The National Productivity Centre (NPC), has cautioned state governments against reducing work days as the removal of petrol subsidy bites workers harder.
The Director General of the Centre, Dr Nasir Raji-Mustapha, who stated this at a management training on performance management systems, productivity, quality improvement tools and techniques, in Keffi, Nasarawa state, argued that though the work arena is going virtual, reducing work days will affect the productivity of the country adversely.
He explained: “Well, the truth is that work now is beyond physical space. Going to a physical workplace every day is no longer seen as the only way to work. Though the virtual work arena is emerging very strongly, there are issues around that in Nigeria.
“For us in this country, we need to have enough infrastructure to be able to work from home. So reducing the number of days of work is not creative at all.
“For a country like Nigeria, if you want to reduce the number of days your workers work, you should give them the facilities, the infrastructure that will enable them to work online. For workers to work from home or wherever, government must provide the infrastructure”, he stated.
The NPC chief noted that virtual work is different from reducing the number of work days, saying, “for the state government to be talking about reducing the number of days workers can come to work is not the same as virtual work. What the concerned states are doing is to reduce hours of work. That will reduce national productivity that is already very low.”
He further admonished state governments to provide the needed infrastructure for their workers to work from home and not reduce the number of work days.
He added: “All over the world now, people are conversing for less physical work where people can work anywhere and get their work done. The most important thing is to meet the set target.
“So, I will advise that the best thing for the governors to do is to provide facilities that will enable workers to either get to their workplace for the period as allowed by the ILO Convention, which specifies eight hours of work every day from Monday to Friday.”
Dr Raji-Mustapha said refreshing the expertise of productivity experts is vital for the revival of micro, small and medium-scale businesses that are the engine room of economic development.
“It is important to keep organizing refresher courses for in-house productivity consultants who have been deploying their productivity tools and techniques to the private sector, especially the small, medium, and large-scale enterprises. We have customized productivity improvement tools and techniques that are recognized worldwide to have the capacity to turn around organizations.
“The Centre has always refreshed the memories of our consultants by giving them current information as far as those tools and techniques are concerned so that they will be able to deploy these tools and techniques to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of small and medium-scale enterprises in Nigeria.”
(The guardian)
