Day 79 – Q 3. How does citizen charter help in shaping the work culture of an organisation? Illustrate.

3. How does citizen charter help in shaping the work culture of an organisation? Illustrate. 

नागरिक चार्टर किसी संगठन की कार्य संस्कृति को आकार देने में कैसे मदद करता है? उदाहरण देकर स्पष्ट करें।

Introduction:

Citizen charter is a declaration of commitment defining and promising standards of various services offered with effective grievance redressal mechanism.

Body

Citizen charter shaping work culture:

• Accountability: It enhances accountability by providing citizens with a clear understanding of service delivery standards, including timetables, user fees for services, and options for grievance redress. E.g. Timely delivery of Pizza failing which it will be free.
• Quality of service: It promotes good governance. It increases organizational effectiveness and performance by making a public commitment to adhere to measurable service delivery standards. E.g. Bangalore police responding to distress calls within 10 minutes. 
• Service Monitoring: It creates a way for both internal and external actors to objectively monitor service delivery performance. It ensures better service quality and grievance redressal. E.g. Details of services provided under municipality.
• Professional work culture: It creates a more professional and client-responsive environment for service delivery as it is citizen-centric in nature, keeping in mind the needs of citizens.
• It fosters improvements in staff morale through incentives like rewards, charter mark and so on. Recognition of work by the staff is a part of citizen charter.
• Transparency in work: ushering in a regime of transparency and openness through Rules, Procedure, Schemes, and Grievances. It decreases opportunities for corruption and graft by increasing transparency and educating citizens about their rights. E.g. details of officer assigned, percentage of work done etc., displayed online 
• Reduce corruption: It increases government revenues by ensuring that the money citizens pay for services goes into the government’s coffers (and not into employees’ pockets). E.g. online payments, refunds as a promise under charter.
• Grievance redress mechanism: will make the organization communicate with the public and improve itself based on complaints and feedback. This creates an organizational culture of learning from mistakes as well as promote participative governance.

Conclusion

Purpose of the Citizens’ Charter is to empower the citizen in relation to public service delivery. Some challenges in citizen charter has to be addressed like callousness in updation, lack of training etc., through steps like involving the citizens, awareness campaigns, statutory backing, adopting sevottam model etc., to gradually develop a work culture promising right to service both in quantity and quality.