The Federal Government has said that it was phasing out analogue operational systems and commencing the digital and automation of service drive to fight corruption and poor performance among workers.
The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoCSF), Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, said this on Monday in Abuja at the formal openings of the Service-Wide Workshop on Performance Management System (PMS) for officers in the federal public service.
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According to her, the former analogue system provided civil servants with opportunities to evade responsibilities, leading to abysmal performance and lack of accountability.
She said that the digital switch over in government’s activities has reduced the chances of workers manipulating the annual performance system, and that workers will now be more accountable for their actions.
She said that digitalizing the systems would also help the civil service to pursue effectively articulated national goals in line with global standards.
Dr. Yemi-Esan added that the digitization of workers performance systems would eliminate corruption from Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs), while also providing opportunities for skills acquisition for all categories of civil servants.
“The new Performance Management System (PMS) is anchored on the principles of accountability, transparency, equity, and ownership and when fully operational, every individual, Unit, Department, and Institution in the Public Service would be held accountable on a continuous basis, to ensure that national development goals are achieved.
“The aim of this workshop, therefore, is to acquaint participants with the requisite knowledge and skills in Job Objectives Setting, Performance Appraisal and Rewards System, which are vital parts of the PMS that would eventually replace the Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APER) currently used.
“Though the APER was designed to foster and reward high performance at the institutional and individual levels, there are no clearly defined national performance measures for public understanding of service delivery outcomes which is the basis for the introduction of the new PMS. Moreover, the existing evaluation system has not been able to incorporate strategic goals and objectives in setting institutional and individual targets,” she said.
The Head of Service said that one of the limitations of the analogue system was that it does not really give any sense of reward or what the officer has done, with officers just sit down and fill forms themselves with no clear objectivity and appraisal whatsoever, apart from the APER form to be filled just once a year.
She said, “So whatever you have done wrongly or rightly throughout the year sometimes can be missed.”
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