Becoming a service centre
Featured in the Partnerships at Work training manual
By Ken Birkett & Val Rowland
Category: Performance Management
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
Successful organisations offer customer service. Service can be defined in terms of quality, price, timeliness and user support. To achieve acceptable standards in these things, organisations need employees with capability and understanding. Employees bring knowledge, skill and personal qualities to the job. These are deployed within human resource structures. Work is continually fed into work centres and results are achieved. Managers, these days, tend to act as a trouble-shooting resource and team members are expected to work together to meet targets. A key aspect of all this is employee attitude. Change is rapid and technology evolves. These bring progress, but also constant challenge. Continuing variation can be exciting but also uncomfortable. Employees have to adopt a mind-set that accommodates the effects of all these things. One way of proceeding effectively is for employees to regard themselves as service centres. Their customers in the first instance are their work colleagues and their boss. Whoever your work impinges upon is your customer. There are several consequences of adopting such a philosophy: people become personally accountable for their results; people accept responsibility for their own morale; people practise continuous improvement (‘kaizen’ is the Japanese word for this). Those things in their turn require that managers not only preach and practise the same philosophy, but also that they adopt attitudes which encourage and help team members to do the same.
You begin the training activity by briefly introducing participants to the concept of seeing themselves as a service centre. Participants work in groups, each group considering one of three topics. This is followed by a feedback session. There is a concluding round-up session.
Who is it for: This training activity is intended for use by trainers to help participants see the importance of becoming a service centre – offering customer service to both external and internal customers.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 6 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 01:25:00 |
| No of Pages: | 14 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training activity can be used in personal development workshops. It can also form part of a management development programme.
Download the training activity, Becoming a service centre as featured in the Fenman training manual; Partnerships at Work