1.  Share stories of great service within your company, agency or location. Use bulletin boards, email or meetings—whatever you’ve got at your disposal.

2. Ask customers what they want! You can use surveys or focus groups to get feedback from customers directly OR ask employees what they’ve been hearing from customers in the way of wants, needs and desires.

3.  Look! Listen! Learn! Have employees actively check out what other organizations are doing –both good and  bad. (It’s especially great when you can have them observe what the competition is doing.)  Recognize or reward them when they bring forth observations your team can use to improve its service level.

4.  Regularly reward employees for giving great service. Small and inexpensive rewards can work well.  For example: movie tickets, coupons to leave work a half-hour early, a pass to park in the boss’s space for a week, etc.

5.  Post key customer service concepts in prominent places.  Add visuals and snappy phrases.  Post in the break room, cafeteria or on entry/exit doors.

6.  Ask employees to keep a lightbulb list nearby so they can jot down new ideas to improve customer service as they occur.  Reward and recognize employees whose ideas are implemented.

7.  Train employees by: providing brown bag lunch learning sessions where you bring in a guest speaker or motivational video; sending them offsite for a community college training course  or paying for them to take a course online; maintaining a lending library of self-study audio CDs, DVDs, books and periodicals.

8.  Job Rotation Day.  Designate one day a month when a number of employees cross-train and learn a little bit about somebody else’s job.  Draw names randomly so everyone gets a chance to do this over time.  This gives employees a chance to see the big picture of the workplace and gives employees who don’t typically interact with customers an opportunity to do so.

9.  Revolving Brainstorm Bulletin Board.  Set up a webpage or suggestion box for employees to bring forth customer service problems (anonymous is usually best). Post the problems and provide methods for other employees to propose possible solutions.

10.  Have fun at work!  Studies show happy employees are healthier and they give better service. Here are just a few ideas:

·         Awards – Create a rotating award relevant to your organization.  The awards can be funny or serious.  Once a month, give the award to a team member.

·         Decorate – Decorate the workplace for holidays or seasons.

·         No Reason Parties – Throw a little party for no reason at all.

·         Ice Cream Social – Walk around and hand out a selection of ice cream treats.  If your employees work on a retail floor, put them in the freezer for everyone to have on their break.

This material excerpted from the Leader’s Guides to the video programs Remember Me and Fun is Good.

Need more help in this area? CRM’s new video program, WAYMISH (Why Are You Making It So Hard…for me to give you my money), comes with a special video just for supervisors.  Find out why WAYMISH was voted a “Best Product 2009” by Training Media Review.

Time: 5 minutes or 15 minutes (15 minutes if participant introductions are done in conjunction with the activity)

Introduce Activity/Give Instructions

1) Explain that this exercise gives people a chance to perform a quick self-check on their feelings and attitudes about change.

2) Give each participant a handout (see * below). Ask participants to check whichever box (”Negative” or “Positive”) best reflects their initial reaction to each word or phrase.  Tell them to go with their initial “gut response”, not to over think it.  If they feel neutral on a word, have them do their best to decide if their reaction is closer to the positive or to the negative side of the range.

*The following should appear on the handout: 

 3)  Allow participants about 1 minute to complete the list.

 Debrief Exercise

4)     Instruct participants to count the number of positive and negative responses and note them in the Totals row.  Ask how many people had more negatives than positives and vice versa.  Make the following points:

·             We tend to view change either as a challenge or opportunity.

·             Even those of us with many positives have some concerns about different aspects of change.  

Participant Introductions (Optional)

Time: 10 minutes

If you would like to wrap the participant introductions into the icebreaker: 

1)     Tell the participants you’d like them to take about 30 seconds each to introduce themselves and tell the group a little about their attitude towards change. Each person should share:

·              Their name and department

·              The word from the Exercise they had the most positive reaction to

·              The word from the Exercise they had the most negative reaction to

Be sure to keep track of words/phrases that were mentioned the most as a negative or positive.

2)     Thank the participants for sharing their responses. Comment on the following:

·      Some words elicit both positive and negative responses

·      Some words can be one person’s most favorable and another person’s most negative.

3) Divulge which words were seen most positively, and which were perceived most negatively.  (If there is time, you can always expand on this.)

4) Summarize by saying that each person reacts differently to change — even when we are only reading or hearing words that represent change.   Change gets to our “gut” as much as it gets to our heads - and many of our strongest reactions come from there.  Reactions that arise from our “gut” are just as valid as those that arise from our heads.

     5) Transition to the next activity in your change management training session or discussion.

This material excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program, Taking Charge of Change.

Need more help in this area? CRM Learning’s Taking Charge of Change video training program helps people recognize and embrace the various emotions we all experience when going through the stages of change.

Interpersonal conflicts can wreak havoc on an organization. Whether it’s a silent war between departments, a hostile relationship between two co-workers, or a damaging relationship with a vendor, when two or more people are caught in an interpersonal tug-of-war, the organization pays
the price.

In fact, it is estimated that 20-50% of work time is routinely wasted on bickering, backstabbing, vying for approval and other forms of emotional inefficiency. 

Instead of focusing on the work at hand, employees spend time recovering from interactions with a bullying boss, or griping with their colleagues about an irritating co-worker. Sometimes, the most capable employee becomes the least productive worker because he or she is burnt out from months of compensating for less motivated members of the work team.

Emotional inefficiency can develop from something as simple as a constant noise distraction whereby one loud, talkative person eats up hours of other people’s concentration. It can also occur between departments–one team becomes resentful of another team’s inability to meet deadlines. Instead of resolving the problem, a cold war ensues. Both sides quietly sabotage the other.