Government must train employees to reform and improve work quality: El-Hini

Unfortunately, Egypt destroys its human resources, and does not manage them well in its public sector, says former minister

Reforming the state's administrative body requires real training to change government employees' working culture and to qualify them to advance the public sector, whether in service or production, Misr Insurance Holding Company Chairman Basel El-Hini said.
He said the average government employee does not work under pressure and yet they have increasing monthly salaries without improvement or effort in their work. El-Hini further noted that he supports offering training courses for employees in the public sector to qualify them to enhance their institutions. Their managers should give them the chance to apply these experiences.
El-Hini gave the example of public banks, which reformed their employees and so improved the general workflow. Employees are part of the equation and the process of adding cadres and experienced workers from the private sector to join banks is called Administration Privatisation. After a few years, public banks became strong competitors to the biggest private banks operating in the local market.
What happened in the public banks is that the new cadres and the employees merged together, which sped up the achievement of needed goals. Al-Hini said he refused to make use of these cadres as consultants or any major staff in the bank.
The main element to advance any company or country is by having qualified advanced human cadres. Choosing employees is the foundation of success, according to former minister of administrative development Hani Mahmoud, who worked in Vodafone before joining the government.
"Unfortunately, Egypt destroys its human resources by leaving them without training or qualifications," Mahmoud said during the T-20 Innovation in Government conference on Sunday. "The government has to first choose efficient employees properly and then work on training and qualifying them."
He said the government is required to first prepare, train, and qualify about 30,000 Egyptians for several years then have them join the public sector. The selection should not be based on interviews alone; there must be other tools and ways to evaluate the applicants technically.
Mahmoud said after preparing leaders through specific programmes and selecting based on qualifications, the work environment must be prepared to fit the ambitions of these new experienced workers. Moreover, they must be granted broad authorities to make radical change, to develop and reform these bodies.
Government work is not easy because it is a subject to rules, regulations, and laws that can hinder work and improvement, Assistant to the Minister of Planning Mostafa Ghali said.
He added that the most important thing in this period is for the government to create goals and link achieving these goals to the evaluation of the performance of new leaderships and all government employees.