Introduction
Mission Karmayogi is India's first comprehensive mission to reform civil services and enable them to offer services in an effective and efficient manner. This is a bold move by the Government of India to democratise the training process and level the playing field for all. This purpose stresses the 'servant' aspect of the well-known civil services. It seeks to address existing system difficulties like as complexity and red tape through a capacity-building strategy that works at the person, institutional, and procedural levels. This mission can overcome all of its flaws provided the programme is driven by a long-term vision and ongoing motivation.
The 89 percent of bureaucrats in direct contact with the public receive fragmented and inadequate training. The mission will aim to abolish the bureaucracy's 'work-silo' culture through a bottom-up strategy and digitised manner of working and training. Mission Karmayogi aims to include 46 lakh central government employees in its purview. The government proposes to invest INR 510.86 crore during a five-year period, from fiscal year 2021-22 to fiscal year 2024-25. External accountability and transparency are regarded as critical for improving individual responsiveness. The mission aims to improve information systems, ensure accountability for inputs, and improve auditing.
Author: Air Commodore Kailas Gurao
Unique Features of Mission Karmayogi
There are varied unique features of Mission Karmayogi such as Rule based to Role Based Training, Professional Growth, Uniform Training Approach, Vision for Future India, On Site Learning, Adoption of Best Practices and Reducing the Training Cost. The mission will urge all Central Ministries and departments, as well as their organisations, to place a greater focus on online courses and to direct their resources toward co-creation and sharing of learning processes through internal and external faculty.
Guiding Principles
The guiding principles of the Mission Karmayogi include: -
Advantages of the Mission
There are various advantages of Mission Karmayogi mission like having National Architecture for Civil Services Capacity Building that will herald into Silo-less Performance. There needs to be a holistic approach which is a comprehensive reform of capacity building apparatus at individual, institutional and process levels for efficient public service delivery. Being the competency driven HR Management policy it will ensure that right person with right competencies is at the right position. This will also enable Civil Servants to learn from the best institutions and practices across the world. The mission is Knowledge driven and aims at building competencies to transform Civil Servants into leaders and subject matter experts.
Having good governance will play a vital role in performing core governance functions. The mission will help make Civil Servant more efficient, effective, accountable and responsive to the needs of the citizen. This will further lead to better Work Culture and strengthening public institutions through adopting modern technology which lays emphasis on skills. It is an opportunity to continuously build and strengthen the Behavioural, Functional and Domain Competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths for all civil servants. Having uniform approach will enable a consistent approach to administering and regulating the capacity-building ecosystem through collaboration and co-sharing. Lastly it will reduce cost of training due to emphasis given on continuous online learning and shared ecosystem, it will reduce training costs. Similarly, expenditure on foreign training will also be cut down.
Taking Accountability
The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, has issued a clarion demand for an efficient, transparent, and responsible bureaucracy, which was also stressed in NITI Aayog's report on India@75. Although the concept of responsibility is not new, its power and benefit have grown much better appreciated over time. Personal accountability, according to management consultant Todd Herman, is "...being willing to answer... for the results coming from your decisions, behaviours, and actions." When you are personally accountable, you accept responsibility for the situations in which you are involved. You see them through, and you accept responsibility for what happens for the better or for the worst. When something goes wrong, you don't point the finger at others. Instead, you make every effort to put things right.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, 'accountability' is "the phenomenon of being responsible for what you do and being able to offer a good reason for it or the degree to which this occurs." Simply said, accountability means being held accountable for something you say you're going to do, regardless of the outcome or whether you do it. Accountability implies that you are aware that there are external dangers or penalties if you do not follow through on what you have said, but it also implies that there may be external benefits for following through or going above and beyond.
Discussion
While it may appear that accountability begins externally, it actually begins within oneself. The first step is to make sure your officer is prepared to be held accountable. We want the governance to succeed, so it is critical that before we discuss accountability, we help to establish an environment in which people believe they can succeed. Officers may then take full responsibility for any action they choose to take when the time comes, and they will do their best if things don't go as planned since they have consciously decided to be accountable for their actions. Accountability is beneficial not only to those who are unable to find time for themselves, but also to those who suffer from perfectionism.
Consider the interaction between a boss and a staff member as an example. The management assigns the employee the duty of completing a proposal by the end of the week. The employee is aware that their manager will request the proposal and expect an update at the end of the week. If the proposal is not finished, some external implications may include the staff member losing their job, disappointing their management, and offending the officer for whom the proposal is intended. External benefits could include the management being very happy with the staff member's job, granting them a promotion who may supply further information on more work and business in future.
Benefits of having Accountability in work place
It is probably isn’t tough to imagine why accountability in the workplace is important. Few of the benefits of a team that’s highly accountable are as follows:-
Common Roadblocks to Accountability
Though accountability has numerous advantages, following are some common challenges to accountability that teams must overcome.:-
Accountability Strategies / Techniques
Conclusion and Recommendations
​​​​​​​For the first time in the country, the Civil Service Capacity Building plans will be authorised and supervised by an eminent Council led by the Prime Minister himself under Mission Karmayogi. Multiple systems have been established to provide real-time and credible review, monitoring, and reporting, thereby introducing accountability and transparency by design. The Prime Minister's iGOT Karmayogi Dashboard will allow for real-time Mission monitoring, delivering continual snapshots of each department's progress and score card. The significance of understanding expectations and how a person responds to them in order to realise how accountability might help, especially if a person responds well to external expectations. We discussed perfectionism and how accountability might assist perfectionists overcome roadblocks when starting new and foreign goals or ones that appear too challenging. Accountability can be used in the coaching process in a variety of ways, but it must be owned by the officer in order for them to succeed and feel responsible. Accountability is a useful tool that can assist an officer achieve their objectives and dreams.
Given the nature and pace of change in governance, government officials' roles and responsibilities are becoming increasingly complicated. Better-trained officers are now required for efficient and effective governance. As a result, it is critical to increase officials' ability and competency, and more officers should be taught to upgrade their skills and knowledge based on their job tasks, activities, and abilities. A considerable number of officers benefit from the Mission Karmayogi Scheme, which provides more flexible and advanced learning possibilities. It envisions online and, to a lesser extent, mixed instruction with little face-to-face training. Officers will now be able to gain national/international exposure in order to acquire in-depth competences in a variety of subjects/areas or specific specialised subjects required for their present or future job profiles.
Overall, building an accountability culture on your team will not only enhance employee morale and productivity, but will also provide your team with the autonomy and sense of ownership they require to truly thrive. If you believe your team lacks accountability, it's time to make some changes!
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