GEORGE S. CHUA l AUGUST 9, 2022 l BUSINESS MIRROR
IT would seem that rightsizing has become a popular topic recently and it is about time that we all give it serious thought.
From a business perspective, in today’s highly competitive environment, you cannot survive if you are not efficient; and rightsizing is certainly a critical ingredient in maximizing efficiency. If you have more people than you need, you end up paying more for salaries and wages, space and administrative overhead.
A business unit, department or organization that has more people than it truly needs creates more problems beyond the cost of having more people. It is part of human behavior that to justify their pay they must appear to do something and since the responsibility is now shared over many more people, it has become more difficult to identify who is to blame if anything goes wrong and it becomes a finger pointing game and makes it easier to pass the buck.
Not only does the business suffer from a bloated and bureaucratic organization, their customers also suffer from these inefficiencies. These clients get passed around, getting anything done takes longer and chances are the quality of the product or service will also deteriorate due to the difficulty in determining who is responsible for what. The result is an unhappy customer that the business will end up losing, which means that these employees will now have fewer customers to serve leading to a death spiral of the business.
How does rightsizing work in government? Much like in business, efficiency if the key.
While businesses may focus their rightsizing to maximize shareholder wealth, governments should focus their rightsizing to maximize the satisfaction of their citizenry.
What makes the citizens happy? It does not take a genius to figure this out. People want to minimize their cost in dealing with government, they would like to pay the lowest taxes and fees as possible, they would like to spend the least time in getting permits, licenses and other requirements imposed upon them, they would like to have the simplest and easiest forms to fill up and submit and if possible not deal with government at all!
Rightsizing in any private or government organization is only possible if it is clear what the objective is. If it is to establish the baseline identity of a person like in the PhilSys ID Registation, then a face to face process may be required to take a photo, get the biometrics and so on. However, once this is properly established everything else can be done online.
Doing transactions and getting permits and licenses online should be the goal. It will reduce the burden of cost and time on the people and prevent opportunities for corruption in government. The other huge benefit of online transactions is that you now have an electronic record of documents automatically, which is more environmentally friendly over paper transactions and makes for easier and safer storage and retrieval.
Our government is on the right track in lengthening the validity of documents and licenses such as passports and driver’s licenses. The savings in time and effort of both the agency concerned and the applicant can be better spent on other more productive things that will improve the economy. It will cause less traffic, less pollution, less waste and allow for fewer employees since the daily load is greatly reduced.
It is about time we focus on rightsizing to catch up with the leading economies of the world.
*** George S. Chua was 2016 FINEX President, currently a Professorial Lecturer at UP Diliman and an active Entrepreneur. The views and comments of the author are his own and not of the newspaper or the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines. Comments may be sent to gschua@up.edu.ph.