WORKER’S COMPENSATION CORNER with MAYBIN NKHOLOMBA
IN HIS book ‘Thinking for a Change’, John Maxwell made, in my opinion, an important observation which makes sense for today’s article.
He observed that “our life today is a result of your thinking yesterday. Your life tomorrow will be determined by what you think today”.
We are thinking about service excellence today because we desire a better organisation for future generations. There is absolutely no doubt that to achieve service excellence, a lot of investment will be required, but unless we start marching towards it, this organisation will remain what it has been.
Investing in people to create a pool of talented and skilled employees who can easily take advantage of existing and future information technological advancements, which help improve service levels, are not going to be avoidable costs in our long match towards service excellence.
Because we believe in creating a wonderful organisation for future generations without compromising today’s requirements on service delivery, our strategic plan for 2016-2020 is developed under the theme ‘Service Excellence’.
As we indicated in our article last week, effort has been made to run esteemed readers through our vision, mission, values and strategic objectives informing our long-term planning for WCFCB and we take interest to share them below:
• Our vision is to ‘strive towards service excellence in providing social security services whereas the mission is ‘to effectively, efficiently and professionally administer a quality employment injury and occupational disease scheme that embraces service excellence in the provision of compensation to all beneficiaries’
• Our core values shall remain in the form of professionalism, courtesy and integrity, fairness and equity, accountability and transparency, team spirit and timeliness
We have made an undertaking to strive for excellence in all aspects of our social delivery and to interact in a respectful, competent and efficient manner.
We have also committed to discharging our functions with utmost courtesy, honesty and integrity honouring and accounting for our commitments to our stakeholders.
These philosophies are important to us and our stakeholders, and that is why we are sharing them publicly. We are going to learn to live with them to attract trust and confidence. Institutions such as ours have often suffered negative perceptions and it will take spirited efforts to turn around peoples’ negative perception to believe that we too can come on board and provide excellent services to the people of Zambia and beyond. We remain committed to achieving objectives set out in our plan, which was launched last week in Lusaka. The strategic objectives of our plan are shared in this article to inform esteemed readers where we intend to take the institution over the next five years as follows;
• To provide compensation to the board’s beneficiaries in line with the Workers’ Compensation Act. This will entail ensuring that actuarial valuations are done timely in order to monitor the financial soundness of the fund, and to implement the pension increase policy, among other issues. The promotion of health and safe work environments to employers and employees, and returning of injured workers to good health and to work will be prioritised. What is very interesting to me as an individual is the creation of the next generation of safety champions in our youth. This is likely to help reduce the experience of accidents in industry ultimately
• To ensure adherence to corporate governance reporting requirements. This will entail ensuring strong internal controls and compliance to statutory requirements; conducting regular internal and external audits. Other areas of the strategies would be to review and update risk management policy and procedures on a regular basis and production of annual reports. Priority will be given to the promotion of cordial relations with stakeholders and the training of board members and senior management in corporate governance
• To increase assessment income by 100 percent through the implementation of new rates of assessment, carrying out actuarial valuation tri-annually and increasing strategic partnerships with key stakeholders
The board will also be extending coverage to the informal sector through partnerships with the International Labour Organisation, in addition to implementation of the proposed amendments to the WCFCB Act and establishment of regulations for rebates.
• To provide quality service to all the board’s customers through the development of a customer service charter, decentralisation of core functions and reducing response time to one month. The other strategies have to do with the development of a communication policy, implementation of an online pension management system and enhancing accessibility to services.
To be continued next week. God bless you.
The author is corporate affairs and customer services manager at Workers Compensation Fund Control Board; email compensation@workers.com.zm . 0212621283