The officers are not provided on-job training that is focused on behaviour management to the officers
LAHORE: Will we ever learn to become courteous and gentle in our public dealings? Recently, I came across a group of people who were deeply aggrieved by the rude behaviour of an officer sitting at a NADRA counter located in Abbot Road, Lahore. My own encounter with the officer, who was processing my papers, was not good either. She was cold and indifferent, as if she was granting me a personal favour. This is the general attitude of people working in government offices. There could be many reasons for this, but four are most prominent. One, we do not give on-job training that is focused on behaviour management to the officers; our entire emphasis remains on the technical part of the training; that, too, at times is not done professionally and left incomplete.
Two, seemingly there is no mechanism of reward and punishment linked to the output of an officer’s professional duties. Three, we do not create a link between customers and the officers concerned, through a system of feedback and suggestions. Four, we give a partially functioning environment to the workers. I observed two glaring technical issues hindering and slowing down work at NADRA’s Abbot Road office. The internet was too slow and the intranet kept shutting down, with the result that the password had to be re-entered every other minute by the administrator. If we can learn to dress up and live like Westerners, why can we not imitate their work ethic? This goes for both the workers and the employers.
Durdana Najam
Published in The Express Tribune, September 21st, 2015.
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