Some civil servants, especially in administrative units, act in a less than friendly and professional manner, and sometimes outside their mandate. As I deal a great deal with officials abroad in my work, I am sorry to say that the Slovenian public administration is pretty much in the toilet when it comes to professionalism and the attitude towards the parties to proceedings. It would be unfair to generalise, because in my work, even at home, I have come across a very few officials who carry out their work in a very correct and professional manner. To them, all honour and glory.
I therefore propose a system of continuous evaluation of the staff involved in official procedures, with a random and unique electronic code on every application, decision, call, e-mail, etc., to evaluate the procedure. E.g. QR code printed on the decision, application, receipt of a one-off SMS code after the end of a phone call. Based on this code, an anonymised evaluation of the procedure could be submitted on the website of the office where the official is employed, or on a central site, together with a comment or description of the experience, and satisfaction with the duration and quality of the procedure, relating to the exact official or officials involved in the procedure. Such aggregated and anonymised evaluations of the parties to proceedings should be a key element of staff remuneration. Staff members who perform well on the basis of the evaluations received from litigants could be better rewarded, while those who do not could be sanctioned (reduction of remuneration, dismissal for repeated poor evaluations). This would improve the unfortunately quite common attitude of civil servants that we citizens are subordinate in official proceedings and that they are not individually accountable for poor work, unprofessionalism or even overstepping their authority.
Given that civil servants are, on average, significantly better paid than workers in the economy, I believe that citizens of the Republic of Slovenia, as parties to official proceedings, deserve a correspondingly high quality and punctuality of service. After all, we have to pay for the procedure - in advance - ! and the administrative fee, so we have a right to expect a service that is commensurate with this.