From The Office of the Auditor General

The report, “Workforce planning and management in the Cayman Islands Government” issued by the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) today, reviewed how well the civil service plans and manages its workforce.

The report specifically looked at how well the civil service plans and manages its workforce to meet its strategic goals; how effective it is at attracting, retaining and supporting its workforce; if it has relevant and reliable information about its staff and how it uses this to support workforce planning and decision making.

“The Cayman Islands Government has recently launched a new five-year strategic plan, which sets out the ambition of becoming a world-class civil service” says Sue Winspear, Auditor General of the Cayman Islands. “But it does not have a plan that sets out its workforce needs in the longer term to ensure that it has the right people with the right skills in place to achieve its strategic objectives and deliver the services that will be needed in the future.”

The report highlights that the strategic plan concentrates on delivering quality services and improving customer experience. The civil service has started to collect baseline information on staff and customer satisfaction levels which will help it measure progress in the years ahead.

The report also states that the Cayman Islands Government has a range of workforce management processes and tools in place and has already started to improve some of these.

“I’m pleased that the Cayman Islands Government has already started to improve its workforce management but there is scope to further improve and better integrate its approach.” Ms. Winspear continues. “It also urgently needs to improve its IT systems for workforce management. The systems in place are not well-designed, integrated or user-friendly, which leads to inefficiencies in both inputting and extracting information for decision making.”

Ms. Winspear concludes: “The civil service is entirely dependent upon its staff to deliver its strategic objectives, policies and a wide range of public services. The five-year strategic plan is an excellent start but it also needs to have a clear pay strategy that sets out how it plans to keep civil service salaries competitive to ensure that it can recruit and retain the right staff now and in the future.”

More information about these reports can be obtained by contacting Sue Winspear at (345) 244-3201 or Angela Cullen, Director of Performance Audit and report author, at (345) 244-3220.

The reports are available at www.auditorgeneral.gov.ky.

Notes
1. As at June 2016 the Cayman Islands Government (civil service) employed 3,600 staff.
2. In 2015-16 the Cayman Islands Government spent $232 million on staff costs. Staff costs include basic salary, pension costs and healthcare insurance.
3. The audit looks at the civil service only, i.e. those staff employed by Ministries, Portfolios and Offices and their related departments. It did not look at staff employed by Statutory Authorities and Government Companies. The audit focused on four government departments and their related ministries that employed 36.5 per cent of staff at June 2016:
Department of Education Services – 719 staff (Ministry of Education, Youth, Sports, Agriculture and Lands)
Royal Cayman Islands Police Service – 433 staff (Ministry of Human Resources and Immigration)
Department of Children and Family Services – 138 staff (Ministry of Community Affairs)
Needs Assessment Unit – 24 staff (Ministry of Community Affairs).