At Your Service: Taking your team back to the basics

Once you are ready, it is important to make this as professional as possible. I would suggest holding your training session outside your regular business hours. Pay your employees to be there. Order pizza or wings and have cold beverages of your choice there. Hold it at a different venue if you can afford to. Consider enlisting the help of some of your top performers to go over the basics with the rest of your team. Can you make games out of the activities so it is more engaging? Can you give out prizes? We learn during moments of enjoyment so try to make it fun.

When you build a strong, interactive presentation and make it fun, you will have a greater chance of success with everyone enjoying themselves, learning some new ways to do things and getting involved in team building. Employees don’t always get together outside of work, so holding an event like this will definitely increase the team spirit.

Here are four benefits your team will have from going back to the basics.

It will keep them “present” at work and focused on what is important. Being present each day will make a huge impact in the number of mistakes that happen. Philip Crosby was one of the biggest names in the “quality revolution” era. In his book, Quality is Free, Crosby talks about Zero Defects and the effect it can have on your company.  Imagine if you cut your mistakes down by 50 per cent – how much would that add to your bottom line? What about 90 per cent or more? Having your employees present each and every day will help you achieve this.

Getting back to basics keeps everyone on the same page so that procedures are followed the same way by everyone. Anyone in a given department can pick up where one person left off and continue on if everyone is doing things the same way. This is especially important if you are on shared drives at work. If people store their finished reports wherever they want, it can be frustrating for others to find. If everyone is on the same page and sharing the same folders for reports, everyone knows where to look if one person is away ill or no longer with the company.

It reignites passion. Once you have buy-in on going back to the basics, it can have a very positive effect on each of the team members. Sometimes we get stale in our positions or just go through the motions. When we reignite that passion, the culture and productivity become so much more positive.

There will always be a few that say they are not learning anything new, but new advancements are coming all the time in all industries. For most, they will learn one or two new techniques that will make their job easier or make something better for their customers. It may be the same thing they have been doing for years but said in a different way that resonates more with them and they will carry it forward. Every once in a while I will hear from an older attendee at my customer service training sessions that they do not feel like they are learning anything new. With 95 per cent of my stories being completely original, I know my way of saying it will be brand new to them. I also have a few acronyms that they will not have heard before until they come to a session. I usually remind them that customer service is pretty basic and there is not much of anything new you can do but there are always ways to do things better than the way we are doing them now.  

Russ Dantu is a 30-year veteran of the rental industry and has been delivering workshops, seminars and keynotes on customer servicce for over 15 years. For more information, visit russdantu.com or email russ@russdantu.com