I refer to the Malaysiakini report New reward system for civil servants .

It is heartening to know that our prime minister is trying hard to search for ways to motivate civil servants to perform. As a retiree who has worked in the government service and in the private sector, I wish to share some of my experience in avenues for motivating staff to perform.

It is useful to state at the outset that civil servants today are amply paid for the type of job that they are required to do and the secure environment that they work in. So the element of not being adequately compensated for doing their job should not arise. So what is lacking if the performance is not at a satisfactory level but long tolerated by the rakyat?

When I started out as a young officer fresh out of college at the Rubber Research Institute of Malaya (RRIM), we were motivated to work by an inherent interest in doing a good job, earning the respect of our peers and the industry we serve and last but not least, maintaining the RRIM as the foremost research institute in the world.

In short, pride in our work was the first and perhaps the most crucial factor. When that environment proved to be less challenging, it was time for me to move on. In the private sector, the job is both interesting and challenging. And most of all, learning to do more with less, a layman's way of saying higher productivity.

Like sharing your secretary with the rest of your staff in my first plantation company. Here it was still, ‘if you did a good job you get rewarded’ but the slackers were not really punished. My third job at another plantation company proved even more interesting and educational. Here the organisation was even leaner.

I shared a clerk with my staff. But the job still needed to get done and I had seven operating centres reporting to me. Here, the top management (the major shareholder) had not forgotten about the ‘stick’ being the other component of effective motivation. If you don't perform, you are sure to get and feel a lot of heat on you.

But when you do, you get amply rewarded by a generous Employee Share Option Scheme (Esos) allocation. In case you missed it, it was the ‘stick’ that you will feel and drive you before you taste the reward. In this system, if you do perform, then you have less to worry about but don't you sit back and take your foot off the pedal. If you slack, you either shape up or ship out.

This last plantation company started out as a small industrial gas company and grew to be one of the largest companies listed on Bursa Malaysia in less than two decades. So there is a lesson to be learned here from a highly successful Malaysian story. Don't forget the stick. But also reward handsomely when performance is delivered.

The chief secretary to the government must not to forget the ‘stick’ while contemplating yet another set of rewards. When you have been amply paid, work of its own accord should be the primary motivating factor. Reward should be a consequence of having done a good job. This is no suggestion that most civil servants are not doing their jobs satisfactorily.

On the contrary, my experience is that the staff of Hospital University Kebangsaan Malaysia (HUKM) are doing an excellent job. Whenever I make my bi-monthly visits, I can sense that the doctors and staff are doing their best in attending to you (and the hospital handles thousands of patients daily).

Here is an institution that is dispensing good quality service as a social obligation and responsibility to the rakyat, as opposed to those organisations set up to collect money from you.

Having a few words in private with the slackers may not achieve the desired result of eliciting improved performance. Then what? You will still need to devise some tangible and visible systems to reprimand the non-performers. Otherwise, it will be difficult to overcome the powerful gravitational pull towards below par performance.

The long held adages of the ‘carrot and stick’ in motivational techniques and ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ in folklore are still relevant in today's world.

Perhaps we need to add to the ‘1Malaysia’ slogan of ‘People First. Performance Now’ a ‘Work First. Rewards Later’ component. Or to borrow from a former US president's often-quoted, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’.

Give diligently your due share of work before thinking of rewards. We need more examples of the HUKMs in our public delivery system. That should be a useful case study for the chief secretary.