Online Reporter
The new job evaluation by the Public Service Commission has taken the lead in Zimbabwe by separating grades and pay rises from promotion posts, allowing first class professionals to earn more at what they do so well rather than be forced into a limited number of administrative and management posts.
We are all aware of the problem. You can get a first-class teacher with some years of experience who can motivate their classes, get the children to understand what they are doing and eager to learn more, and then have examination results well above the average.
And they earn very little more than some newly graduated teacher whose heart might well not be in the job. But the first class teacher is expected to apply for a job as an education officer in the administrative structure of the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, or seek promotion to deputy head or head, before they get paid better.
They might not be that great an administrator or supervisor or manager, which makes the transfer or promotion even sadder if they are really a great teacher.
The new civil service job evaluation finally breaks this link between promotion and pay rises and starts to pay those really good at their job more money to stay in that job.
That has an additional benefit that those being taught by a good teacher, or dealing with a first class professional in agriculture sciences, can continue to benefit from the retention of that professional in their post.
The new structure will probably also help retain the best skilled and professional staff within the public service, instead of seeing them leak away to better remuneration in the private sector.
When someone moved out of the civil service, the hiring private company obviously wanted the smartest and best of those who applied, rather than just lumping everyone with the same academic qualifications together.
The civil service, with the largest payroll in Zimbabwe and easily the largest number of skilled and professional staff, needs the sort of structure where pay is far more reliant on competence than on position.
There will still be openings for managerial staff, but perhaps these can be filled by those with a gift for management, rather than just by a financially desperate professional needing a better salary.
But generally the civil service has a far flatter structure than most of the private sector so the new structure can make a very real difference.
The private sector can be just as bad, mind you, with the rewards going to those who administer and direct the work of others rather than being shared by top skilled staff, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.
The private sector has an additional problem of a far greater spread of salaries than the private sector, with managers in the private sector far keener on overvaluing their own posts and granting themselves large salaries and benefits.
For practical reasons, fake promotions are more common than many suppose in the private sector, that is promotions that do not in fact change the duties and responsibilities of the promoted employee very much, but which move them up to the next pay grade; these are the promotions designed to retain top class employees to keep doing what they are doing so well rather than swell the ranks of supervisors.
The civil service, which does not have the flexibility for such ad hoc and not very efficient solutions, has now chosen a far more sensible route. The private sector should take note and borrow the same ideas and concepts.
The public service will also have to develop the fair and transparent criteria for measuring the higher level performance, but this should be possible. Again the private sector should be able to benefit from similar criteria.
It is very old-fashioned and possibly a direct result of the English class system translated into the colonial race system that created the organisations where managers get most of the rewards. This simplistic split of staff, and sometimes a veiled degree of contempt for those who do when compared to those who order, is damaging.
The Public Service Commission has made a good start in ordering a completely new evaluation of the public service, and for breaking with the simplistic management-worker splits of the past.
Now it needs to implement the changes that should do so much to upgrade the service offered by those on the State payroll.
