Singapore Government Press Release
Media Division, Ministry of Information and The Arts,
MITA Building, 140 Hill Street, 2^nd Storey, Singapore 179369
Tel: 837-9666

Good morning colleagues

In the heart of every human being is a desire for meaning and purpose in life. Different people seek different ways to discover that purpose. But many people testify that nothing beats contributing to the lives of other human beings. There is nothing that gives each of us more happiness than to know that we have been useful and helpful to another person. That other person may be our parents, our spouse, our children. It may be our colleagues at work, our neighbours at home, our friends from school, new acquaintances from organised, unorganised or disorganised occasions, strangers we meet on the street or in the community centre. The word of thanks, the smile of gratitude, the gesture of appreciation, particularly from those who do not have the capacity to repay you in cash or in kind for what you have done, does something to the heart which money cannot do.

Staff Well-being is one of the four key aspects of PS21, the others being ExCEL, Organisational Review and Quality Service. How do we perceive Staff Well-being? It would be far, far too narrow to think of it simply in terms of monthly salary and performance bonus, or of medical leave and holiday bungalows, or to think of it in terms of passing the hat round if an officer has lost his parent, or for HR to send a birthday card to offer best wishes on the passage of time. No, Staff Well-being should be seen in its comprehensiveness as Fitness, Challenge and Recognition – Work that offers challenge because it is interesting, meaningful and presents room for personal development; and Recognition that says thank you and well done in ways both tangible and intangible. Fitness itself should be comprehensively perceived as Physical Fitness, Mental Fitness and Emotional Fitness. Physical Fitness as meaning things like healthy lifestyle, health screening, a body both healthy and physically fit. Mental fitness would mean alertness, judgment, understanding and continuous learning. And finally, Emotional Fitness should cover stress under control, feeling good about oneself, capacity to accept and interact with others. There are people who cynically say that they have absolutely no problem with work – it is people they hate, because it is having to deal with the people around them that they find the greatest unhappiness. We need to have people see people not as problems but as opportunity – opportunity for good and for happiness.

I have made two points. The first is that there is a satisfaction and a sense of well-being that can come only by contributing good to the lives of others. If you should dispute with this assertion, please dispute only after you have tried it and found it not to be so. An easy way to imagine the truth of the statement is if you would extrapolate how ideally you should like your relationship with your parents, your spouse and your children to be like. How you wish so much for them to appreciate the good you are trying to do for them, and how you regret so much the good you had failed to do for them. My second point is that as supervisors and managers in our respective organisations, we owe it to our staff to provide for their emotional fitness, and an important part of that fitness lies in relationships and contributions in the lives of others.

Many of your work places are on the path to organisational excellence, seeking ISO 9000 certification, the People Developer Standard, and especially the Singapore Quality Award for which the Singapore Quality Class is a major milestone of progress. You will know that the SQA/SQC framework covers 7 award criteria: Leadership (120 points), Information (80 points), Planning (80 points), People (110 points), Processes (100 points), Customers (110 points) and Results (400 points). You would notice that among all the enabling factors, as opposed to the Results factor, Leadership has the highest emphasis. This is not at all surprising. What is interesting is what is expected of Leadership under SQA. The Leadership category examines the organisation’s leadership system, values and expectations, and responsibilities to the community, society and the environment. The last is very interesting and totally essential. The organisation has to be more than itself – it has to recognise, accept and undertake its responsibilities to community, society and the environment.

Why do I mention the SQA? It is because we can all easily take the position that where it comes to helping other people, it should be an individual thing. Let the individual make his own choice and do his own thing. We can easily excuse ourselves by saying that just like religion is for the individual to decide and not for the organisation to suggest, encourage or appreciate, so also service to the community should be left alone for the individual to ponder, propose and undertake. This would not be a satisfactory stand for us to take.

There is another unsatisfactory position we in the Public Sector can easily lull ourselves into. And that is to say that since we are the Public Service, we are already serving the community. We say private sector companies must do their bit as corporate citizens to balance their chase for profits. But the public agency is already serving the community by virtue of its existence, and its continuous drive for more effective and efficient delivery of the services. However, this would be far too narrow a view. No doubt each public agency has a particular role in the total delivery of government service to the public. It is a case of One Government delivering services to the public through a whole network of government departments and statutory boards, sometimes delivering the services directly and sometimes as regulators and facilitators for the services to be delivered through private sector companies and people sector organisations. Nonetheless, each public agency should see itself beyond its specific role in public service delivery, to its role as corporate citizen.

Performing our role as corporate citizens in community service requires supervisors and managers – that is you and me – to recognise two functions. One is as facilitator and enabler for our staff. It is an integral part of Staff Well-being to create channels for our staff to do good to others and in the process do good for their own heart and soul. The second function is as formal corporate contact for those who are helped. While individuals may not be able to commit to serve week after week, the public agency should seek to organise itself to assure those who are helped of continuing, sustained and reliable service.

What can public agencies do in service to the community? This can take many forms – whether it’s spending time with the less privileged, raising funds for a new home, doing our part for the environment, or teaching a young person a new skill. All of us have something to give, but we must take the first step. The bottomline is that community involvement should not be regarded as an add-on, but as something we believe to be part of our organisation’s mission and responsibility, an expression of our beliefs and values, and a statement of our commitment and citizenship.

Community involvement must go beyond stringing together a list of feel-good, one-off activities. These may soon peter out. It is questionable whether they can have any lasting impact. It is important to think of programmes which can be sustained so as to achieve real results. Let me add to what you have already seen in the video just shown by quoting a couple of examples. MCDS has seeded a reading programme in the Toa Payoh East Children’s Community Library where their officers take turns to read to children from the neighbourhood every week. The purpose of the programme is to inculcate a love for reading and to improve the literacy skills of children from less privileged homes. Following the success of this initial programme, MCDS plans to start another reading programme in the Toa Payoh Community Library next week. AVA is helping Teen Challenge set up a fruit orchard, imparting planting and grafting skills to them. They will give continuing advisory services to Teen Challenge on the maintenance of the fruit orchard. The potential for creativity and innovation in your organisation’s possibilities for community service is simply huge. What it takes is putting in time and effort to imagine and to do.

We should give each of our staff the opportunity to be a community service activist. Volunteering can be a catalyst to help people discover their capabilities, and find meaning in their lives besides the organisation. As we energise them to be activists, they will in turn energise our respective organisations with their heart and their humanity.

Thank you for coming to this launch of Public Service in Action for the Community. The spirit of PSAC is about public sector organisations committing to community involvement as part of their mission, and enabling our people to make the difference through participation. We owe this to our staff. We owe this to Singapore.