Waiting Time
The measurement of efficiency in service sectors. Bosses always hound on us when we have a poor waiting time in the pharmacy. They want us to form task groups to analyse and improve the waiting time. Little do they know that the real cause is because they had hired incompetent staff to begin with. Anyway, this is a story for another time.
A dad wrote into the Straits Times forum to "complain" about the poor waiting time at Immigrations and Checkpoints Authority (ICA). Apparently he waited more than 3 hours to get his daughter's passport. Well, I would be pissed off if I have to wait 3 hours just to get my passport so I am not blaming him for commenting on the poor waiting time.
He gave some suggestions on how to improve the waiting time. However, these are only good on paper. Having been in the service line for 3 yrs I know the limitations of what you can tweak to improve the waiting time, so I am going to dissect what Mr Goh had suggested.
- Open more counters during peak hours to handle the crowd.
- Possible solution, if there is sufficient manpower to start with. If ICA only has sufficient staff to comfortably manage at off-peak hours then opening more counters would not help. Empty counters will not give out passports.
- If such is the case then this solution can only be pulled off if ICA hires more counter staff. Ouch! That is going to hurt the bottomline.
- Roping in staff working at other counters to help issue passport. Mr Goh noted that other counters not issuing passports closed around 5PM.
- Er... fair enough. However, it was probably time for the staff to go home. Asking them to stay back to help out with issuing passports, well, as they say 有钱能使鬼推磨. But there are also instances whereby the extra money is not worth sacrificing the time for rest and time to spend with the family.
- Then again we are not working in ICA, perhaps there are fixed procedures to follow when issuing passports. It may be more than just matching the customer's ID with the passport. Given the severity of the matter should a wrong/faulty passport be issued to a customer, staff not familiar with the procedures may not be able to help out with issuing passports.
Whatever is the case, we should be a little more sympathetic towards staff providing us services. Staff can get demoralised too when they have tried their best, but never seem to meet the target waiting time. Worse if the customers are overly demanding during peak hours.
Yamosh felt frustrated @ 8:22 AM
2 Comments:
Well, I haven't read that particular article, but any idea what his idea of peak hour is?
Considering he waited for more than 3 hours, & saw counters close at 5pm, the bugger probably went at 1+pm: otherwise know as lunch time. Just because he can sacrifice his lunch hour to collect a passport, doesn't mean that ICA staff should also sacrifice their lunch hour everyday.
They've probably already tried to work around that problem a bit, but we definitely could not force people to take lunch breaks at irregular hours. That'll surely lead to all sorts of health problems and unhappiness, resulting in worse manpower woes.
Also, with the amount of people going there everyday, peak and off-peak hours are probably much the same -- there'll still be a load of people waiting. Peak period crowds will still overflow onto the off-peak periods, and can we ban people from turning up later during off-peak hours add to the already long queues?
I'd never thought that I'd be parroting this, but some people just want their bread buttered on both sides. Complain that the govt too slow, so if govt employs a load of people just to hand out passports, then we can complain that govt increase our tax just to employ people to sit around in ICA when the place gets rather free during the off-peak hours. Come on, think about what you really want, man.
... even if we use a load or robots to do the work, I can foresee people complaining about how the robots are inflexible, how we are contributing to pollution by running them on electricity, how we could cut down unemployment rates by employing real workers. Face it, people will complain no matter what.
No lah my fault. He didn't go during lunch hours. He was there at 3.40pm. If it's weekday, then that's prob after his daughter's school lessons.
Link to ST forum
Robots would be good except I think many S'poreans will not know how to use them even if you leave detailed instructions for them to follow. They will then blame ICA for wasting $$ on the robots instead of lamenting on their own stupidity.
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