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Scapegoating and the Black Magic of Work Creation

5 March, 2018 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Scapegoat

An imaginary tale… Picture a high pressure environment.  Resources are stretched and the work keeps on coming. Jobs are routinely prioritised so that staff can focus on what is important. That isn’t an uncommon scenario, maybe it is ringing bells, so let me make it a little more dramatic by upping the stakes. Imagine it was […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, bureaucracy, fear and anxiety, mitigating demand, office productivity, over-processing

The “A” Team

4 October, 2014 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Mr T Fool

The escalation What do you do when things get out of hand?  When your staff are bombarded with queries that they can’t handle? There are two lines of thought… Management Model 1: First split your staff into two pools, the experienced people who know what they are doing and the less so (who presumably don’t) […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, call centre, cheap and nasty, escalation, first call resolution, learning, mitigating demand, office productivity

How I Lost My Job

20 October, 2012 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Job Disappeared

A while back I worked in a call centre. It was a big call centre, thousands of people worked there, talking to customers. But not any more… First we mitigated the work, we removed all the rework and mistakes and backlogs, we got rid of all the things that went wrong Second we automated the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: automation, first call resolution, mitigating demand, outsourcing, redundancy

How to Have an Easy Life: 3 Lessons from a Fireman

24 August, 2012 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Dave having a break

I am not fond of working, I want an easy life.  I’d far rather lie on a beach than be sitting in an office. My mate Dave has an easy life.  He is a fireman.  They have an easy life, all they do is sit about, waiting for a phone call, reading the paper and […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: automation, first call resolution, mitigating demand, rework

How to Deal with Customer Complaints

10 August, 2011 by James Lawther 2 Comments

The Highways Agency (the people responsible for the state of the UK’s roads) have announced a plan to save money. You can read about it here. Currently if a member of the public complains about a pot hole on a major road the Highways Agency are duty bound to repair it (throw on a couple […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: best practice, customer complaints, customer focus, government, mitigating demand, poor service

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