PUTRAJAYA, 2 Nov 2009: The government will introduce a new reward system to motivate civil servants and inculcate a culture of high performance in the public sector, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said.
Najib said he, together with Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Chief Secretary to the Government Tan Sri Mohd Sidek Hassan, were now looking into the reward system.
“Maybe we need to rename Quality Day as Innovation Day. We want to formulate a more meaningful reward system, unlike the previous one where civil servants were given vertical or diagonal salary increment.
“This is not an effective system because we can collude to abuse the system; this year, it’s my turn (to get the vertical or diagonal increment), next year, it’s your turn.
“And don’t tell me it [hasn’t] happened. It [has] happened, I know,” he said at the Prime Minister’s Department’s monthly gathering today.
Najib said that the new reward system was to show that the government would not tolerate mediocrity or abuse of power.
On the other hand, he said, high performance should be rewarded accordingly.
“We should reward departments which collected more taxes or those which are successful in prosecutions or those which produced compelling products from research and development activities,” he said.
Cynical
He also called for an end to incidence of abuse and mismanagement as pointed out in the Auditor-General’s Report, saying it reflected badly on the government.
“People have gotten cynical. Each time a report is produced, they say it’s just a report and no action will be taken.
“It’s the same old story; our performance is not getting better and the people are criticising us. This will affect the government,” he said.
Najib also called on department heads not to tolerate mediocrity among officers. — Bernama
Siva says
All we hear is carrots being offered – what about the stick? Most of the civil service personnel get off with a slap on the wrist for crappy performance / job.
megabigBLUR says
“We should reward departments which collected more taxes or those which are successful in prosecutions…”
These are poor ways of evaluating the performance of a civil service department. How would anyone know if a department was collecting exorbitant fees just to plump up its funding, or prosecuting innocent parties to fill a quota of cases? Performance must be measured by real achievements. The ultimate goal of collecting taxes is to channel them back into services provided to THE RAKYAT (not to line the pockets of bureaucrats), and the ultimate goal of prosecuting suspects is to reduce crime.