Lack of scorecards, as well as dilapidated offices, antiquated systems, a high rate of injury at work, and what appears to be blatant employee abuse are all rife in the City of Johannesburg’s departments and municipal entities.
The city’s administration has become a uniquely unfair and abusive workplace for employees, whether they are senior directors or service workers.
The city has its Integrated Development Plan and business plans for the city’s departments and municipal entities, but residents of Johannesburg should be concerned about the significant obstacles to enacting and implementing these plans across the city.
How can these plans be effectively implemented when the city’s revenue streams are affected by so-called “resident flight” − irate rate-paying residents leaving Johannesburg? Every home and every family in Joburg deserve basic services, but they don’t get them, because there is no single integrated online performance-management system for the city’s employees, unlike in other metros.
This enables a truly unfair and inefficient working environment that allows for mismanagement and even overt malfeasance. Residents need to know that a large portion of the City’s workforce is not effectively monitored and doesn’t have performance scorecards.
No scorecards
Residents of Joburg must understand that while their employers or their own small businesses and large firms implement company-wide performance management – and employees have scorecards that they are measured on – many departmental and municipal-owned-entity employees in the City of Joburg are not managed and monitored, and if they are, it is often a tick-box exercise.
Managers and directors in the city cannot determine where coaching, mentoring, and training is desperately required for themselves or their subordinates. There is no city-wide system for performance management linked to the new SAP system and Microsoft’s PowerBI system. This is very worrying when it comes to monitoring and evaluating service entities and ensuring employees are looked after and cared for.
Populism and poor management
Currently, we see photos of Members of the Mayoral Committee (also known as “MMCs”) from the Government of Local Unity traveling to European cities for oversight visits and engagements with metropolitan government officials. However, councillors and residents are not informed of what these trips were for, and what the benefit was for Joburg’s residents, businesses, and civil society. While the diplomatic corps engagements with diplomats and international investors seem to have stalled, we have MMCs and their support staff traveling overseas for trips that we are not told about.
Meanwhile, functions under the City Manager’s Office, like Group Forensics (GFIS) and Citizen Relations and Urban Management (CRUM), are hindered by poor system management and a lack of consequence management for Group ICT and the Metro Trading Company (MTC), which procures and monitors the developers of new systems and applications.
For example, GFIS systems were down twice recently, hampering the work of the City’s investigators, and CRUM has been pressuring GICT and MTC to hurry up with the development of the Single Service Delivery Platform which will assist regional urban inspectors, municipal entities, and both ward and proportional representative councillors.
Since the city does not have a permanent City Manager, there are also ongoing issues with accountability when it comes to governance in the city. The Mayor is signing various documents and shareholder compacts late, quarterlies from departments are often late, and the reports from the deployed cadres who became board members at the Municipal Entities have been described by the City’s Group Governance unit as “substandard”.
Blatant employee abuse
The city’s Civic Centre ‘Metro building’ in Braamfontein has been closed by the current Government of Local Unity coalition, due to issues with the structural integrity of the building, and a seemingly dodgy plan to supposedly develop the precinct into rented office spaces and a shopping centre. The closed Metro offices have unfortunately now been trashed and vandalised by vagrants and unhoused immigrants who live in the inner City’s abandoned and hijacked properties.
Employees have been moved to costly rented offices across the CBD, often in areas and streets that are not safe, and in office spaces that are poorly maintained and poorly ventilated. Many employees have indicated that they wish they were back at the Metro centre.
The closure of the main office space for core departments means thousands of employees also don’t have access to the employee clinic and the gym that were used by many employees. These facilities are essentially being wasted. An oversight visit by councillors revealed a dystopian and ransacked space that looks like a scene from the TV series ‘The Walking Dead’.
Usurping elected councillors
One major concern I must mention is the introduction of the so-called ‘Bomb Squad’ by Mayor Dada Morero. We are told this rag-tag group of unelected politicians and former municipal managers has only briefly met with the Executive Management Team (EMT).
Thus far the Bomb Squad, introduced to intervene with major issues facing the City, has contributed nothing.
The residents elect councillors to govern the City, and to approve the recruitment, selection, and hiring of qualified municipal executives. However, the potentially unconstitutional Bomb Squad initiative dethrones and disempowers elected public representatives (in Council and the Gauteng legislature too), and also usurps the delegated powers of senior officials.
This is insulting to hard-working councillors and sidelines the expertise of directors and managers within the administration. Residents and their elected councillors must resist efforts to take over the City, and fight to prevent attempts at centralising decision-making and interventions.
The way forward
The City desperately needs a paradigm shift away from centralised decision-making and a lazy and apathetic approach to performance management and consequence management. A new administration should ensure that the right people are hired and trained, with more being done to retain some of the existing talent in the City’s departments, regions, and municipal entities.
Hopefully the upcoming municipal elections will produce new leaders who can assertively design an efficient and more procedurally fair workplace for the City’s officials and workers.
[Image: Simon Hurry on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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