Class work
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Safety and Health (NIOSH) research on forklifts. The team identified root causes, which included a lack of operating skill and knowledge by forklift operators, some minor warehouse engineering items that needed to be changed, and some safety policy gaps.
The following interventions were proposed and carried out:
Instruction and testing of operator skill and knowledge Specific management policies Supervisory practices Engineering standards, which covered things like painting safety lines on the ground for pedestrians who traveled in and around forklift operations Maintenance practices for brake repair, etc.
As you can see, the supervisors, engineers, and maintenance workers became stakeholders of the projects, too.
To determine the project’s success, a list of about 50 safe behaviors were identified and measured. Seven to eight years later, studies showed that serious injuries were greater for those who were not trained in the system. The long-term outcome of this project was the development of a forklift safety system (www.LIFTOR.com) that has been marketed and sold to other companies for the past 20 years.
When asked what led to the project’s success, the HPI practitioner cited the initial lack of budget constraints and the personal interest that extended all the way to the top of the company. But most of all, it was the detailed and systematic analysis of the forklift operators’ performance that continues to focus improvements to this day.
Call Center Makeover
Most everyone recognizes the challenges of managing a call center. Spending all day talking with people who are mostly unhappy and frustrated could make anyone, well, unhappy and frustrated. It’s not surprising that most call center operations have a high level of employee turnover.
An HPI practitioner was approached and asked to conduct two one-day meetings to create a new Service Excellence Strategy for the call center. When the HPI consultant asked why they needed a Service Excellence Strategy, she quickly discovered some underlying problems. The environment was hostile. Employees were slamming down phones and screaming in the aisles. There were frequent shouting matches between employees and managers. The only feedback provided to call-center employees was negative and untimely. They didn’t have modern call center tools and technology. The managers didn’t receive much training on how to manage. The major decision makers for the project were the call center director and the next-level managers.
The key stakeholders were the call center employees, the customer service rep auditors, the technical support staff, and all other employees within the company who had technical questions.
The project team consisted of the entire call center management team, a project manager, an interpersonal communications coach, an organizational communications person, a metrics and survey method consultant, a life skills coach, and an HPI practitioner.
While the call center management wanted the quick fix of training, the HPI consultant was able to convince all levels of management that a complete make-over was needed. A complete analysis was authorized. The team studied the call center auditors, whose role was to listen in on the calls, and report what they observed. The team observed that the auditors would basically focus narrowly on call standards, criticize the calls, and write people up. The call center employees would receive the negative feedback
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from their managers weeks later. The process was ineffective at driving excellent customer service or a productive work environment.
The team also looked at the metrics that were used to measure performance. The measure of “average speed of answer” was found to be more of a measure of staffing than of individual performance. The measure was encouraging customer service reps to get off the phone quickly, sometimes without resolving the customer issue. There were no guidelines for what made a good customer service rep. Managers were not well equipped with call center management skills or people coaching skills. The call center tools that were being utilized were antiquated.
The team proposed the following solutions: (1) install new tools for call monitoring and incident reporting; (2) develop a competency model for call center reps; (3) create a department communication strategy with goals and metrics for the department and for individuals; (4) change the role of auditor from policing to coaching for improvement (and change the name of the role from auditor to coach!); (5) build relationships between management and call center reps and their customers.
All of the proposed solutions were implemented. In many cases, new people needed to be hired into the role of coach, since the job requirements had significantly