{"id":107250,"date":"2020-10-03T15:51:28","date_gmt":"2020-10-03T22:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=107250"},"modified":"2020-10-03T15:51:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-03T22:51:51","slug":"winds-of-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/10\/03\/winds-of-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Winds of change"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Laksiri Warnakula\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>The\nnews about the Presidents\u2019 surprise visit a few days ago, to the Narahenpita\nOffice of the \u2018National Housing Development Authority\u2019 made me pen this short\narticle.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He is\nsaid to be following a complaint by a customer, who was told by the officers\nthat they were short of staff. And the President not surprisingly though found\nit otherwise that they indeed had enough staff to fulfil their duties properly.\nThis isn\u2019t the first time that he has done this. He did few unannounced visits\nto some other government institutions before. I am not sure what came about\nsubsequent to those visits: whether anything worth happened such as a visible\nattitudinal change of those government employees towards their customers. Or\nwas it business as usual after the president left. I am sure it was. Reminds me\nof a scenario, where a teacher, a strict disciplinarian visiting a class of\nmerry-making students, who suddenly become well-behaved and quiet on seeing the\nteacher. No sooner than the teacher leaves, they are back at their usual\nselves, behaving as before. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No\nwonder. It is not an easy task to change ones\u2019 work-culture\/habits so quickly\nlet alone in a matter of days. Practises that have been going on for decades\ncannot be changed overnight. Even the walls around those offices would speak up\nin protest for the change if they could. And as far as many of our government\ninstitutions and organisations that deal with the public, are concerned, the\ncustomer is a nonentity. In fact for many of those employees, the customer is a\npain in the neck getting in the way of their otherwise important businesses\nthat have nothing to with their duty. And that includes unofficial tea breaks,\nextended meal breaks, chit-chatting-over-the-phone breaks and as for the female\nemployees a bit of nose- powdering and other similar grooming activities as\nwell (how many times during their office hours, your guess is as good as mine).\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However,\nthis is not to say that we do not have those duty conscious, customer-friendly\ngovernment employees anymore.&nbsp;In fact we still do though their numbers are in\nrapid decline as can &nbsp;be seen today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are many therapies that\ncan treat this multi-faceted disease: indifference, having absolutely no idea\nregarding what customer service is all about, the failure to understand and be\nvery conscious about fact that the customer is the one, who keeps their jobs\nand pays for their jobs, to mention a few. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my\nhumble opinion, a full-scale computerisation is one way of reducing this\nlethargy, indifference and inefficiency, all of which are synonymous with the\nold-fashioned mentality and ways of doing clerical work, such as hard-copy-file\nkeeping and their retrieval on demand, which is a painfully slow process from a\ncustomers\u2019 point of view. Hard copies can be kept in archives, by all means, if\nnecessary. Yet there should be data bases built into the system, where any\nrelevant employee can log into it, access a customers\u2019 file electronically and\nserve him\/her without delay. So there is no need to have separate\ncounters\/tables manned by dozens of personnel dealing with only a specific set\nof customer-queries and other related issues. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And\nbefore going any further, I must not forget our \u2018used-to-be-then-ubiquitous\noffice peon\u2019. There was at least one in each and every office those days. And\nthen their presence gradually declined, when machine began to replace man over\ntime. However, they are still there, now in small numbers though, at some\nplaces, those figures usually clad-in-full-white, while being always kept busy\nby demands and needs of all above him: from shopping for bosses, tea-making to\nfile locating and delivering to the appropriate tables, to mention a few.\n&nbsp;And then and quite often too, he happened to be the unofficial liaison\n(the public were\/are well aware of it. \u2018Peonwa alluwanam hari. Wede ikmanata\nkaraganna puluwan\u2019. Talk to the Peon. He will get it done quickly). Offer\nplenty of oil to rub his palms and miracles begin to happen. The files that\nhave been gathering dust somewhere and declared to be hard to locate and\nretrieve quickly suddenly make their way to the relevant table\/counter in no\ntime, as if by magic. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And\nlastly Mr President please do not make any more jump on the gravy train for a\nfree ride, which they do at the expense of the tax payer. In fact, you can ask\nmany of them to climb down and assign\/direct them to posts\/locations, where\nthey can do some productive work in return for their pay. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope\nour President being a strict disciplinarian will be able to change the current\nwork ethics and habits of many of the employees of our government organisations\nand bring in \u2018refreshing winds of change\u2019.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Laksiri\nWarnakula&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laksiri Warnakula\u00a0 The news about the Presidents\u2019 surprise visit a few days ago, to the Narahenpita Office of the \u2018National Housing Development Authority\u2019 made me pen this short article.&nbsp; He is said to be following a complaint by a customer, who was told by the officers that they were short of staff. And the President [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[157],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laksiri-warnakula"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}