It appears appropriate and cogent to me that the required HRM reform that will transform the competence and skill repository of the public service must commence with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) as the umbrella gatekeeper of HR function in Nigeria. The CIPM provides the convenient forum and framework that could enable us rethink and reinvent HR functions in order to be able to properly “innovate, empower and engage”! As the gatekeeping body, the overarching objective of the organization is already captured by the World Economic Forum 2011 document titled The Future of Government. According to the document, “What is needed today is a flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled (FAST) government.” It goes without saying that government cannot be FAST and indeed developmental if it lacks a public service guided and guarded by a new generation of FAST public managers.
The HR reform imperative must therefore be structured around modernization and professionalization that will make the HRM of the public sector not only more professional, efficient and citizen-friendly, but also facilitate the rethinking the operational base of the skills-set of the managerial corps from being generalist to being “serial masters”’ with in-depth knowledge and competences in a number of administrative domains. In this modernizing context, for example, the recruitment and selection processes and strategies must support and complement training and development strategies while the reward function must equally reinforce and be reinforced by performance management. Thus, one of the policy requirements in the new HRM is the urgent need for line managers to be allowed to exercise staff management authority rather than just limiting HR management in the hands of HR specialists or in central personnel agencies.
This will require a host of modernizing imperatives that must be infused into the HR function of the public sector. As the first order of business, there is an urgent need to undertake periodic functional reviews of MDAs to determine tasks and responsibility dynamics, transfer redundant functions, effect required structural changes and processes and exit redundant staff on an on-going basis and within framework to which labour unions are enlisted. This is a must since the needed reform must commence at the level of the MDAs with an HR assessment of what is on ground. The necessary second stage of modernizing reform is to undertake job study and job evaluation to address internal relative job worth. This becomes imperative as the only scientific means of establishing an optimum staffing level in the MDAs. Reform initiatives can then be put in place for a selective opening up of the public service to talents from other sectors, especially the private sector. One of the major obstacles to the public service operational and efficient functioning is the negative dynamics of inbreeding that constrains administrative creativity. Opening up the public service therefore effectively facilitates a process of cross-fertilization of managerial and organizational cultures.
The public service, in a technology dispensation, must not fail to speed up digital penetration and technology adoption that will essentially ensure not only citizen participation in the business of government through survey, consultations and deliberations, but will also facilitate productivity through performance assessment, transparency check and accountability. It seems practically impossible in today’s democracy to imagine citizen engagement outside of, say, a functional website and social media visibility. An open data policy is central to any attempt at facilitating democratic service delivery with citizens’ inputs, suggestions and criticisms. This must also go hand in hand with an elaborate attempt at deepening public-private partnership dynamics that will enable the public service to further handle and resolve service delivery complexities, manage serious challenges relating to economies of scale and scope in order to better be able to leverage innovative ideas and best practices from the private sector and other non-state sectors. One significant consequence of this PPP initiative will be the effect it has on the public service pay and incentive structure. This remains a critical issue that has constrained performance, productivity, administrative behavior and the capacity to attract scarce skills and competences. The public service therefore, as a matter of urgency, needs to design and implement a rational and sustainable model of pay adjustment sustained through constant pay research and wage monitoring mechanisms.
In the final analysis, the public service cannot be sidelined from a general national productivity shift that must be founded on three fundamental administrative elements: (a) Institutional rationalization; (b) Benchmarking of capital-overhead-personnel budget; and (c) a national waste reduction strategy that is linked to a new national maintenance management policy and a new asset efficiency management scheme. This places a huge burden on the CIPM and the reform architecture of the public service to facilitate the architecture of a new career management system which demands a review of the position of the government as the highest employer of labour, and the character, education and adaptability of the workforce. The new strategic human resource management that must evolve from the existing personnel management framework will then be circumscribed sufficiently by specific performance-enhancing metrics—a strategic needs metrics required for assessing future needs related to the institution’s vision and mission; mission effectiveness metrics which involves having a critical mass of capability experts who can generate ways of assessing the health and viability of future missions and objectives for meeting future challenges; and an operational efficiency metrics that demands the use of benchmarking, customer survey and other standardized metrics for identifying the quality of operational frameworks, processes and dynamics by which required institutional missions can be accomplished with minimum cost.
The CIPM has provided the context within which these reform thoughts could be prevented. But that cannot be the end of the story given the stasis which has attended most reform ideas in Nigeria. As a significant organization in the HRM business, it behooves the CIPM to also facilitate the context within which these ideas can be successfully deployed for transforming the public service in Nigeria.