>Much of the productivity decline is the amount of time fixing earlier poor
>work. The latest example is a company which swears (to employees and
>customers) that service quality is the main concern ... and rewards
>employees for nothing but volume of calls handled per fixed time period.
Adding to Michael's response....
While at a utility I was the "customer advocate"--and was battered and
bloodied by both internal customers and external customers. Most of my
work centered around dealing with issues caused by our own employees: poor
work, rudeness, not showing up at all, not using new techniques, doing
damage to customer's homes because they just plain did not care.
Productivity? When a customer calls in and tells you a truck has been
sitting at the end of a road with someone sleeping all day, there is no
productivity. And when management did not deal with it, they got the
employees they deserved. My job added to costs...just the fact I was
needed was caused by an entire organization that was entitled and "bred"
entitled employees.
Competition is forcing change in this organization and others like it that
has had arrogant and "secure" management and employees who forgot their
jobs existed because they were serving customers who were paying their
paychecks. They are (or will be) learning, fortunately, that the customer
must be served in the best possible way by the best possible
organizational members.
The organization that is not training all their members to be marketers
for their employer (and creating an atmosphere that makes it possible)
will struggle when faced with real competition.
Jane Seiling
jseiling@alpha.wcoil.com
--Jane Seiling <jseiling@alpha.wcoil.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>