Workplace Flexibility and Operational Performance of Maritime Agency in Nigeria: A Study of NIMASA Workers

Abstract

Ensuring operational efficiency has become a worry for all organizations including government agencies such as NIMASA. Maritime activities are fundamental to improving their revenue generation across the world. Unfortunately, there have been reports of poor maritime operations at Nigerian terminals, and some of these issues can be attributed to the government's failure to implement appropriate plans and activities for its workforce. The maritime industry in Nigeria is no exception, and as a government organization saddled with ensuring seamless maritime activities (NIMASA) must ensure that its staff are always giving optimal output towards this. The challenge lies with making them operationally efficient. Hence, the objective of the study was to examine the effect of workplace flexibility on operational efficiency of workers in the maritime industry, a study of NIMASA, Lagos State. Construct variables were developed for each of the latent variables and hypothetically tested. Descriptive Survey Research Design was employed, utilizing a sample size adjusted to 339. Questionnaire was developed and administered, out of which 327 copies of questionnaires were returned and valid for analysis. Analysis was done using simple linear regression on SPSS 27.0 and findings revealed that workplace flexibility does have a statistically significant effect on operational efficiency of NIMASA staff in Lagos State, with all results of the hypotheses tested returning significant t-values (10.666; 4.977) respectively and p-values 0.001<0.05, which is enough to reject the null hypotheses formulated. The study recommended that NIMASA embrace the tenets of teleworking while also adopting compress workweek practices to facilitate improved team-bonding, teamwork while also increasing employees’ satisfaction leading to increased productivity, which will ultimately improve the operational efficiency of staff.