Dear Colleagues,

Vision, Mission and Core Values of Civil Service Bureau

If you browsed our homepage recently, you would have noticed the Vision, Mission and Core Values (VMV) developed jointly by all of us in the Civil Service Bureau (CSB). Briefly, our Vision is to foster a dynamic, visionary and knowledge-based Civil Service, which delivers quality service to the community through a clean, trusted, respectable and fulfilled workforce; our Mission is to develop talented civil servants, to ensure the highest standard of integrity among them, and to empower them to contribute to and take pride in their work; our Core Values are Simple, Positive Thinking, Fairness, Partnership and Learning.

A new year has just begun. We will keep our Vision in mind, incorporate our Mission into our plans and apply the Core Values in our daily work. I would invite colleagues outside CSB to assess our policies, measures and practices by the VMV we have laid down. We welcome your views and recommendations which would help us learn and improve continuously.

In the past five months since I took up office, I have visited 18 departments to experience at first hand the work of our front-line colleagues and to listen direct to the views of departmental management and staff representatives. These visits have proved to be most useful. I will continue with my schedule of visits to other departments and in so doing strengthen CSB's communication with all staff at various levels.

The Voluntary Retirement Scheme was implemented at the end of last year. Of the 11 000 or so applications received, about 650 were withdrawn by the deadline. In the next three years, we will work closely with the departments concerned to ensure that our public services will not be affected by the departure of some 10 000 staff.

The focus of our efforts this year will be to promote training and develop a culture of learning in the Civil Service. We are now working out a comprehensive programme and will seek the provision of $50m from the Finance Committee of the Legislative Council. Our objective is to give each and every civil servant an opportunity to receive in-house training or partial subsidy for attending external courses.

In the next few months, we will conduct extensive consultation on a proposed Civil Service Provident Fund for new recruits so as to ensure that the final package will have the support of both civil servants and the public. I hope the new arrangements will help attract the best talent to join the Civil Service and to retain them on a long term basis. I will explain in greater detail our initial thinking in due course.

Apart from the continued orderly implementation of the Civil Service Reform measures which have already been announced, our work in the coming year will include strengthening the integrity of civil servants, improving communication between staff and management, promoting effective and appropriate human resource management practices and fostering the public's trust and goodwill towards the Civil Service.

Let us all work together to provide a better service to our community in the coming year.

I wish you a prosperous and happy new year.

Yours sincerely,

(Joseph W P Wong)
Secretary for the Civil Service