PESHAWAR: Senior officials fear that the ongoing reshuffle of government employees holding the same positions for many years will slow down the disposal of official business and cause institutional memory loss.

The cabinet recently decided about the transfer of the officials working on the same post for more than two years.

The officials welcomed the cabinet’s decision but felt that it should have been implemented gradually as transferred employees had deprived their departments of the ‘memory and context’ of the issues not existing on official files.

“Decision-making is a complex process, which involves evaluation of many factors, so leaving one or any of these factors unattended can lead to disasters,” an official of the establishment department told Dawn.

Cabinet recently decided about reshuffle of officials holding same posts for more than two years

He said the decision-making happened first through intuition and second through rational and conscious mind.

The official said any department’s primary unit of structure was a section, which was responsible for keeping records and maintaining files.

He said record keeping was meant to keep a track of the progresses made in a case to achieve uniformity, judiciousness and symmetry in the decision-making processes of a department.

Another official in the planning and development department said most of the important sections had employees with elephant’s memory, so they could detail down and recall aspects of cases like who dealt with them previously and how, what happened during the relevant meetings, and how the departmental heads reacted to them.

He said such employees became sort of indispensable and if they’re replaced together, their replacements would struggle to manage things for being new to the department or section.

An official of the elementary and secondary education department told Dawn that only naib qasids were left in some sections of the department in the wake of the cabinet-ordered reshuffle, while 70-80 per cent of the staff in other sections had been replaced.

He said non-engineers had been posted to the positions of engineers for monitoring and evaluating civil works, which would be impossible for them to do.

“This happened due to hasty implementation of the cabinet’s decision without the consultation of the administrative secretaries of the departments,” he said.

An official of the establishment department said to retain the institutional memory and keep the official business on track, the establishment department transferred its employees from one section to another instead of placing them in other department.

He, however, said the establishment department withdrew its decision when authorities in the chief minister’s secretariat expressed concern about the non-transfer of its employees to other departments.

“The decision of the government to shuffle these employees without giving any or enough consideration to these matters has led to the loss or shuffle of institutional memory,” he said.

The official said by a single notification, more than 100 employees had been transferred from one department to another.

He also said there were departments in which the entire staff of one section had been transferred and thus, leaving that section literally handicapped.

“Now, there are fears that these transfers will eventually slow down the functioning of departments, where complete staff has been reshuffled,” he said.

The official said practically, the new staff would constantly contact the transferred staff for guidance to recourse to papers, files and verbal data of a section and that would continue for months.

“It was a good decision but its implementation has led to a mini crisis. The government should have set a timeline for the postings and transfers in a phased manner,” he said.

The other officials also said alongside their tenures, the government should also have deliberated upon the importance of such employees in departments by seeking reports from the heads of the departments concerned.

They said the indispensable should have been left in departments and the others should have been transferred, while in the next phase, new employees should have been posted with the old ones to help them learn basic ‘ins and outs’ of a section or department.

The officials said in that way, the indispensable employees would have shared knowledge and institutional memory with the new ones.

They added that in the third phase, which could happen six months later, the remaining staff should have been posted out.

Published in Dawn, December 6th, 2020