Metro in impasse on skills scrutiny

Management wants to match abilities to needs

HUNDREDS of Buffalo City Metro employees are allegedly refusing to take a crucial skills audit initiated by the city to improve staff functions and service delivery, forcing management to threaten disciplinary action against those who resist the audit.

The directive for disciplinary action to be taken against non-compliant employees came straight from acting city manager Nceba Ncunyana after only 508 workers completed the skills forms by May, further delaying the process which began last year and was scheduled to be completed this year.

Ncunyana confirmed in a report tabled before council last month that a skills audit of all staff was being conducted by the human resource performance and development department (HR) and results would be analysed by the HR department. The results will be used for the metro’s skills development plan and to further personnel development initiatives.

Ncunyana said: “1 139 skills audit forms of staff members have been received as at July 6 2016. This is an improvement in forms received during May 2016. It was further reported as a challenge that staff members were reluctant to complete skills audit forms.”

Following the reluctance from the employees and slow progress made, Ncunyana issued aninstruction toall departments to ensure that “their staff members comply with the submission by October 18 2016 or face disciplinary action by line managers”.

He said HR department officials had since been meeting with office managers before any consequence management started.

By October 4, 1 393 workers were recorded to have submitted their skills forms.

However, a huge 3 233 forms were still outstanding.

Based on the outstanding numbers Ncunyana said a need had risen for support to be sourced from the enterprise project management office (EPMO) in an effort to speed up the process of returning the skills forms and to support semi-skilled and semi-literate workers.

“The skills of employees need to be audited in order to ensure that a workplace skills’ plan is approved every year, setting out the necessary capacitation interventions to improve staff capacity,” Ncunyana said.

Majority workers’ representative, the SA Municipal Workers’ Union’s (Samwu) regional secretary Zolani Ndlela yesterday disputed the claims that workers were behind the delay. Ndlela, instead, blamed managers.

“We have the local labour forum where these matters are supposed to be discussed and I can assure you that management has not informed us that workers are not cooperating,” said Ndlela.

Ndlela said managers had failed to communicate with workers. He alleged some managers were less skilled than their subordinates and felt threatened and opted not to take part in the auditing.

BCM spokesman Sibusiso Cindi said on Wednesday the numbers of workers who had cooperated had improved to 1 686, while 1 547 workers had still not been audited.

Ncunyana’s recent report highlighted that zero submissions were received from law enforcement, supply chain management, legal services and internal auditing, among other departments. —