Vigilance: A shared responsibility

Like every year, Vigilance Awareness Week is being celebrated with the theme “Vigilance: Our Shared Responsibility”. The purpose of this awareness campaign is to create awareness among the masses regarding the joint collective effort required to fight against corruption and to promote integrity. 

I looked for the word “Vigilance” in the dictionary, which is the noun form of the word “Vigilant”, meaning “keeping a careful watch on the dangers or problems”. 

So does the awareness campaign is trying to improve the safety performance? - one may ask. 

The answer is “No”. However, it tries to promote and create awareness among both employees’ common public regarding the correct way and means of doing our jobs. It also creates awareness and educates employees via various programmes, whether the administrative jobs being carried out in the organisation are being done as per rules or not. The Vigilance Department, from time to time, examines files and sees whether the procedures followed during the processing of the files are as per laid-down procedures or not.

Now coming back to the theme of the campaign, which states that vigilance is a shared responsibility. If a separate department is there, why should others share their responsibility, some people may ask. But the responsibility here does not mean that the responsibility to check the accuracy or procedural adequacy of the files. It means that the compliance of laid-down procedures and carrying out our official work with integrity and honesty is a shared responsibility. 

The objective is, when all of us, together share the responsibility to be vigilant to the rules, then there is no need to separately check the files by a particular department.

But we as humans err, some do due to lack of knowledge and some people do it with a dishonest intention. 

What can we do?

         1.   If you do not know, then ask.

Many times, we break rules because we do not know what the rules say. While processing a file, it is better to look for the relevant rules in the Integrated Work Procedures Manual (IWPM) and Integrated Materials Management Manual (IMMT). If you can’t find the relevant rule, then ask someone who might know. Vigilance Department itself can guide you.

2.   If you know, then implement.

At senior positions, our role is to check whether the file being processed is as per the rule or not. With experience, we are supposed to know the rules guiding the procedures. A junior employee may make a mistake due to a lack of knowledge; as seniors, we need to ensure that the rules are followed. If there is lack of awareness than required training programmes can be arranged.

3.   If you do not know, that “you do not know”.

Other chances of mistakes follow from the fact that we don’t know that “we don’t know”. This is very common when we are oblivious to our mistake or what we are doing is wrong, but we assume it to be right. The solution is to create general awareness among the employees with respect to different case studies and newsletters. Regular refresher courses on the rules reduce the blind spots in people.

So, is it a sufficient condition that if all the employees know the rules, then there will not be any lapses? 

The answer is “No”. 

What separates humans from machines is “Ingenuity”. While a machine knows the rules and works according to the rules (for example, a software programme will run according to the code written. It will only make a mistake only if there is a mistake in the code), however, humans have intelligence to understand the rules, and we can devise methods to bypass the rules. 

Sometimes people find out the lacuna in the rules to bypass them, most of the time to fulfil their greed.

So, when we talk about shared responsibility, it does talk about our conduct in public dealings also and it starts in our personal space as well. When we align our behaviour and public dealings based on morals, honesty, integrity and ethics, that will not only change us and change the society as well. We should keep in mind the following things.

Change begins with us:

Any change begins with one person and that person is none other than “You” and “Me”. Gandhiji had said, “Be the Change You Want to See”. If we want to change the workplace and society, we need to change. Someone else is not going to come and make us change.

Start with Small Things:

Display the virtues of honesty, ethics, and morals with small things. If you do small things right, the big things will take care of themselves. Be honest with your dealings in a morally upright manner, no matter how small the stakes are. Like habits, money and everything else, our lapses also compound with time. If we think that we will be honest with big things but can be dishonest with small ones, then that is not going to happen. Overtime, your dishonesty will rise to fulfil your greed.

Educate Children

Society evolves with time. The best way to sustain good things in a society is to educate the next generations on it. Children learn by emulating. They observe elders and follow. Do the right things in front of them; follow traffic rules, wear helmets, put on seat belts, do not litter at home and in public spaces. Children amplify the things when they become adults.  

The awareness campaign calling for our shared responsibility is an opportunity to not only refine our knowledge with respect to the rules in professional dealings but also a chance to introspect on our conduct in our personal lives and align them with our ethics and moral values. 

 

Jai Hind.