Preparing the public service for the Generation Z workforce

THE Nigerian public service system is going through transition on many fronts, all in a sustained bid to backstop the dividends of democratic governance for Nigerians with enhanced bureaucratic efficiency that undermines many of the systemic hinderances to service delivery and, at that, within framework of performance accountability. One of the most fundamental contemporary problems is that of an ageing workforce that makes it most difficult for the system to engage with the new knowledge society, the impact of technological innovations, and the imperatives of the fourth industrial revolution. And the explanation for the issue of an ageing workforce is not only that there has been in place decades of embargoed recruitment into the service. More significantly, and more increasingly, the federal government of Nigeria ceased to be the employer of choice, especially for the Generation Z. There are many reasons for this. The most significant is that the government fails to become incentivising sufficiently, or make the bureaucratic system modernizing enough to excite a demographic space filled with those who have no patience with a lumbering system. And the private sector became increasingly more attractive in attracting and recruiting the best from the now internationalized labour market in terms of human resources.

The trajectory becomes clear. While the Baby Boomers, those who made the effort to domesticate the public service system into the Nigerian post-independence world, are all almost gone, and the millennials are struggling with a system that has consistently failed to see their significance and hence is driving them to the private sector, it is to the Gen Z or Zoomers that the system now has to look up to. This is the generation of the digital natives that is redefining the world into a knowledge society, basically understand the transformative capacities of the new technologies, and are more than capable of integrating into the demands of the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions. Indeed, all across the world, the public service is depending on the Gen Z to bring it up to speed on the imperatives of a digital world that is transforming everything we know about public service. They therefore possess the capability to lead the digital revolution in society and the workplace in ways that grounds the capability readiness of the public service to lead the efficiency of democratic governance.

Unfortunately, it does not seem as if Nigeria is ready for this generation and its revolutionary presence and potentials for institutional reforms. Aside the dismal fact that the public sector has lost its appeal to attract key and sophisticated employees, the public service is not adequately professionalized and incentivised—through its human resource management frameworks—to put in place the methods, practices, schemas and paradigms that adequately accommodate the organizational and institutional dynamics of the Zoomers.

This calls for a policy conversation between the government and its many stakeholders on what needs to be done to resuscitate the significance of institutional reform that will have the Gen Z at the core of the transformation of the public service workplace and its HRM dynamics. And the key issue is first how to understand the Zoomers as the most critical human resource available for public administration today, and the strategies required to factor them into institutional reform around the effectiveness and efficiency of the public service. We need to, in other words, start asking new and critical questions that will yield reform insights about how we can improve workforce planning, recruitment and retention policies and procedures, performance management, talent management, training, pay and compensation, and career management.

The Gen Z is a unique set of people with a world view that sets them apart. They are entrepreneurial. They are technology savvy. They are multicultural and diverse. They are self-reliant, self-motivated and adaptive. They are cosmopolitan. They are skillful. And they love money and beautiful incentives. ⁠They live on smartphones, video games and social media, manipulate gadgets, operate in networks, have critical information on their fingertips, and they are defined by global polycrisis: economic recession, Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, terrorism, etc. They are the digital natives with the capabilities to maneuver technologies for the purpose of achieving crucial objectives that transforms the workplace and the human society. They constitute the human capital that motivate the industrial revolution in its fourth and fifth iterations. 

In administrative terms, the definers in this generation are not interested in the public sector because it does not contain the institutional modalities that could interest them. For instance, there is the HR function that accommodates flexi-timing, and a suitable work-life balance for Zoomers who do not want to spend all weeks at work, from 8 am to 5 pm. The career path in the public sector is nothing to write home about. Incentives and compensations are next to nothing. In short, the bureaucratic culture—and its bureau-pathologies—sits incongruously with the expectation of the Zoomers for an efficient institution driven by foresight, strategies, competences and technologies. The administrative and institutional workplace must be one that is driven by technologies to achieve transparency, accountability and efficiency in service delivery.

The challenge for institutional reform and policy innovation is simple: Given the generational gap that now plagues the Nigerian public service system and its workplace, how can the Gen Z and its worldviews and workplace imperative be factored into institutional reform? How can the public service be rebranded and professionalized sufficiently to facilitate the attraction, recruitment and retention of the Zoomers? What marketing strategies can the government and administrative leadership promote as a key policy initiative?

Administrative reform needs a cultural adjustment program and a value reorientation that rethinks the public service as a noble vocation meant for those who genuinely want to serve the public. This demands that the value of public spiritedness must be highlighted as the key to seeing the public service as a spiritual calling to serve others with deferred gratification. Rebranding the public service implies reconstituting it as the new public service, founded on new code of conduct and code of ethics. In other words, the traditional Weberian system, with its Theory X worldview, can no longer serve the Gen Z. The Theory Y provides a more formidable, innovative and entrepreneurial basis for a transformational leadership with the latitude and discretion to accommodate the values, attitudes and mindsets of the Zoomers.

However, public-spiritedness must not be made a value that rejects compensation. Even Max Weber insists that those who serve the public and hence live for politics, can also live from politics. Public servants, in other words, live for a cause—a dedication to the public, but they also have the responsibility to live from this cause, and benefit from it. This is the sense in which the system must make the issues of wages, incentives and compensation with its associated imperatives of restructuring, rightsizing, job revaluation and developmental industrial relations (to get a handle on cost of governance) critical in ways that will redirect the attention of the employees away from bureaucratic corruption and instant gratification.

Policy attention must be given to human resource management that recognize the new normal especially in terms of the performance management system, workplace redefinition and reskilling, meritocracy and excellence that reform the administrative processes and workplace dynamics through the infusion of new digital technologies and artificial intelligences, as well as the peculiar sociological imperatives of emergence of the Gen Z and even Gen Alpha. This is critical because the Gen Z constitutes the core of the knowledge society within which the developmental state must function. And the Zoomers are the custodians of this knowledge and its technological components.

The demographic imperative of the Gen Z calls for a reform program that de-bureaucratises the Nigerian public service system in ways that transform the workplace sufficiently to make allowance for performance, accountability, innovation and productivity. This opens the way for a new breed of public managers that possess the capability readiness and knowledge prerequisite to lead the system into a new golden era Nigeria requires to make democratic governance work for Nigerians. A special onus of responsibility therefore rests on the federal civil service commission (FCSC) to play a fundamental role not only in crafting an entry requirement that has the Zoomers in mind, but also a human resource management framework that attends to their peculiarity as a defining workforce that Nigeria urgently needs to transform its workplace performance and productivity. This will necessitate, for example, a comprehensive review of the MDAs and their operational guidelines and HR functions in ways that align with the objectives of the FCSC.

The FCSC, and the various state CSCs, needs to review and modernize the guidelines for appointment, promotion and discipline in the civil services, as well as reinforce the standard operating procedures across the various CSCs as a mean of guiding against the incidences of sharp practices, the politicization of staff career management, and the enforcement of strict compliance with the rules of law and the constitutional order in all operations. This demand, for instance, the need to institute a performance-based promotion system that is rooted in competency, training and project-based assessments.

The future of the institutional reform of the public service system in Nigeria, in a critical sense, lies in the system’s capacity to engage with and incorporate the Gen Z as a crucial demographic component of a change management that recognizes their significance in making the public service space for new administrative thinking and performance. The Gen Z is the future of the administrative workplace.

• Tunji Olaopa, Professor of Public Administration & Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, writes from Abuja

READ ALSO: Join politics, make change through public service — Presidency urges young women