Productivity is an acquired culture, seminar told

JAKARTA (JP): Productivity, one of today's most popular catchphrases in government and business circles, turns out to be an acquired culture that can only evolve in society over time.

Rahadi Ramelan, deputy chairman of the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas), told a seminar yesterday that productivity enhancement and sustainable economic growth are part of the evolution of the national culture.

"Productivity improvement is a cultural matter. If we want to enhance national productivity, then cultural values such as working ethos, national discipline, performance, professionalism and devotion have to be sown and developed among the people, especially the work force," Rahadi said in the seminar jointly organized by the Ministry of Manpower and the Pan Asia Research and Communication Services.

"Technology is only an attribution to the cultural values," he said in the seminar opened by Minister of Industry Tunky Ariwibowo and attended by experts from Indonesia, Singapore and the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Any person will attempt to improve his productivity if he has the outlook that anything he does today must always be done better than it was yesterday, Rahadi said.

He suggested that productivity enhancement should be well embedded in the corporate culture of any company.

Tunky, in his keynote address, pointed out that the main source of economic growth in Indonesia will now come chiefly from enhancement in workers' productivity and he suggested that the nation must be prepared to shift its manpower resources from unproductive to productive sectors.

Recalling that the productivity of Indonesian workers is still among the lowest in Southeast Asia, Tunky said that the government has made it a national program to enhance productivity in its economic development program.

Rahadi, in his presentation, hammered on the same point, saying that Indonesia no longer could fall back on its natural resources as it has in the past as the chief source of economic growth because they are limited.

Besides the capital accumulation and growth of work force, improvement in the quality of human resources would give a major contribution to economic growth in the future.

He said the government was making efforts to improve the quality of human resources, create as many job opportunities as possible and gear the economic development towards improving workers' productivity and national productivity.

"Training programs will be launched to improve workers' skill and the education system has been revamped to allow students at high school level some exposure to industrial jobs," he said, adding that these would improve the Indonesian human resources' competitiveness and the quality of its products.

Bappenas estimates that the average workers' productivity will increase by 3.3 percent annually in the next five years. Productivity in the industrial sector is projected to increase by 3.7 percent while that in agriculture by 2.4 percent.

"To reach this target, a total investment of around Rp 660 trillion (US$305 billion) is needed and 10 percent of it is expected to come from the public," Rahadi said. (rms)