FG replaces APER with PMS to assess civil servants’ performances

The Federal Government has introduced a new evaluation system, called Performance Management System (PMS), in place of Annual Performance Evaluation Report (APER), to assess civil servants’ performances.
The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCSF), Dr Folasade Yemi-Esan, made this known at the opening of a three-day workshop on Service-Wide Training on Monday in Abuja.
According to her, the newly-introduced PMS will create a digitally-driven culture of performance management in the civil service.
The Federal Government had earlier planned to reinvigorate the civil service system by introducing PMS to engender effective service delivery among civil servants across the country.
Permanent secretaries, selected federal public servants from ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and other stakeholders were participants at the training, organised in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria (CIPM).
Yemi-Esan said her office had been working assiduously, in collaboration with its development partners, to implement a number of flagship programmes and policy initiatives to evolve a globally-competent, efficient and competitive workforce in the country.
She said that the training was aimed at acquainting participants with the requisite knowledge and skills in job objectives setting, performance appraisal and reward system.
All these, according to her, are vital parts of the PMS that will eventually replace the APER currently being used.
“You will agree with me that although APER was designed to foster and reward high performance at the institutional and individual levels, there are no clearly- defined national performance measures for public understanding of service delivery outcomes.
“It is pertinent to point out that globally, the annual performance review system has become obsolete in the human resource management space for quite sometimes now.
“In 2016, the Harvard Business Review reported a rising performance management revolution. It stated that traditional performance appraisals had been abandoned by more than a third of US companies,’’ she said.
Also speaking, the Vice-President of CIPM, Mrs Titi Akinsanya, said her institute`s partnership with the office of the HOCSF was borne out of the desire for achieving the ideals and objectives for a better civil service operational system in the country.
She emphasised that the CIPM initiative was about the total transformation of the federal civil service.
“PMS is about making yourself accountable to what you have to deliver on a day-to-day basis to ensure that you succeed, your team succeeds and the entire federal service system succeeds,” Akinsanya said.
Earlier, the Permanent Secretary in the office of the HOCSF, Mr Mammam Mahmuda, said that the objectives of setting up PMS was to strengthen and reposition the civil servants to be more responsible and accountable in the discharge of their duties.