent of public services goes on, most Sri Lankans still expect their government to actively provide critical programs and services. Interestingly, Sri Lankans continue to place considerable trust in public service at the same time as they are increasingly distrustful of its performance overall.

Analysts of the public service in developed countries advocate efficiency-driven change in the public service. These emerging global views - which are already practiced in some developing countries - challenge traditional views of a single public service dominating the public sector. They suggest a vision of a public service in which a small corporate core, a number of quasi-autonomous public service departments, an arm's-length public sector, and the private sector work together to deliver the services that have traditionally been provided by a centralized public service.

Vision

To achieve any radical transformation, political leaders and senior Government officials must create the will and vision for deep-rooted change. Without such a vision, any efficiency program will be regarded as a cost-cutting exercise, rather than as a renewal of public services that can engage employees at all levels of the organization. In this respect, this writer believes two critical steps have to be taken.

1. Work out what really matters - and stop everything else

Delivering major efficiency decisions require rethinking and reprioritizing all areas of activity and, most important, making active decisions on what to stop doing. A sign of intelligent cost reduction-as opposed to reactive slashing is that costs are not cut uniformly across the board.

Private-sector companies that respond effectively to financial downturns quickly identify the businesses, products, and capital programs they want to maintain, those they need to rein in or stop, and those in which they want to invest. They proactively prune their portfolio, allowing favored priorities to flourish. In the public sector, a more softer and refined approach is needed, since there are many activities that the government must continue because of legislation or for reasons of fairness; government also lacks the flexibility of a business, which can simply decide to stop serving an expensive-to-reach segment of the population. However, these constraints should not prevent a detailed review of expenditure.

2. Shake up and clarify roles and relationships

A refocused set of activities is likely to require new organizational arrangements-new structures, roles, relationships, and linkages within and among all the organizations involved in policy making, funding, delivering services, or managing performance.

Large-scale organizational changes in government are typically beyond the remit of individual senior leaders. Indeed, in Sri Lanka, the organizational landscape is regarded as untouchable and outside the scope of any review. There will be serious pressure originating from unions and other vested interests. However, explicitly discussing the efficiency benefits of organizational changes, where they a possible, can be enormously valuable

A good starting point is to take a clean-sheet approach: with no legacy, what would be the ideal set of organizations to deliver the Government's revised priorities, and how would they work together? What kind of public service does Sri Lanka want? What part of society's work should be done in or by the public sector? What set of values should govern the provision of public goods and services? Should the public service focus exclusively on efficiency, or also satisfy other societal goals such as, for example, being representative of the population as a whole in its composition? What should be the criteria for the migration of public service functions to the private sector?

These questions about approaches to public service and public management deserve debate with all stakeholders in order to agree on the nature of our public service as it evolves toward the future.