I’ve come across some interesting facts about coaching to share with you.

In a recent survey conducted by the Institute of Leadership and Management into coaching methodology across 250 large UK companies the following was noted:

• Coaching is widely used as a development tool. 80% of the organisations surveyed had used or were using coaching, with a further 9% likely to use coaching in the next three years.

• 83% use internally recruited/employed coaches and 65% use external coaches.

So who are the internal coaches?

• 53% of internal coaches are coachee’s line manager, 46% are ’senior staff members from within coachee’s own business area (technical specialists)

How were these coaches selected?

Internal coaches are selected on the basis that they are:

• Suitable individuals (54%)
• Line managers (53%)
• Senior staff members (46%)
• Members of HR staff (43%)

This led me to question if they have the right skills and how are they trained.  In the same survey two thirds of organisations (34%) offer some form of development, and one third encourage coaches to gain a qualification – but are the right people elected as a coach in the first place?

So can everyone be a coach?

Used well coaching is a powerful tool that can improve individual and company development.  However the coach needs to develop core skills, experience, knowledge and personal attributes to enable them to develop as a great coach.  You do not become a great coach just by being appointed one.  I’ve seen this many times and it takes a certain skills set to be effective.  A good coach knows there is always room for improvement – in themselves and the people they coach.

So over to you….

Do you see coaching as a proven way for managers to motivate people and improve individual and business performance – what works for you and what are the benefits?

Is coaching seen (evidenced) as a powerful tool in your organisation?

Leave a response and comment on what size organisation you are too please.  Thanks!

Janet Greenwood, Client Solutions at eg

It’s interesting the conversations you have in the middle of the night. As I write this at 2.30am, our Year End processing is taking place and a couple of bleary eyed chaps in our IT department are finishing off the remnants of the pizzas and bottles of pop to try to keep themselves awake.

One of them asked me if we were still using eg work manager®, to which I replied we couldn’t live without it as I have always believed that, as is posted so many times on this site, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it…” Then we got onto the subject of staff measurement.

They couldn’t believe the extent to which we can measure our staff through work manager and our telecoms system, but to me after more years than I care to remember, it’s a way of life in a busy Contact Centre and I should know as my team produce reams of MI for managers on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis. I guess many HO support areas in other organisations are similar in so much as they don’t have the same level of measurement.

This got me thinking… In an age when we measure our most important resource, those at the customer facing rock face who are on the whole at the lower end of the salary scale against:

• quality of work
• effectiveness/productivity
• service standards
• regulatory compliance
• timekeeping etc, etc…

What keeps them coming back every day?? I guess it can’t be that bad a place to work, there is a good atmosphere within the teams and of course they get paid.

However, what will make them want to come back day after day? The best thing for some I guess is the chance to grow and develop their skills, improve their career and increase their pay and someday move to a support team when the amount of time you spend in the loo in a day isn’t as important.

This then reminded me that one of the objectives for the coming year for the Contact Centre management group is to dust down the skills matrices and create development and training plans for our teams.

Before I get too bogged down in it all, and taking the advice of a former manager of mine who said “Never re-invent the wheel” can any of the readers of this blog who have had to create development plans in the past provide any good points to consider and any pitfalls to avoid. We obviously want this to motivate staff to develop which should in turn help the company with peaks and troughs in the various work types we have to process.

Any help would be appreciated…

Reference was made to ‘Just-in-time’ decision making and the impact on a company of making hasty decisions under time pressure or economic duress, potentially resulting in bad choices or excessive risks.  Would this not be less of a problem if managers/key decision makers had access to the correct Management Information?  It’s obvious but not that common.

Many managers are reluctant to make important and sometimes difficult decisions at the point when they can have the maximum impact on current stability and future performance.  Could a well-designed management information/performance-management system not alleviate this problem?

In my opinion, a company can’t predict the future but, having systems in place which enable forecasting and forward planning is surely an invaluable tool in the current uncertain market and in any possible future.

I’d be interested in what systems you use?  What works, what doesn’t? – I think things have moved on from the humble spreadsheet, or are we still using ‘gut feel’ and ‘retrospective management systems’.  Email me with your experiences, Sarah Price – ask@eguk.co.uk

Jane wrote this in response to the recent blog entry written by Andy Baker – ‘What’s measured gets better!’

Recently I was asked about “engagement” – What does it mean?  What value does it add?  How should it be done? And why is it important?

Having discussed it with several colleagues I have come to the conclusion that engagement is important in helping our colleagues feel that they are contributing to the business success either as part of a team or as an individual.  

Management should have a good knowledge of their business and subject, they should be able to roll up their sleeves and help when needed and, most importantly, they should be able to talk in a candid manner with everyone, regardless of status.  Our Head of Customer Experience manages to share his vision with everyone within the team in a way that they understand and feel that they can challenge, even during staff briefings.  His warmth “engages” people and they want to be a part of the team’s success.  Some may say he has the Customer Experience factor.

Another manager said “say hello in the morning and goodbye in the evening, no matter what your own day has been like”.  Being professional in attitude and human in approach appears to be the key to success.

eg work manager® provides us with many of our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that permit us to measure our successes.  It isn’t the only tool we use but it does allow us to measure and target team managers and team members and direct them in achieving our business goals.  Team members can see how well they are performing and if they need help, can request it from their colleagues with a clear idea about what the priorities in the team are.

Daily Capacity Planning meetings (DCPs) and bi-weekly performance reviews create opportunities to work as a team of teams and the sharing of resources across global functional units rather than at a local level have helped our ability to improve service to our customers.  With recognition and reward mechanisms in place, team members can feel that their managers talk to them honestly about what the metrics tell them and drive a cycle of continuous improvement at both a personal and process level because they have the MI to evidence this.

Please note: this blog post reflects a personal opinion and is not representative of the formal views of Zurich International Life.

The Professional Planning Forum (www.planningforum.co.uk) is the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, working across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals.  Championing the importance of these critical skills, the Planning Forum is widely recognised for its best practice research and case studies, as well as the results focused nature of its professional development training and in-company workshops.

Take a look at any call centre planning job on the market today and you’ll find a dizzying array of requirements.  Now, in increasing numbers of cases, employers are also looking beyond the call centre.  They’ve seen the gains to be made by bringing exceptional planners into their customer service environment and want to replicate their skills in the back office as well.

The problem, however, is that back office activity is inherently different to front office operations.  Instead of matching staffing levels to a call demand profile, back office planning is about creating a demand profile that suits the staffing levels already in situ.  It’s not aboutqueue management, it’s about workload management – and this, for many
planners, is a relatively untested area.

In fact, by following a four-step process, planners can not only get to grips with back office planning, but can actually start making as much of a difference there as they do in the call centre.  The fours steps are Process, Data, Planning and Performance Management.

• Process – Understand your processes and their complexity
• Data – You need to determine what level of detail you require from the data you’re capturing in order to ensure that each of those processes outlined in step one becomes as streamlined as possible and can be measured
• Planning – It is at this stage that a planner will be able to produce forecasts for workloads, start tracking targets and begin scheduling according to individual back office workers’ abilities
• Performance Management – Here, a planner will need to identify productivity, not only in terms of the individuals carrying out the work, but also the effectiveness of the processes those individuals are carrying out.

The reality is that defining processes and capturing data will only give you a snapshot of what’s happening in the
back office.  Equally, planning will only give you a tool to effectively resource the demands you’re anticipating. To
create a really streamlined back office environment, planners need to go one step further; they need to analyse all the
facets of steps one to three to identify what is being done well and, conversely, what aspects could be re-engineered and how.

Strategically focused planners are arguably the best people to support this process re-engineering work. But even the best planners in the country will not succeed if they don’t, right from the outset, have a firm grasp of what their success criteria are.

Having spent the day at an eg user group it got me thinking re the dilemma of Quantity vs Quality.  To me it is a quandary in so much as whilst each should form the basis of a balanced scorecard, how do you balance this?  I’m not sure how you can truly achieve both, as each has such conflicting aims.

Consultants and “experts” over the years have moved their thinking away from quantity towards the quality angle.  When working as a Team Manager 10 years ago, the aim was to shift the bits of paper from the Team Inbox to the team Outbox as quickly as possible.  It wasn’t until I’d been running the team for a while that I realised that these bits of paper represented the real lives of customers – if the team got things wrong then the consequences were more than just a bit of re-work.

Now I have to take the holistic company approach for MI and forecasting purposes, I can understand completely the impact of both, with regards to reworks, complaints etc, etc… When we look at Continuous Improvement programmes the key driver is ensuring that the company does more for less, whilst ensuring that quality is of a high standard.  So the focus remains on Quantity with Quality as an important Output.

The main target for processing staff is their productivity.  Quality scores come second. Whilst we have dabbled with the targets, staff still work to ensure that they achieve 100% productivity at all times.

When a whole culture within a large department has been fostered towards achieving good performance measures and then the experts change their mind, how do you change the culture to focus on quality (within a short period of time), whilst also ensuring that staff do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay?

If anyone has achieved this successfully I would be grateful if you could share any experiences with me. Answers on a postcard please….

Please leave a comment or contact Paul by emailing ask@eguk.co.uk