Lean measures in public sector only way to be efficient

LAHORE: The private sector is more receptive to lean management than the public sector, probably because the private sector owners have individual interest in saving costs, and their employees are accountable, whereas the public sector lacks accountability and individual interest.

However, this is not the only reason that public sector opposes lean practices; they also fear losing jobs. It is well known that the corporate sector employs enough workers to perform the jobs in hand efficiently, and rarely faces the problem of under staffing or over staffing.

The problem of over staffing is common in our public sector. Sometimes governments slap a ban on new recruitments to reduce the burden of excess employees. This ban is applied across the board. The practice causes further problems in the working of the public sector.

According to this principal, if a teacher, doctor or engineer retires or leaves the job he/she cannot be replaced with new recruits because of ban on new employment. In such instances, the performance of institutions facing shortage of these skills further deteriorates.

There has to be a rationale on filling the essential posts even during recruitment ban. A study in this regard was carried out during the Musharraf regime in Punjab by the then Punjab finance minister.

He found that at that time about a million people were working in Punjab’s bureaucracy. Out of those, about 300,000 jobs were redundant, according to the study. These 300,000 employees had almost no education and they did not possess the ability to learn skills needed in bureaucracy. Firing such a large number of employees was not politically possible.

Public servants scorn at the suggestion of going leaner. They argue that the job of the bureaucracy is to formulate policies and they cannot be equated with workers operating production lines.

They conveniently ignore the fact that besides formulating policies and executing them, the public sector is also a provider of services. They have to transfer land and property. They have to maintain roads and infrastructure; they have to regulate trade and industry; they have to ensure affordable supply of water and power, and above all they have to ensure internal and external security.

The fact none of these services are being provided to the people satisfactorily shows there is something missing. However, when the same services are handed over to the private sector in a competitive environment, it is better able to maintain efficiency. One reason for efficiency may be the profit motive of the private sector.

In private sector, efficiency is rewarded and inefficiency penalised. But in public sector there is no regard for efficiency and no penalty for inefficiency. So the public servants have no incentive to operate efficiently.

Public sector the world over is less efficient then the private sector. However, the difference in inefficiency is not as sharp as in Pakistan where over employment, coupled with political appointment of incompetent people makes the matters worse.

Over employment also means dividing the resources among all including the incompetent. If the governments become leans they could raise incentive for the competent staff that is retained.

A lean system is designed to eliminate waste, variability, and inflexibility, although in view of variety and complexity of many processes, there can be no one-size-fits-all lean template.

Many public services—military logistics, employment agencies, hospital tests, social-security benefits, airport security checks—use processes that lend themselves to efficiency and quality improvements.

Lean principles even apply in specialised fields such as legal casework and the development of policy. Work in these areas tends to be solitary, and the availability of email and voice mail discourages face-to-face collaboration.

Looking at such activities through a lean lens suggests that productivity can rise through more highly structured problem solving in teams, a more flexible allocation of resources, and a more sophisticated approach to managing knowledge. From an operational viewpoint, the aim is to smooth out the work flow.