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Serve Us With A Smile

12th July 2018

Sometimes what we don’t say, says so much more than what is said. Precisely the situation I was in last night at one of our local restaurants. I go there because the food is excellent, and I can sit quietly between training sessions (when I need to have a break before starting work in the evening). As I was saying, ‘the food is excellent’. And this is what I said to the bar manager when he asked, “how was your meal sir?”. But what I didn’t say was what was foremost in my head. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to give him some feedback, so I just kept my thoughts to myself, remained polite and went on my way (like what so many would do in the same situation!).

The food was excellent, but the waitress was terrible. Not for the first time I hasten to add (hmm, is that quick enough?). I ate at the same place a few weeks ago, with the same waitress serving me, and had exactly the same experience (in fact worse!). I said to myself on that occasion, that I wouldn’t be back. But last night I thought, ‘you know its normally pretty good, and last time was probably just someone having a bad night’. I came in and asked for a table for one. There was only one other sitting at the time. I was spoken to in a way that made me feel that it was a nuisance that a table was going to need to be set up for me at that time (it was dinner time btw). I was given a menu. I made my choice and placed the menu back on the table (an indication that I was ready!). The waitress saw me do this. She then proceeded to pass my table 11 times (yes, I counted) without asking me for an order. Granted, two of those occasions was to serve the other table, the other 9 were just trips backward and forward doing stuff (although a few of these were not actually doing anything other than making me feel ignored!). On pass number 12 I asked if she was ready to take my order (seems the wrong way round!). All of this appears to be a bit petty on my part, doesn’t it? But the whole time, from start to finish (c.90 mins later when I left, after my meal), this young lady had a face on her like thunder. As she did the time before. The impression it left with me was immense, to the point that I am writing about it. Do I blame her? OK, yes in part. She is responsible for how she is perceived by the world around her. But what about the person who hired her, the person who trained her, the people working in more senior positions within the establishment? They can all see what we the customers see and ultimately feel. Their product and their brand is evaporating in front of them. That is it for me now. I aint going back.

So here is the message. If you are in a customer facing, service sector role, then a big part of your job description is not just to perform tasks, but it is to do so in a friendly, efficient and approachable (which means smiling as well, or at the very least not being a bear with a sore head) manner. This is part of your job description. If you aint doing it, then you aint doing what you are being paid to do! If this is something you are unable to do, then it doesn’t make you a bad person, it just means you are in the wrong job. Customer service is a performance. A customer doesn’t care about what’s going on in your personal life. The customer is coming into your workplace as part of their personal life in order to have an experience that makes them happy and/or feels as if they are being looked after and cared about. The food, in my example above, is only part of the product. The service is every bit as much a part of the product. If both don’t happen to be collectively good, then one will impact upon the other. Customer Service is the product. So, when you are at work in this type of environment you need to put on your happy face, Service with a smile!

Beware – The Time Terrorist

23rd February 2017

When it comes to work-related difficulties with a team member, more often than not, the person falls into one of two camps. Firstly, you may have someone who is trying really hard to perform at the level required, but for some reason they just aren’t able to deliver. They are not a bad person – they may just need more coaching, or, ultimately, they may just not be suited to that role. Within this broad category, granted there can be a vast range of potential challenges. And then, secondly, there are those who, just by their very nature, go to extraordinary lengths to be obstructive against what the business requires of them. They seem to lose sight of the fact that they are paid to be productive; not to spend their time plotting against their manager’s requests or business goals. It’s this latter group that I want to focus on here. Thankfully they don’t occur that often, but when they do – oh my word, they can cause a whole team to go totally off the rails.

“My boss calls them, Time Terrorists”, a team manager recently told me. “They take up so much managerial effort that you are disabled from giving other, more valuable and more deserved members of your team a fair apportionment of your quality time.” My reply was, “Well your boss describes them perfectly. That just sums it up in so many ways.” So let’s now explore, briefly, what we mean.

First of all, as a manager you only have so much time to devote to getting the job done. Even if you take work home and graft all weekend, there are only limited hours in any week when you can interact directly with your people, and therefore coach them, assist with technical queries, encourage and motivate them etc. etc. It’s challenging enough trying to fit all of this around your other responsibilities, including the tasks handed down to you from your own boss. And then, BANG!, someone in your team, not for the first, or even the second time, starts going ‘full steam’ down a road whereby they are requiring so much more of your attention than either they warrant, or is proportionate to the issue raised. All of a sudden, all of that valuable quality team time disappears down a sink hole, from which there appears to be no escape.

It may be a fairly straight forward change in someone’s duties that has resulted in them becoming, once again, awkward. You end up having to manage the person’s expectations, take time to try and enable them to see that the change is not as bad as they are perceiving, and deal with fallout as it creeps across other team members. It sucks you up. And not just during work time! You go home and you spend time reflecting over what is going on. It frustrates you that there could be lots of positive things happening for others in the team, had the Time Terrorist not decided to once again push things beyond what would be normally acceptable. I am, most definitely, not saying that an employee should never raise concerns, or challenge their boss or the business. In many respects that’s part of the manager’s role to deal with such occurrences. But in reality these instances are rare per capita.

Call me old fashioned, but we get paid to work because our employer needs a job done. We don’t get paid to create a conveyor belt, taking people off on unproductive tangents, and creating even more work for someone else. Then in doing so, the very reason for our jobs existing in the first place is still sitting in the backlog, and adding even more pressure on our team mates as they are left making up the shortfall created by the “It’s all about me” campaign.

So what can be done about it? Well let’s first consider the perspective from someone who is on the verge of being a Time Terrorist themselves. Think about why are they at work, and what are they expected to achieve. Think about the impact on all of those around them. It’s not just the management or the business that will suffer, but also those team members who are supposedly their colleagues. Are they really being fair to everyone, and are they really doing themselves any justice? They need to get some perspective. Rise above it, and take one for the team. Tomorrow someone else may be getting asked to do something that will make their life easier. After all, they are here to work – so get on with it! It’s not supposed to be ‘full on’ fun, or filled with personal preferences. If it was, it would be called ‘leisure’ and they wouldn’t be getting paid for it! Now that would be something to moan about!

What about if you are the manager? OK, you need to be fair to all of your team, and balance that against what the business needs you to deliver. At times certain team members will warrant more of your attention than others. Your team is full of people, and they all have ups and downs along the road of life. So think long and hard. Is this really a ‘Time Terrorist’ you are dealing with, or is it just someone having a bad day? If it is the latter, then part of your role is to manage what’s in front of you. You have to be as supportive as the business allows you to be, and as considerate as the situation requires. Conversely, a ‘Time Terrorist’ is someone whose very character and regular approach (i.e. poor attitude) to their workplace, creates issues that vacuum up your time to the detriment of others and the business. Quite frankly, someone like this is of little value, if any at all, in your team. They are holding you all back, and it needs to be dealt with. The person should be made aware of their impact upon those around them, and they need to be given ample opportunity to develop their energy in more positive and productive ways. Ultimately, having tried as much as is ‘more than reasonable’ to improve the situation, if they can’t do this, then you may find yourself needing to raise the temperature somewhat. As managers we never want to go that far, but when faced with such scenarios, and in order to be fair to the business, and the rest of the team, you have no choice. In fact, if you don’t deal with it, it could be construed that you are inadvertently discriminating against the good people, as they struggle to get your time. Not that any of them would ever complain – they are too busy working on the backlog, and focusing on what they are getting paid to do! But they are the ones who really are deserving of your time and attention – BOOM!

The Ideal Recruitment Choice

14th March 2016

When it comes to building a successful team within your business it is essential that you recruit the right people into the roles that need to be filled. In a previous blog (Feb 2015) I discussed the importance of ensuring that the people you employ are a ‘good fit’ for your business, and I suggested that this is probably the most important aspect to carefully consider, albeit the toughest one to measure during the selection process.

What, however, is the overall blend that ideally you are seeking to acquire when selecting new team members? As the Venn diagram displays, you are ideally looking for the candidate that first and foremost is a good fit for your team, and in addition has the suitable experience and the correct level of technical knowledge. Only when you have a potential employee who exhibits all of these characteristics, are you then faced with the ideal choice for the role. Of course there will be occasions when no-one satisfies all three areas, and you may be forced to choose someone who is less than ideal, or alternatively start the whole recruitment process again with a different approach.

So when faced with your next recruitment dilemma why not take the list of candidates and add them to your own version of the Venn diagram. Anyone who falls inside the overlap of all three areas surely has to be a serious contender. But for those who don’t, you would be wise to ensure that the successful candidate has been considered from a ‘good fit’ perspective (see blog dated 09 Feb 2015: Successful Recruitment Matrix).

 

The Effective Ecologist

17th November 2015

What is being effective in the workplace? First of all, in so many respects it is easy to be able to quantify technical skills and experience. With technical skills you can be taught techniques, go on training courses and gain qualifications. It is a very factual account of what an employee brings to a team. They are either qualified or not. They can either carry out a particular skill competently or not. Then there is experience. This differs from skills. For example you may have passed your driving test, but that does not necessarily mean that you are an experienced driver. It’s not until you have been doing something for a while, and under different conditions, do you then begin to call yourself ‘experienced’. But is a combination of technical ability and experience enough in order for someone to be successful professionally?

Well, no it isn’t that easy. Despite your technical ability and your experience there is also the necessity for you to be effective in the workplace. In fact, despite a huge amount of technical ability and experience, if you are not effective then quite possibly you are not going to be considered as being any good at your job, probably won’t last that long in the position, or if you do, certainly won’t achieve anywhere close to the potential of someone with less skills, but who is more effective.

Being effective is all about doing the simple things well and at the right time. Being in the right place when you are supposed to be; anticipating and dealing with a looming situation before it becomes a problem; standing by your promises; being credible and so much more. For example – what is the difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber? So little of that is down to their broadly similar technical abilities. Assuming they have both fixed the problem, it is down to: did they arrive on time; did they tidy up after them; did they stick to the figure quoted: were they polite etc. The one that got all of these basics right could very well be perceived by the customer as brilliant, whilst the other (if they got all of these things wrong) would be perceived as terrible. Effectiveness is all about getting the basics right. These basics are the foundation to everything else. It is a thin line between being brilliant and mediocre. The line is drawn where being effective starts.

Aimed at the ecological sector, but with so much that is transferrable into other service sector roles, ‘The Effective Ecologist’ covers much about being effective within your workplace. See the following link for more details:   http://www.pelagicpublishing.com/the-effective-ecologist-succeed-in-the-office-environment.html

Good & Poor Recruitment Choices

11th June 2015

Choices! Yes I have used this word deliberately in this post, as we employers ultimately are responsible for the decisions (i.e. choices) we have made relating to the people we have chosen to work within our organisations. Now all of this (good, bad or indifferent) is a reflection on our interviewing techniques and selection criteria. And to be truthful, how many of us can truly call ourselves expert recruiters? Unfortunately unless you are specifically trained, or doing it all the time, or part of a larger organisation that has HR support in this respect, the chances are that recruitment is something you only do now and again, as/when the need arises.

So what precisely is it all about? Well most of the time (in fact always as far as I can think of) it is because there is a problem (e.g. lack of resource or expertise) and you (or someone else in your team) are looking for a solution. It is therefore so, so important that in making your decision that you do actually solve the problem. There is the challenge: sometimes not only does your choice fail to deliver upon what is required, but additionally it is such a poor choice that it actually has a negative impact upon your ability to get through the other things on your desk that you are responsible for.  Yes, a bad choice has a negative impact upon your time, in that not only are you unable to allocate or transfer the tasks over to the new employee (so the problem has not been resolved, and you now have the expense of an additional salary), but you are also having to manage the situation going forward (i.e. a negative drain on your time).  At this stage, assuming that training, coaching etc. have all been properly implemented you may need to be considering going down the route of a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan), and you would need to be a complete saint for not thinking, at least for a few seconds, “If only I had picked the other person for the role at the outset”. Sadly some managers fail to address such issues head on and just let things slide (it’s too difficult; I don’t know what to do; it’s easier just to be nice and forget about it; hopefully they might leave soon and I won’t need to do all the paperwork… ).  The issue with not tackling the situation ‘head on’ is that the problem that was so desperately needing to be resolved (to the point that you went into the marketplace and employed someone) is still there and is still not being dealt with efficiently or effectively (if at all!). So it needs to be tackled – and hopefully this will be demonstrated with an improvement in performance by the individual, but ultimately if not, then more drastic action may be needed. Either that or you are accepting that it wasn’t such a big problem in the first place!! REALLY – that’s interesting! That wasn’t what you were saying many months ago when you persuaded someone to release the funds to employ the person.

So here’s a thought. In this situation how often does the first step in the process (e.g. your initial decision as to who to employ) get looked at in any great detail. Are you, as the recruiter, not at least partly responsible for the outcome of your decisions? Yes it’s extremely difficult to know precisely, on the back of an interview, what you are going to get when the new start walks through the door next Monday, but can you be better at ascertaining likelihood of success at the outset? I bet we all could be better at this. OK, it won’t always be perfect, bad decisions will fall through the cracks, but hopefully there will be many more better decisions and you can reflect upon the bad ones to help ensure that you make better ones going forward. The point is to realise that this is a massive decision about a person you are about to employ, and it is full of potential benefits and costs. So, do your homework on the candidate, ask the right questions, put them under pressure, get proper references, follow your HR departments steer (to a point!), but ultimately, having done all of that and more, what is your gut instinct telling you?

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Neil Middleton of ‘Time For’ helped us with bespoke professional development, advice and support for one of our team. He helped bring a fresh perspective with great results. I am writing this after several months of seeing ongoing benefits from his advice. Neil’s approach really worked well at teasing out the issues and finding sensible solutions, and all in plain English. Thoroughly recommended.
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Neil talked with us in detail about management techniques and the general running of our business, in order for our business to become more effective, stream-lined and productive. He did all of this in a calm and non-judgemental manner. We would highly recommend his services for helping businesses improve and reach their full potential
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