We have just been running some creativity and continuous improvement workshops for a company and I thought I would give you a nudge to think about how you too can improve your
team and business.

Everyone loves big, dramatic ideas.

In fact, the bigger and sexier the ideas, the more people are drawn to them.

A lot managers look for the golden bullet idea and by focusing all of your energy on this you miss out on a lot of smaller ideas that have a huge impact.

Let me illustrate this with an example.

Before I founded MTD, one of my earlier jobs was Head Of Operational Planning for Barclays Contact Centres.

It was my responsibility to plan out how many call centres we needed, how many staff, IT etc

I concentrated my team on looking for small ideas that had a large impact.

Here are a few of the ideas that we implemented and the impact:

* We recommended a change to the greeting of each call within our contact centres.

This reduced the average call length by 2 seconds without any impact on the quality of customer service.

Now, 2 seconds does not sound a lot but when you are taking 33 million calls per year it soon adds up!

I can’t remember exactly what the figures were but I know it saved us something in the region of £20,000 per month

£10,000 saving per second per month!

* Multi-Skilling

Instead of recruiting for certain departments we multi-skilled our workforce so that they could carry out multiple tasks and services.

This required training and a reward system based upon a skills matrix but it saved us recruiting an additional 20 members of staff at £15,000 each.

You see, by focusing on the small wins you gain great rewards.

You do not have to come up with ideas of new products or new ways of doing business.

Instead, look closer to home and look at your existing processes and ask yourself:

CAN WE DO THIS BETTER?

CAN WE DO THIS MORE EFFICIENTLY?

Think "Small" first and the big win will come.

Until the next time, take care of yourself

Live, love and laugh

Sean

Managing your time effectively is one of the most important skills that you can master.

A lot of people ask me for tips and techniques to squeeze more out of their day and I would always recommend that you take stock and audit how and where you are spending your time.

Do this over a 2 week period and it will highlight some trends.

Then identify the time stealers! Don’t check your emails 39 times per day! Don’t say YES when you really wanted to say no! Appreciate the differences between IMPORTANT and URGENT tasks.

Can you get rid of any tasks?

Can you delegates some tasks?

Can you automate any tasks?

Start by understanding where your time goes and then set about to improve it!

Sean Mc

Local Training Firm Speaks On International Stage

Staff from Coventry based MTD Management Training have been asked to speak along side Sir Ranulph Fiennes and former Apprentice winner Michelle Dewbury at this years Call Centre Expo conference being held on 26/27 September at the NEC.

MTD’s managing director, Sean McPheat, has been asked by the event organisers to deliver keynote speaking sessions known as the “Management Development Academy” covering subjects such as how to manage under-performers, conflict management and influencing skills.

“I was honoured when Call Centre Expo approached me to help them with their Academy. For us to be speaking along side an exploring legend like Sir Ranulph Fiennes is just awesome” said Sean McPheat.

Call Centre Expo is the leading international exhibition for the call centre industry and MTD will be delivering short, practical based training sessions for up to 500 managers at a time throughout the day.

“It’s a challenging ask but we are up for it. To cover a topic in just 30 minutes for 500 people will require great skill in itself. We will need to keep the audience engaged, entertained and at the same time enable them to go away with some practical tips that they can implement when they get back to work”

Sean Mc

Conflict resolution, how to handle unpleasant situations at workplace

Conflict at the workplace is damaging, traumatic and counter productive for all the individuals caught up in it. It becomes the responsibility of the leadership to resolve the conflicts as fast as they can. There are several ways to resolve the conflicts to handle unpleasant situations at the workplace.

As the organisations are now restructuring the work teams, there is a growing need to train people in conflict resolution. As more and more organisations are experiencing stress at workplace ultimately resulting in conflicts, more and more managers are concentrating towards conflict resolution. As a result, it has become a complete field of study.

Introduction to conflict resolution – How does it work?

Conflict resolution, also known as “Conflictology” is an attempt to resolve a conflict (In this case, at a work place). At a work place, where deadlines always heat up the atmosphere, rising conflicts is not a strange issue. They may arise out of the blue from any debate or differences. When the employees have to work together as a team, they have to work in great coordination with each other. A little lack of cooperation or careless attitude can unexpectedly give rise to conflicts.

Conflict can be differences in terms of class, rank, power, and behavioural attitudes. The role of conflict resolution is to help in avoiding the negative circumstances that may be caused as a result of disputes, controversies, and other methods used to resolve conflict. With conflict resolution, the conflicts can be dealt with quickly and overtly.

How to handle unpleasant situation at work place

The job of conflict resolution is to end the conflicts prior to they occurance or cause any verbal, physical, or legal dispute. Conflict resolution can be successful by giving people a platform to speak and listening to them, offering them equal opportunities to work to meet each other’s needs. The team leader or the manager has to properly deal with their interests so that they remain satisfied with the result.

There are different ways to deal with the conflict at work place:

• Direct Approach

Direct approach is the best approach among all others, which focuses on the leader, who deals with the issue directly. However, conflicts are not so easy or comfortable to deal with; it brings up a time which is the best to introspect at the issues impartially. One has to face the conflicts as they are. If you need to criticise to emphasize your point, you have to make it positive in tone for the recipients.

The direct approach depends more on the skills of solving problems. It usually brings a sense of motion, as the conflict has been brought to the surface and has to be dealt with and controlled.

• Negotiation

The most effective conflict resolution takes place directly between the parties who have opposing views. This stage is known as negotiation, which is the conventional way of bargaining tough where the interests of a group far overshadow the concerned working relationships.

A third party makes use of the most efficient way of bargaining where both the parties have certain ideas about a solution but they cannot find a common position, acceptable for both sides. In this situation, the role of a project manager or a team leader is required. They, due to the positions they have, can help in finding out the best compromise.

For finding the middle ground to resolve the conflict, there has to be a give and take on both the sides. However, most of the times, it generally concludes with both the parties remaining dissatisfied. To find the middle ground in the spur of the conflict is not easy. For a fair judgment, a negotiator has to look at the both interests and working relationships as important.

• Enforcing Team Rules

Enforcing team rules for conflict resolution does not have a good success rate and is mostly considered best avoided, if possible. There is a possibility for this method to bring out hard feelings towards not only the leader but the whole team. However, it helps in observing strict discipline at once. This method should be employed at the time when you know it for sure that a member does not want to remain in the team. The best way of resolving the conflict here is to help the person to find out another team.

• Leave untouched

A negotiator can leave the conflict untouched in the situation when the conflict is actually not so real to start with. You need to simply avoid it or work around it, by not directly interfering in the conflict. This helps in delaying things long enough for the person to pacify. This method of conflict resolution is a tricky one and needs high level of judgment from the leadership whether the situation is fit enough to leave untouched or not.

If used by an experienced leader at the right time and environment, the technique of not interfering in the conflict can be the best way to avoid minor incidents, which usually arise due to occasional bad mood and get blown up to be real problems that should not have happened otherwise.

Sean Mc

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