Telikom’s new thrust

Business, Normal
Source:

The National, Wednesday November 6th, 2013

 By GYNNIE KERO

TELIKOM PNG Ltd will spend millions of kina in personnel training, performance incentives and in putting up new infrastructure, chairman Mahesh Patel (pictured right) said.

He told The National yesterday that instilling the business culture in Telikom was aimed at monitoring the performance of employees.

“We have started from the board level of an open-door communication policy,” he said.

“We wanted all employees to be performance-based and not according to how long they have been working with us or who they are related to.

“Our human resource department is closely monitoring key performance indicators of employees and everyone would be judged accordingly.”

Patel stressed that consumer demand and competition were main drivers behind this new culture.

However, the state-owned telecommunications provider lacked front end customer focus service, he said.

“The business culture needs new investment in infrastructure, which had been long overdue,” he said. 

“It’s only with these two hand in hand would we be able to deliver service demanded by our customers and dividends for the government – the key delivery of service first. 

“We would be spending millions (of kina), which would include training of personnel, improvement in business processes, performance incentives, information technology systems, and many more.

Patel said Telikom would assess the performance of its employees on merit.

“We have already seen improvement, but it seemed to be dragged by poor infrastructure and lack of investment,” he said. 

He said Telikom was not embroiled in management issues despite media claims of that constant changes to the top management were causing instability and concern among the workforce.

Patel said current acting managing director Martin Veisame had the support of the Telikom board and was not new to the job having served in the position during a previous term.