The past weeks have seen a diaspora of news items on PBS most of which focused on the painful cutting down on staff at the State broadcasting company from 180 to 60 or thereabouts.

PBS was costing the taxpayer Lm2 million in subsidies a year, a spokesman for the Ministry of IT and Investments told The Malta Independent on Sunday. As a result of this restructuring exercise, the subsidy carried by the Maltese public will be reduced by 75 per cent down to Lm0.5 million to finance the public service obligation. The spokesman said that “obviously like in any other re-structuring exercise in both the public and private sectors, PBS needs the necessary stabilisation time to enable the whole exercise to be concluded and to start operations in full steam”.

The work done so far included the drawing up of blueprints for the new organisation, reaching an agreement with the trade union, drawing up of the first Broadcasting Policy, a radical overhaul of the outsourcing model and a detailed review of the technological investment required.

Then followed the tough job of implementing the blueprint. PBS had to be brought down to, so to speak, Ground Zero, on which the future shape of the new PBS will be built. Long-standing work practices had to be dismantled and ingrained cultures – some of which inherited from the former Telemalta times – removed.

The spokesman explained the much-discussed redeployment exercise.

The government had decided on the human resources requirements it felt PBS would need in the new model and what amount of money PBS would be getting. Everyone understood – including the union – that the human resources at PBS were in excess of the need. This, however, does not mean – as some quarters tried to emotionally imply – that the people in excess of requirements are not valid people. “No one ever said they are good for nothing,” the spokesman said.

On the contrary, these people have value, and the country needs to make the best use of them.

Those people found to be in excess of requirements at PBS are now being retrained and redeployed to an entity where they are needed. All this in full consultation with the GWU.

This means that the government will save on the new salaries it would have had to fork out if it recruited people for its needs without considering the people in excess at PBS and MDC. At a time when government critics preach cost-cutting, this creative way of realising savings should be acclaimed and not demonised.

An exercise is now being run with the local councils to redeploy many of these persons with local councils to enable the local councils to set up e-government in all localities.

This resembles, but is not a carbon copy of, the most recent redeployment exercise at the dockyard with the creation of IPSL. This, the spokesman said, can be considered a 70 per cent success. The ministry itself obtained five workers and they were described as “very diligent workers”.

The redeployment exercise meant that one of every three workers only would be retained at PBS.

The process how these were identified was drawn up and agreed to with the GWU. In any selection process, the spokesman said, one starts by agreeing on the selection criteria. These criteria are then given to the people who are selected to sit on the selection board. The board of directors thus chose the selection board, taking care to ensure the right mix.

It is the selection board which sees the employees and which draws up the order of merit according to each person’s qualifications, ability and the way each person fits or does not fit the selection criteria for that particular job.

The order of merit is then passed on to management and then to the board of directors together with the views of the management.

At the end, in reality, this meant that 120 persons had to be identified and had to be told they were in excess of the company’s requirements. There was too little time to do this, the spokesman agreed, but the ministry felt this process could not be prolonged: everyone needed to know where they stood. This is why the selection process, which normally takes far longer in the government, was crunched in just a few weeks.

Obviously, one may – and has the right – not to agree with the choices made, but seniority on its own, the spokesman added, was not and should not have been the only criteria. Moreover, this principle was agreed to in the public service over a decade ago. Now, would it have worked in the particular case of PBS which was used to work with a huge staff and which will now be used to work with very few staff?

The spokesman acknowledged that the GWU had played ball excellently: this was a very good exercise and their endorsement demonstrated that when there’s a will there’s a way, he said. In the meantime, the employees earmarked for re-deployment, were given a short interim period of extra leave, over and above their annual leave, while this exercise was carried out and they are now being told how they will be trained and where their future places of work will be.

Those who have been retained are now learning to adapt to their new roles. This will be a new organisation with new roles: PBS will be one of the first public entities with a real multi-skilled workforce – an integral part of the Ministry’s vision for the entities in our portfolio, he added.

For these people to learn their new roles and for everyone to settle in and work in a lean organisation, it is expected that from six to eight months are required. This is the steepest part of the learning curve. It will not be easy at all, the spokesman acknowledged.

One must however remember that through this admittedly tough exercise, the subsidy is being cut by 75 per cent. This is ‘no mean feat’.

Apart from all this, the success or otherwise of PBS will also depend on a variety of other factors. As a media company, PBS’s success will depend on the revenues it gets from advertising, from the way the new outsourcing policy works and from the new newsroom skillset that is being set up.

As part of the restructuring, the government has already pledged it will reinvest in new technology, which is increasingly becoming all digital.

Fortunately, this new technology is also becoming rapidly cheaper. The availability and the price of new technology will not be a problem: it is knowledge and content management skills that are and will remain scarce. That is why people will have to be trained and trained again to be adaptable to the prevailing technological and media paradigms.

The Ministry’s vision of the digitalisation of PBS can also create a new revenue stream for PBS and a niche market in Malta, which could in itself serve for a number of spin-offs in the content sector.

“At the end of it all, if PBS takes up to two years to become the new organisation that we firmly believe it will become, it would all have been worthwhile doing. “Like anything else in life this is a balance of risk and the related reward. We’re actively managing our risks and believe that the rewards will end up to be a significant achievement for PBS and Malta in general.”

The other novelty in the new PBS is the outsourcing model which is being used for the first time.

The public perception of the previous system was that only a few people or companies used to be able to get the ear of the company’s decision makers and they then got to do the programmes they wished to do.

This time round, there has been a public call for applications. The amount of applications that have flooded in has been extraordinary. This is a very good sign, the spokesman said, it shows that the whole market has now been opened up. This is, literally, another implied liberalisation process in full force. “The room for real and perceived monopolies are being removed in this new model.”

The spokesman acknowledged that the PBS structures have been pleasantly surprised and swept off their feet by this flood of applications and that time is running out before the autumn schedule is announced.

The evaluation was carried out on the content side by the editorial board but there was also another evaluation: the financial side by the board of directors.

The ministry did not agree with the previous methods used at PBS where people would go and negotiate on an ad-hoc basis with the company. Now there is a transparent process and full accountability along established criteria.

These two processes have proved to be much more time-consuming than previously thought. But after all, this is the impact of the learning curve. Hopefully, next time round, everyone will have learned a little more so that things can move even more smoothly. One “cannot expect miracles the first time round, even though cutting the government subsidy by 75 per cent and maintaining high competitive levels is no minor achievement,” the spokesman said.