Effective performance is fundamental to creating a sustainable value system. Societies thrive when people perform. Contrarily, poor performance breeds irreversible failures. From ancient Egyptian civilisation along the Nile, the Harappan in the Indus Valley, and Chinese along the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to the modern world’s economic giants, such as the US, China, and the EU, the formation of a high performance culture has always set the societies on an incredible path of prosperity and glory.

However, performance does not occur in a vacuum. It essentially requires a strategic and integrated approach reinforced by an enabling environment to ensure its growth and continuity. It also needs to be actively managed, as it is a process that consolidates goal setting and development into a single common system.

Within the contextual background of public sector governance in Pakistan, the point of inquiry is the dismal public service delivery that potentially betrays a flawed performance management system in government service. Needless to say, this phenomenon seems central to multiple national debacles at numerous social and economic fronts.

Be it a lack of political will, an unholy connivance between the power elites, or poor public pressure, quite evidently there have been no drastic measures taken by the state machinery to overhaul performance management in the public service of Pakistan. The result is quite catastrophic to the overall health of our national bureaucratic edifice — ad hocism at workplace settings, functional overlaps and job duplications, unclear role profiling, haphazard task assignments, unequal distribution of workload, a responsibility avoidance culture and so on.

In a nutshell, the performance watch-guard mechanism in public sector milieu is so perfunctory that our public functionaries generally symbolise more of a herd of raging bulls blindly charging with their pointed horns to prey the weak and the vulnerable.

There is a lot of hue and cry around the prime minister’s reform team about interventions in the performance management system in civil service but nothing significant has come to the surface. These much-publicised but scantily implemented reform packages include performance contracts for the ministries, revised PER forms and forced rankings. However, as is the case with many other initiatives, these so-called propositions have hardly translated into tangible actions and desirable outcomes.

This is our national dilemma. We are acutely unable to define the specific purpose of most of our endeavours. The classical example includes the ambiguity on the purpose of creation of our country, let alone delineating the true objectives of key state institutions, such as parliament, judiciary, military and civil bureaucracy, etc.

The same malaise has hit performance management in our civil service, as the system appears to be barely surviving without any substantive purpose. Developing a performance-oriented ideology and injecting its essence in the institutional routines is extremely important for setting a direction, measuring performance and taking remedial actions. In its absence, the fruits of performance management cannot be reaped and the whole structure of institutional effectiveness is seriously jeopardised.

The top brass in our administrative landscape is often found responding to short-lived political exigencies brought to bear upon them and the system, resulting in a lack of focus and time to the demands of ‘performance’ at organisational, team, and individual levels. Added to this handicap is a lack of attention to differentiate between the two different but complimentary concepts of performance management and performance evaluation.

Moreover, the capacity building regime in our civil service hardly emphasises the need to train the decision makers in performance management for increased organisational efficacy and improved public service delivery. Any theoretical and practical understanding of the benefits of an effective performance management system is sacrificed at the altar of the mundane and transient. In this situation, the organisational leadership is left incapacitated to contribute positively in breaking the status quo and bringing about any change in the system.

Advanced countries across the globe are investing in human capital by creating robust and stringent performance evaluation systems, such as self-assessment, peer assessment, upward appraisal, and 360-degree feedback, the public sector performance evaluation system in Pakistan has been suffering from gross inefficiencies due to its stereotyped and ritualistic nature, and inherent bias.

Historically an annual confidential report (ACR), now a performance evaluation report (PER) is driven by an outdated proforma arbitrarily populated with mainly subjective information and ranked merely for the purpose of promotion to the higher grade. The Institutional Reforms Cell and the Establishment Division have only recently embarked upon redesigning the PER form to align it with the new concept of key performance indicators (KPIs). The destination seems far away.

The absence of properly developed and neatly documented job descriptions, the unavailability of any performance tracking system, meagre capacity of the reporting officer and counter signatory to scientifically evaluate the performance of the subordinates, retrogressive assessment of strengths and weaknesses, poorly designed PER forms, etc, among others, are some of the major reasons of ineffectiveness of performance evaluation in civil service of Pakistan.

The process is so biased and subjective in nature that the personnel under evaluation may end up getting ‘very good’ in the PER even if their performance largely and openly remains poor, let alone ambivalent or disputed. On the other hand, the reporting officer can always exploit the subordinates by invoking a fear of bad grades in the PER if the latter do not yield to the former’s whims. This is a big blow to the motivation for performing well and producing more.

First and foremost, the PM Reforms Team should be able to articulate their vision of performance management. Secondly, there is a need to establish a clear line between the continuous nature of performance management and the one-off event of annual performance appraisal. Utmost priority should be given to train government officials in properly managing, monitoring and evaluating the performance of the people working under their administrative control.

The obsolete PER form should be replaced with a corporate style and technology-driven performance evaluation system. Above all, detailed job descriptions for all the government employees should be written along with the KPIs for each position, and the major credentials required to perform the job. Reforming the performance management paradigm is not very challenging; it is made to look difficult by those with vested interests in the perpetual incompetence of civil service.

The writer is a senior institutional reforms and capacity building professional. He can be contacted at alitariqjatala@hotmail.com