American Service Excellence consultant, Paul Steel is impressed with the commitment of Fiji’s civil servants towards polishing their role as assessors.
The renowned advocate of performance excellence extolled the attitude of assessors, who pick out ministries and departments for the highest service accolade in the country.
“The cooperation from these evaluators was 100 per cent during the five days training held last week,” Mr Steel said.
“The evaluators had very little problem making the transition from the current assessment system to the Malcolm Baldrige system.”
The National Training and Productivity sector, which was previously following the Australian Quality Awards Framework, has now been switched over to the Malcolm Baldrige Framework.
Public Service Commission permanent secretary, Parmesh Chand said feedbacks received from these assessors after looking into the performance of individual ministries paved the way for improvement.
“Those feedbacks have been very useful to us in that they have gave brought about the changes to the way some of these ministries were operating,” Mr Chand said.
Mr Steel, who has already trained the assessors, will have a session with the permanent secretaries and deputy secretaries and the champions who helped ministries with their submission for the awards.
Mr Chand said the SEA helped the service emulate the excellence in customer service that the private sector drives for.
Government agencies have become more accountable, transparent and customer friendly as a result of being assessed hence services have improved.
The private sector has been having its business excellence awards for the past 15 years while SEA, which is part of the civil service reform, has been running for the past seven years.