Swiss public service: Effi­ci­ency meets courtesy

Are you one of those people who judge a person and a country based on how func­tional their public sector is? Do you assume that if workers in the public sector behave or act in a certain manner, this reflects on the overall outlook of the country? Does the way you are treated by a country’s public sector charac­te­rize your views on how livable a country is? To you, is customer service in a country’s public sector a deter­mi­nant of the stan­dard of living? 

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, I hope you realize just how biased your judgments can be. And I hope, just like me, you don’t care? I have carefully curated for you the hall­marks of the Swiss public service sector, so feel free to judge away!

Grüezi and Dankeschön

In Yoruba, which is my mother tongue, there is a saying that trans­lates to the use of gree­tings to ‘kill you’. This posits that because you are greeted by the same person in the same situa­tion over and over again, the gree­tings may be the end of you. Yoruba’s clearly had Swiss public service workers in mind when they deve­loped this saying. 

Every passenger, and I mean every passenger in either a bus, tram, S‑Bahn or train whose ticket is to be checked by a conductor, gets a Grüezi (hello) and a Danke­schön (thank you). I do not mean that every row of seats gets greeted, I mean each passenger! This may seem like a small task until you add the fact that Swiss trains trans­port about 1 million passen­gers a day! I wonder how the conduc­tors psych them­selves up for this part of their jobs every day. The same goes for atten­dants in super­mar­kets (who are not public service workers). Even people you meet on the streets will sprinkle healthy doses of Grüezi on you just as a courtesy.

Prompt and Timely

It is an acclaimed fact that the Swiss are the most punc­tual people on earth. Gosh, I learned this one the hard way, coming from a conti­nent that had its own acronym (African time) that was supposed to make being late fashionable! 

I know that you know that Switz­er­land is also the Mecca of watch­ma­king and watch­ma­king compa­nies, and the Swiss public sector revels in this time-related history and tradition. 

If a public office is to be opened at 8:00 a.m., be sure that this is not the time when its workers will arrive, and then have their coffee or break­fast, before finally begin­ning the tasks of the day at 9:45 a.m.. 8:00 a.m. is not when the office doors are opened for people to come in, sit, and wait for the workers to arrive at their seats, sort their files, and gossip about their bosses. That will not be the time when custo­mers will be waiting for workers to finish their morning prayers and brie­fings. 8:00am is when the first customer gets called, and the machi­nery of the public sector as it relates to service deli­very begins to move.

Effi­cient to the point of stoic

Picture this: You arrive at a public office about 10 minutes before its doors are to open. Then it begins to rain heavily. The officer respon­sible for opening the doors can see the people getting dren­ched while waiting to be admitted. But there are 10 minutes before those doors are to be offi­ci­ally opened, and no amount of rain would bend that rule. Welcome to the Swiss public service! 

When this happened, I assumed that the officer either could not find the keys to the doors or needed appr­oval from some higher autho­rity who was not in the room to open the doors. 

Alas, when it was the exact time for the office to be opened, he pressed a button behind him, and we, their rain-dren­ched custo­mers, walked in, with water puddles drip­ping ever­y­where as we came in. Effi­ci­ency to the point of being stoic and almost unemo­tional? In certain instances, this effi­ci­ency is so rigid that public sector workers will not huma­nize a situa­tion or go beyond what is set out in the rule books. Welcome to Switzerland! 

Cheerful Customer Service

I have always wanted to know how well public sector workers in this country are paid, and what their welfare packages look like. This is because I have yet to see people so cheerful, unstressed, impos­sible to rattle, and highly profes­sional as they do their jobs. 

And trust me, I have seen terrible situa­tions in Swiss public offices that may not have been handled to the satis­fac­tion of all parties, but the public workers still main­tained their cool while explai­ning, repea­ting, explai­ning again and re-explai­ning what they had just explained 10 seconds ago, then showing you the regu­la­tions that they already posted on their website that you should have known before coming, then repea­ting all of it all over again, and still smiling at your attempt to ‘change an already working system’. Wheewwww! Always a high­light to watch! Also, have you met Swiss airport workers at 5:30 a.m. chir­ping humo­rously as they check you in?

While not enti­rely perfect, as I live this Swiss life the Naija way, I must admit that whatever they are serving Swiss public service workers in their morning coffees, other public service workers need that same supply, starting with one of their closest neigh­bors, Germany (I know what I did there, wink!).