Category Archives: Service

Change Principles, Culture, Excellence, Leadership, Service, Trust

Should we say it again? People are not the problem.

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chimp at wheelDeming famously stated “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special.“. In other words people-related ‘fault’ will be part of the minority 6%.

This statement tends to set people into a degree of  hand-wringing ifs and buts: ‘surely he meant this only in a manufacturing system’, ‘ what about the difficult people?’, ‘ what if they are incompetent?’, ‘I am sure folks are the problem 40% of the time’ etc…

Chip and Dan Heath share a trivial, but insightful example in their book ‘Switch’. They discuss a situation (part of a research exercise) where moviegoers eat significantly more popcorn if they are given large buckets, than if they are given small buckets. To the outsider it looks like the people are ‘Popcorn Gorging Gluttons’ and we may feel that we should judge them as so. In reality, their behaviour (eating excessive amounts of popcorn) is driven by the system – the size  of bucket they have been given. Change the bucket for a small one and their behaviour changes – they seem like moderate consumers. The system is the problem (large buckets), not the people.

“But aha – surely it’s their fault that they choose to scoff down the popcorn!”. True, we are sentient beings and can make choices (for example, I would hope that people who are aware of supermarket sales floor design are less likely to buy excessive amounts of fresh baked goods, fresh fruit and ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ items). I am not suggesting that we should excuse everyone of their behaviour 95% of the time. There are other things to consider – for example do we run on autopilot too often (Do we let the chimp drive the car? More for a later blog I think…)?

However as a start we need to be honest enough to examine our own assumptions as placed upon others and how we judge their behaviour. As the Heath brothers suggest, to do this we need to encounter a deep-rooted phenomenon identified in psychology.

 Kendra Cherry explains -“When it comes to other people, we tend to attribute causes to internal factors such as personality characteristics and ignore or minimize external variables. This phenomenon tends to be very widespread, particularly among individualistic cultures.“

In Psychology this is known as the fundamental attribution error – we automatically assume that the person’s internal characteristics are the cause of behaviour even when other possible influencing factors are present in the situation.

So let’s pull away from assumption and open our minds to what is really happening with people.

Further Reading:

Deming W.E. (1982) Out of the Crisis (p315), MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Heath C., and Heath, D. (2010) Switch: when change is hard, New York: Random House

Peters S. (2012) The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness. Vermillion, London.

 Other links:

Cherry, K. (2014) Attribution: How we explain behaviour. http://psychology.about.com/od/socialpsychology/a/attribution.htm

 

Dialogue, Excellence, Integrity, Partnerships, Professionalism, Service, Updates

What makes us ‘professional’ university administrators?

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Professionalism is something you see, hear and experience and is comprised of a set of behaviours.  A professional always aims to give the best they can.

As university administrators, we seek to maintain high professional standards.  We could do an “acceptable” job – but we always try to do an “exceptional” job.

But have we ever stopped to consider what makes us professional?  We asked this question to our colleagues in the Professional Administration Centre in the School of Engineering and Digital Arts and came up with several ideas as follows:  Our approach to service – we put our customers and users first (students & academic colleagues).  We are qualified (graduates or with graduate level professional qualifications).  We have numerous competences and skills and are good at what we do.  We strive for greater performance and for continued professional development and we belong to the professional organisation for University administrators (AUA), who provide us with a toolkit and resources to help improve our professional behaviours and deal with the ever changing complexities of Higher Education.

Students use our services, as administration staff,  as their first port of call. The blurring of lines between professional services staff and teaching staff has meant that in recent years, we have taken on more of the traditional duties of the “academic” and there is a constant need for us to provide a greater level of service outside of traditional teaching and research functions.

Twenty first  century university  administration staff sees administrators adding enormous value to, and impact on, the whole student experience, to the extent that front-line teaching, research,  enterprise and all external and commercial activities are greatly enhanced by the kind of day to day roles that we  provide.  We respond to customers’ needs, pursue complex tasks, deliver innovative solutions, drive the student experience, facilitate learning and development, effect outcomes and respond to change.  As professional university administrators, we provide high quality professional services, we have developed an appreciation of academic culture, are sensitive to the needs of a variety of diverse clients, accept responsibility for our actions and share expertise and good practice.  As such, the crucial role we play is integral to the strategic success of the University of Kent

In the light of the University of Kent’s 50th anniversary, it seems like a timely opportunity to showcase how the administrative function has changed in the last 50 years.  We should be celebrating the professional value we bring to the organisation and indeed, our own professional identity.

Excellence, Myths, Service

Absorb variety and increase excellence

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Trying to address the demands of variety is a perennial problem. Customers wanting different features in a product, a different colour, a different size, a specific delivery slot, a student wanting specific feedback on their essay. In times gone by, the craftsman would make things according to what the customer wanted. Take the blacksmith – he would manufacture a horseshoe (or shoes) specific to the horse that was presented to him by his customer. A unique shoe every time, or at least finished from a blank to fit the foot perfectly. If you didn’t make your own clothes, you would buy from someone who did, and the clothes were produced in the same way – fitted and finished in the cloth of your choice.

Increasing numbers of customers (and therefore volumes of production) gradually made the provision this type of offer through ‘cottage industries’ more difficult. Bakers had almost always produced batches of loaves for a range of customers, for example, whilst drapers, haberdashers, corwainers and milliners largely did the same. By the 1900s Henry Ford had taken things to the extreme when he produced the Model T Ford, stating memorably in 1909 that any customer “can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”.

model T
Also in white…

Today we are used to buying off-the-shelf or off-the-peg products and services, from fruit to footwear, from breakfasts to banking. Standard products are so familiar that off-the-shelf is seen as inferior and run-of-the-mill. Of course commercially this has become a NEW point of competition and differentiation. Marketeers have identified ways in which we can customise the products to suit our needs. Why?

The reason for wanting to differentiate is, at a superficial level, because we like it. The reason we like it, however, is because we have different needs and at a fundamental level we want a product or service that meets our needs.

So what is there to do about this if we are offering services, whether financial, commercial, educational or other?

Somehow we have to design our services to allow people to request variety, so that a variety of requests from many different customers can be absorbed by the system. Does this sound like some kind of menu system (akin to the dreaded telephone services; press 1 for …). No! Because if we do that we are just providing off-the-shelf all over again: simply reproducing options based on what we already produce in the workshop (or back-office), we build up a set of stock answers that potentially meet no-one’s needs.

Instead we have to do quite the opposite. We need to design processes to be flexible to meet the needs of users/customers at the point of demand. If we do that then our services will respond to them at the point of need and will deliver against their requirements. Services will then be perceived as excellent by the individuals who matter – the people that use them!

***

Further Reading:

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Ford H. (1922) My Life and Work (in collaboration with S. Crowther), Chapter 4, Cosimo Classics

MacDonald, J. (1998) Calling a Halt to Mindless Change, Amacom, UK

Excellence, Service

Service Excellence – Are People the Problem?

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Recently, a colleague helpfully forwarded an interesting link on Service Excellence (see  below). Like a lot of research on Service, it throws up more questions than answers. The researchers had analysed a range of studies of service performance and had identified a number of issues.

 The headliner was that 80% of employees think service is great whilst only 8% of customers think the same. The researchers’ observations were that customer service employees have a misperception of how good they are. This interpretation seems a bit clumsy. The mismatch in this data should not really be a huge shock;  to some degree, employees will tell researchers what they think they should hear – if you asked them in a pub on a Friday night they might rate service differently. The likely cause of this conflict of opinion? The fear factor – who wants to admit that they do a poor job or that their organisation is a bit rubbish?

The researchers described how “Managers are using too much stick and not enough carrot, berating staff with complaints league tables, missed targets and unfavourable mystery shopper reports. Line managers care more about targets than people, as there is data to report, processes to police, bosses to please and larger than ever teams to keep to targets.” This is a very relevant observation; however what becomes frustrating is the way that this research appears to FAIL to identify the link between symptoms (“indifferent staff”) and causes (the list of line management behaviours and protocols presented by the researchers themselves).

Even more worryingly (to use the researchers’ own phrase) the research report states “More worryingly, even when employees were shown facts about customer dissatisfaction, they were twice as likely to blame the organisation as to accept responsibility.” To say this is worrying is INCORRECT – it is not worrying it is in fact highly probable that the workforce have got it spot on; 90% of problems are caused by the system, not the people – so no wonder employees think that it is the company that is the problem!

The fundamental difficulty with the research observations is that they present PEOPLE AS THE PROBLEM, which in 80-90% of cases is unlikely [see messages repeated by heavyweight thinkers like Deming since the 1950s, Senge and more recently Seddon].

So, in summary, although the research article found out some truths, unfortunately they have only one eye open to what they are seeing. They recommend giving people (service staff) a kick as implied by their term – ‘improving attentiveness’ (how do you make people more attentive?) although like any modern HR practitioner, they include some soft and cuddly stuff (still ‘kicks’ actually), such as “Managers need to engage employees and treat them as you want them to treat customers, coach staff to think more commercially and show why giving your full attention to customers is so important.” To be fair they go on to urge managers to do less reporting on sales figures and more observing and guiding their front line colleagues.  However, in any type of organisation, if you do all these positive things but don’t remove all the conditions of targets, scripts, reports, procedures and sanctions then nothing will change – except employees will get even more annoyed and will feel under increasing pressure – and this will be observable to customers, eventually, as even WORSE service. There is still a lot to learn.

To see the original summary of this research, go to the article on the peoplemanagement.co.uk site: http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/03/staff-deluded-over-standard-of-customer-service.htm

Better insights on service can read here:

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.