The government of Bahrain makes every effort to provide high-quality services to all citizens and residents through its various ministries and bureaus.
I usually do not personally conduct my governmental transactions, since I utilise external parties to facilitate the overall process.
Moreover, I need not say here how much time and effort these transactions in government offices take. It is a different matter that many a times, all government office work is done on my behalf by others.
Recently, however, I had to personally visit one of the ministries since my presence, in person, was required.
This was very frustrating to say the least since I was unable to meet the director of the department I was expecting to.
What made matters worse was the attitude and the unfriendliness of the director’s secretary who just wanted to rudely brush me aside.
The secretary behaved as if she were the director and that was annoying but I kept my cool since I desperately needed to meet the director himself to sort out my issue.
The question here is: Why was this person so arrogant and unfriendly?
Why was she not civilised in her behaviour since she is the one who deals with members of the public and interacts with them?
On the contrary, she should be the friendliest and the most sophisticated person and should always extend a helping hand to visitors.
She should take the initiative to expedite people’s work as much as possible.
On the other hand, I do not entirely blame her but feel her director should take most of the blame himself.
It is important that government employees and workers receive special training in the art of serving people and providing services that the visitors – citizens and residents – have every right to obtain with dignity and respect.
Governments around the world pay great attention to this aspect and make efforts to modernise and streamline administrative procedures that facilitate matters for everyone – in the process providing them all assistance in the belief that this would ultimately contribute to the stability and prosperity of the country.
While I do not deny that all government ministries and agencies make intensive efforts to implement the latest in management systems and keep abreast of developments around the world in terms of work procedures and adoption of modern technology, clearly more efforts need to be made on the issue of customer services.
This would only lead to creating a professional, healthy work environment that implements modern management methods and creates a sound work culture and team spirit.
It is very important to work hard to develop human elements while building their knowledge and soft skills related to customer relations.
This is of the utmost importance.