BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

HIS Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam awarded 46 of the nation’s excellent civil servants from 12 ministries with Excellent Employees Civil Service Award 2014 yesterday.

His Majesty also handed the Excellent Civil Service Award 2014 to three teams of civil servants with the best project papers on enhancing service efficiency.

Accompanying His Majesty were the Crown Prince and Senior Minister at the Prime Minister’s office, HRH Prince Hj Al-Muhtadee Billah; Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah; HRH Prince Hj Sufri Bolkiah; and HRH Prince ‘Abdul Malik.

The Excellent Employees Civil Service Awards 2014 is an award given to civil servants as a show of appreciation and recognition for their performance, quality and excellent work as well as their personality that can be made as an example to others.

It also hoped to motivate civil servants in improving their productivity at work and quality of their service.

The recipients are those in the division III, IV and V as well as the newly introduced category for division II. They were chosen based on their personality, dedication, reliability, discipline, accountability, talent and creativity.

The Excellent Civil Service Award began in 1993. The award has two categories: 1) Project papers and 2) Proposal paper.

For the first category, the winners were judged based on their projects’ objectives, implementation and achievements.

Bagging the gold award was the Survey Department, Ministry of Development, with its project, “Survey Spatial Data Infrastructure”.

Meanwhile, the Psychiatry Department of the Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha Hospital won silver for its project on the establishment of assisted living unit for acute psychiatric patients.

Going home with the bronze award was the Meteorological Department, Ministry of Communication with its Brunei WX application, a project to improve the effectiveness of weather information dissemination through mobile technology.

This is the first year that the proposal paper category was offered, however, none of the three proposals reviewed by the evaluation panel qualified for any of the awards.

Prior to presenting the awards to the recipients, His Majesty in his titah announced that the government would be implementing a new online recruitment service next year.

This service would allow jobseekers to submit and track the status of their applications online.

The theme for this year’s celebration is “Dynamic Governance towards a Prosperous Nation”.

“(The theme) emphasised on public governance that is dynamic and progressive in addition to instilling a culture of thinkers and innovators so as to always be relevant with time, and utilising best practices that are based on Al-Quran and Sunnah (life and tradition) of Rasulullah SAW (Peace Be Upon Him),” said Hj Yahya Hj Idris, permanent secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office in his capacity as the chairman for Executive Committee of the 21st Civil Service Day celebration.

His Majesty and the royal family members also viewed an exhibition after the awards presentation to gain better insight into the projects as well as mingle with the recipients.

The Brunei Times