FCSC Chairman, Olaopa charges CIPM on new orientations, innovations

The Chairman of Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has called on the Charted Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) to rethink Human Resources functions from multiple perspectives.

Olaopa acknowledged the changing demographics of employees and workers, adding that contemporary workplace demand new orientations and innovation that take into consideration the new normal and emergency of the Gen Z demographic.

Speaking as Chairman of the Investiture Ceremony of the President and Chairman of Governing Council of CIPM, in Lagos, on Wednesday, said HR function is cogent in achieving performance and productivity.

“Since the HR function is cogent in achieving performance and productivity, there is no doubt that the professionalization of the HR functions is fundamental to transforming the workplace. However, the core professionals need to know that to do this, human resource management can no longer be restricted as the exclusive responsibility of HR departments. Line managers and other managerial executives now require people management skills and competence to facilitate effectiveness and efficiency.

“This also relocates the HR function from the back to the front office. And rethinking the HR function implies a significant level of reform. For instance, at the basic level, it is no longer productive to treat HR in terms of personnel management, and its preoccupation with the passive role of privileging rules, regulations and procedures rather than developing and pursuing policies in manners that extract performance results and productivity bargains from people and from the processes. This automatically affects the current practice of staff performance appraisal which is very vague about what is being assessed and rewarded, or even how appraisal should be directed towards performance assessment and competences, rather than as a mere subjective protocol.

“It has become almost impossible to think of public service transformation without inserting such reform within the public-private partnership (PPP) framework. Working within this framework demands optimizing the PPP contracts through imbuing public officials with commercial skills and competences that open up their capacities to engage with clients, customers and citizens, acquire knowledge of international business practices and labour laws, adopt multicultural sensitivities and multiple languages, and so on. This also brings in the growing consequences of involving artificial intelligences and robotics in upscaling the performance and efficiency of the public service system. The real challenge is how to translate the uncertainties that attend the deployment of artificial intelligence at the moment to real opportunities that will impact the public service system.

” To become the ultimate change agents in the reform of the public service, the HR manager is not only expected to facilitate the establishment of a new HR model that will harness the performance and productive capacities of the workforce. They are also essentially required to deepen the skills and competences with regard to risk management in ways that instigate action research as a component of management cum operation research and organisation development (OD) in the MDAs. This will also enable the HR to institute a learning culture that challenges the bureaucratic status quo, and helps it champions specific cultural transformations directed at translating desirable culture and public service values into public managers behaviour.

“The CIPM is strategically located as a key stakeholder in injecting its organizational strengths into articulating a significant blueprint that insert the organization into a collaborative partnership needed to keep afloat the business of reforming the public service system. I have no iota of doubt that the new chairman will not only build on the existing architecture of achievements of the previous chairpersons, but also lay a few solid foundations of his that will keep the CIPM on course as a change agent in Nigeria’s effort to build a world class public service that backstops her democratic governance”, said Olaopa.