Workers in call centres in Britain claim they are being treated like battery hens and say conditions are getting worse.

The Mirror has uncovered shocking working conditions with some staff allowed just EIGHT minutes for their toilet breaks during an eight-hour shift and others getting warnings for being 30 seconds late back from lunch.

In another case, a woman was refused permission to leave her work station because her child was taken ill at school because it would have left the call-centre undermanned.

With the hyperbole turned down a notch or two, we can see the glaring omission from the article. The thing that is missing is that any company with a call centre where they are doing the things that The Mirror describes, will actually be hurting their own effectiveness. Of course call centres should stop monitoring toilet breaks and reduce bullying for the sake of the staff, but they should also do it because the organisation will perform better.

Just doing more of what you agree with is dogma

If there is a genuine need to get better, why do call centres not try things with an open mind? Why do they not try being open, honest and trusting to their staff to see how that goes?

The reason is twofold. Firstly, the current mindset is all about economies of scale, sweating your assets (staff) and focusing on individual performance. Secondly, they don’t get PDSA. They don’t understand that you have to experiment with every method to see if it works. Just doing more of what you think with no proper evaluation is dogma, not improvement. I can’t tell you the number of times working with clients when a staff member has suggested something that both the managers and I have thought could not possibly work, which worked brilliantly.

Fail fast, learn fast

It is genuine PDSA when staff are trying things that managers are not sure about or completely disagree with. To do that staff need to experiment fast and have a rigorous method of evaluation and implementation. If it works, put it in place quickly, if it doesn’t work, throw it out and learn from it. Managers also have to understand that people learn best by doing, not by being told what won’t work. Staff also need support from managers to do this.

Let them fail. Let them fail fast. See them learn faster than you could possibly have imagined.

Best,

Rob

The Tories’ critisism of targets indicates that they do not understand the basic quality principle of plan, do, study, act.

I would counter that the writer of the statement above does not understand that to set a target is not a plan. There is no proper ‘do’ other than set the arbitrary target then stand back. The ‘study’ is reduced to the useless, “see if we hit the target” and the ‘act’ can only be to change the level of the target, drop it or add a new one to counter the perverse unintended effects of the first one.

A proper plan has method. Things you are going to study to understand your situation so you can make changes with knowledge. Targets do not give knowledge, only fear and pressure.

Best,

Rob

Now Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) is the Shewhart Cycle (some know it as the Deming Cycle) which is a generalisation of the scientific method as applied to improvement in general.

Plan: make a plan or a hypothesis about what you are going to do.
Do: try it out, run the experiment.
Study (sometimes called Check): see how the plan came out.
Act: implement the findings. Either embed the new way or throw it out.

Then you cycle back to Plan with new information.

Anyway, back to this meeting. We tried our best to fill in the four quarters of the chart with our good and bad points about the meeting but try as the chair could he couldn’t explain what he meant in this context by the four quadrants in this context. As far as we could all see we were in Study. We had just Done the meeting and were Studying what we had done for the next Plan for the next meeting. A big row broke out because apparently the chair applied PDSA to everything without problems.

The only new information I gained was that you should never force a technique on a group of people if it is irrelevant and you can’t communicate it properly.

Best,

Rob