Proper appraisal system needed

Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs, Cynthia Forde, is insisting a proper appraisal system be placed within the public service.

Addressing Parliament’s debate on the Public Service (General) Order, 2020, she said that one of the pitfalls of a small community is that persons without the relevant qualifications may be promoted to the dismay of those with, simply because of who they know.

“In small societies everyone knows each other, so they promote the friend of a minister or a priest or a supervisor in charge of some other entity in government, but overlook the ordinary poor man or woman who strives every day but with tremendous difficulties to be able to deliver. We have to look at how promotion is done and not because of favouritism or nepotism, but to make sure those promoted meet the criteria,” the MP for St. Thomas asserted.

Speaking on the need to deal with appointments to the Civil Service without long delays, she insisted the current administration is actively working on ensuring persons received security of tenure as long as they fitted the job’s profile.

Forde, however, insisted that supervisors and employers must be considerate to their hardworking employees if their personal responsibilities sometimes impacted on their jobs.

“While we are doing this, it is incumbent on Government and the private institutions to ensure that there is a proper appraisal system put in place to be able to measure the contribution of workers. There must be training on a regular basis because some people because of illnesses and their own personal issues where a child is sick, a parent has Alzheimer’s and such like that they cannot get to work on time. So a level of empathy should be there, but the communication from those persons who are in charge of the institutions should be coming through from their training to be able to listen and understand and give them an opportunity where persons can use a sort of flexi-time to put back in the time they may have missed because of such situations.

“But the rigidity sometimes that is within the governmental sector causes a lot of people to be disenchanted and to be grumbling all the time and to be feeling ‘nobody likes me because they are picking on me’. It is incumbent upon us to have the appraisal system, let people know where they have made errors and where they have not been as professional as they should be, and take out the anger and the malice over personalities,” she added.