Recruiting and selecting staff

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There is a large amount of money spent every year by organisations on recruiting and selecting staff for positions that arise. Organisations can, however, waste money in a number of areas if the successful candidate is unsuitable or leaves after a few weeks or months:

• Recruitment costs; for example the cost of adverts
• Induction training – the time and effort invested in training can be large. In the contact centre industry, for example, there is often high turnover of staff with new starters staying only a few weeks before deciding the role is not for them
• The costs of having to subsequently re-advertise the role and go through the whole process again.

What is often overlooked is the impact on staff who have been in the company for a longer period and who see a succession of new colleagues join and then leave. The rapid turnover of new staff can clearly have a negative impact on morale within the work environment.

The steps involved in recruiting and selecting new staff are often standard across organisations, but there are a number of factors to consider along the way.

Thoughts on coaching

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I was thinking about how different a manager or team leader role is today compared to when I started my career.

My first manager was a 50-year banker who, while being very good at lending money (and getting it back), would have had difficulty with the demands of the role today. Managers and team leaders are no longer expected to only complete more advanced technical or administrative tasks; there are a range of people management issues to be dealt with also.

It’s the ‘softer people skills’ that most managers and team leaders struggle with in the places I work now. Coaching, communication, listening skills and the ability to generate enthusiasm, energy and commitment in others are not abilities that everyone has – yet these are the things we ask our managers and team leaders to do.

Take coaching for example. There can’t be too many things with the potential to demotivate employees more than a botched discussion about performance. Yet the assumption is that managers and team leader have the attributes to be effective coaches.

Thinking back, I can only remember one training session that I attended on coaching. The advice was that it is best to listen twice as much as one spoke. The coaches I see presenting at managerial conferences suggest there is more to it than that.

Introducing a performance management system

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As a business grows and takes on more staff, the management of people becomes a bigger issue. There will reach a point where it is right to introduce a staff performance management system.

In addition, a number of organisations in the public sector have recently introduced performance management systems; as reaching demanding government targets has meant developing performance management cultures across departments. For example, organisations in the emergency services have designed performance management systems that tie in control room and field staff to meeting targets.

A performance management system consists of agreeing objectives or goals with each employee that reflect what they will achieve in the coming period (say the next twelve months). The precise objectives will depend on the employee’s role; for example, a sales manager may have objectives relating to the amount of sales to new or existing customers as well as correct completion of order forms and related administration.  

Why is the customer services team the odd one out?

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I visited a medium size telco recently. The company is doing well and seeing strong growth. They had a decent Christmas as there were some new products on the market that came at the right time. Their telephone sales team is also up to full strength and there are high expectations.

The company has progressed like others. They took on a few staff in the early days to answer phones and do some processing. Before they knew it they had a sizeable customer services team; together with customer retentions and collections.

I met the CEO, bright and early. He explained they’d lost a couple of senior staff recently; the heads of the customer service and collections teams. He was concerned about collections, so he’d moved the deputy in customer services across to run that team. This left a big gap in the senior management of the customer services team (who also had retentions reporting to them).

Housing Sector Tenant Management Workshop 9th and 10th March 2011

The Accord Partnership has just finished hosting their 2^nd annual Housing Sector workshop, this time in the Institute of Directors in London.

Due to the large numbers wishing to attend the event, we spread it out over 2 days, which not only provided the opportunity for everyone who wished to attend, to attend, but also we could vary the subjects covered in the 2 days and so more topics could be covered.

Firstly, we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended. Everyone enthusiastically joined in the group discussions on both days, and each session was very interactive, with the audience providing real life examples form their own experiences, ensuring the presentations were particularly relevant to everyone.

Front-line leaders – you’re on your own

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I’ve written before about the importance of front-line leaders and how their roles have become more complex. I’ve also discussed John Adair’s approach to developing people in these roles.

Team leaders and supervisors play a huge part in any contact centre or customer facing department. However, the amount of effort allocated to develop and support them in their roles is insufficient. I can’t help thinking that the situation is getting worse.

My suspicions were raised by an article in the ‘Financial Times’ at the start of the year. The article discussed how the Chartered Management Institute are putting more resource into developing the leadership skills of younger people. The initiative was to help fill the 1 million new leadership positions coming up in the UK over the next 10-years. The article implied that effort is needed as organisations have mixed records in supporting leadership development in their own operations.

Making the most of shared services

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Shared services is the buzz word at the moment, particularly in the public sector. In some circumstances, it is almost assumed that the service you offer will be shared, and a convincing argument needs to be put forward to not share services. Clearly not all organisations have taken things this far…yet.

Whatever form of shared services you opt for, there is one key business driver – to save money. Sharing services with another organisation or even outsource partner, will allow for greater economies of scale. This will then allow for either a saving to be made or more work completed for the same level of manpower. That is what you expect from shared services.

But more can be done to either create greater savings or an increase in flexible capacity. Optimising processes and concentrating on transformation as part of the shared service planning and implementation, will increase savings and improve the customer experience. This is for the whole end to end processes, not simply those processes handled within the shared services.

So if you create a contact centre shared service, it will use the same processes as were used previously. But by optimising the end to end processes from a customer perspective, more informational and transactional work can be completed at the first point of contact. This will mean that more work is taken from the back offices, resulting in over capacity. This indeed might be good, and allow backlogs to be completed, but it will mean that there will be people in work with little work to do. That is why it is essential to look at the end to end process during a transformation programme, not simply the front end or shared service processes.

Is service once again in fashion?

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Last week I watched the programme “Service” where Michel Roux was helping a group of unemployed people learn the skills required to work front of house in a restaurant, and how important service was and what skills it could develop and ultimately how rewarding it was.

For many years now, people have bemoaned the lack of service generally and it seemed that little was done to improve things. Contact centres, for example, held up as the new way of providing customer service, often provided poor service, concentrating more on efficiency and statistic rather than provide customer’s the service the expected. As a result, expectations dropped. Perhaps now, with this new programme, customer’s expectations may begin to rise.

Contact centres play such a key role in everyone’s lives, whether it be to pay a gas bill, change your phone, or book a holiday. Local authority contact centres arguably play a much more important role in many people’s lives that of a mobile phone provider or utility company. And the disadvantaged and vulnerable arguably need better service still.

Struggling to make the Technology Exploitation Business Case?

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As reported in my previous blog all UK NHS Trusts are facing severe austerity pressures, but are expected to continue to deliver top class services.

Traditionally UK Public Sector organisations have not been known for being overly efficient. However, in the current climate this all has to change. No longer will it be acceptable to prepare and submit annual budgets that are based on purely standing still from both organisational and financial perspectives. Therefore opportunities to exploit technology for both internal and external benefit have to become the norm.

Notwithstanding the above, all Patient Transport operations are increasingly finding themselves in more and more competitive markets and as such, it is crucial that they operate as effectively as possible without threatening the qualities being demanded by their commissioning authorities. Automated and proactive contacts with patients, road crews on control room staff can provide real tangible benefits, but only if the service providers accept the opportunities before them.

Consider a world where the NHS is truly ‘joined up’ in terms of information provision and sharing. It would not take a huge leap of faith to envisage a vehicle starting out on a multiple patient pick up and transit to clinic / hospital; on the way delays are experienced and the vehicle could miss appointment times for one / many of its occupants. This essential information could be shared across the NHS to facilitate ‘flex’ within the system to move schedules around and avoid the financial implications associated with missed / broken appointments (estimated to cost the NHS some £600 million annually).

Accord’s Housing Association Tennant Management Workshop comes to London

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Measures announced in the October Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) are now starting to filter down to those organisations directly impacted by them.  Changes to the Department for Communities & Local Government (CLG) budget – for local authorities and housing – are of particular interest to us here at Accord because of our work in this sector over the past 12-months.

Back in the summer we brought together leaders and key influencers in the Housing Association community to share their tenant management challenges in a one-day free of charge workshop held in central Manchester.  The event was extremely well attended and proved to be a helpful platform for attendees to network and share ideas about:

• The Coalition Government’s housing policy and its impact on ALMOs, TSA, etc.
• The responsibilities of Housing Associations post Tenant Service Authority (TSA) reports
• The role of the contact centre in the social housing context
  • How anti-social behaviour is managed through the contact centre
  • How to reduce contacts volumes and improve first contact resolution
  • ‘Need to reach’ engagement techniques deployed by the contact centre in conjunction with community partners

Since then we’ve been actively engaged on a number of assignments helping Housing Association clients to develop their contact centre operations and implement performance improvement initiatives which respond to post-CSR tenant management challenges.

As with all of the sectors in which we operate and the services that we deliver, knowledge transfer is key to our approach.  We are therefore committed to holding our second free of charge Housing Association Tenant Management Workshop as a means of once again gathering leaders and managers together to share their challenges, ideas and solutions in a facilitative and practical networking environment.