COOPERATE WITH US TO IMPLEMENT LINKING PAY TO PRODUCTIVITY INITIATIVE
-FAIR WAGES TO HR MANAGERS
The Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) has called on directors and human resource managers of public service institutions to support the implementation of the initiative linking pay to performance and productivity to promote an effective wage management system in the country.
The initiative followed a directive from President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo during the Chief Executive Conference earlier this year, instructing the Public Services Commission (PSC) to collaborate with the FWSC to ensure its implementation.
Speaking on “Rewards and Compensation Administration in the Public Sector” at a workshop organised by the PSC for directors and human resource managers in Accra, Cephas Amada, the Director in Charge of Salary Administration at the FWSC, emphasised the goal of aligning workers’ monthly salaries with their performance.
He stated that the ongoing initiative was crucial for enhancing productivity in the public service.
“We need your cooperation. If we execute this effectively, we will have a productive nation, and a productive nation is a prosperous nation,” he said.
He said originally, the plan was to adopt a straightforward approach of linking pay to productivity.
He, however, said studies revealed that would have been problematic due to the absence of national productivity indicators and indices.
Consequently, Mr Amada noted that the PSC and FWSC decided to implement the initiative in two phases, with the first phase focusing on linking pay to performance and subsequently linking pay to productivity.
The first phase would rely heavily on the PSC’s performance management system for public services, requiring organisations to set targets and determine performance indicators and every worker should have annual targets.
“By January 2025, our expectation is that the movement of your notches on the single spine will freeze. It will only be unfrozen when you submit your performance for analysis,” he said.
The notches on the single spine, he said, was not meant to reward people for passage of time but “to reward people for performance.
He said to facilitate this, a form had been developed for submitting annual performance records to the FWSC.
For the second phase, Mr Amada revealed that pay increments would be linked to the contribution of public service to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
He explained that the model would include a negotiation framework ensuring that salary negotiations align with the sector’s GDP contribution.
For example, he said, “if the contribution increases by 10 percent, negotiations might allow for a salary increase of between 10 to 15 percent. This approach aims to prevent arbitrary demands by unions, where they will not come and say they want 165 percent increment as it happened in the past”.
Mr Amada said research had shown that 60 percent of public service institutions do not implement performance management, even though they promote workers annually.
“We are working to digitise the process so that at the end of the year, performance scores are stored as evidence for promotions,” Mr Amada said.
He said consequently, negotiation percentages would not be uniform; 70 percent of the negotiated amount would be allocated to workers across the board, while 30 percent would be reserved as a performance reward.
Mental health
The two-day workshop themed “Empowering Human Resource Excellence in the Public Sector,” focused on discussions, including managing employer-employee relations under Ghanaian labour laws, industrial relations and union perspectives, and mental health awareness.
A former Registrar of the Ghana Psychology Council, Rev Dr Dinah Baah-Odoom, highlighted the importance of mental health awareness in the workplace and pointed out that one in every four persons in Ghana suffers from a mental health challenge, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) 2021 report.
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