The Importance of Department Collaboration
By: Greg Alcorn, President and CEO of GCS
I’m worried about the next generation of managers. Of course, that’s what my parents said thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, management principles and leadership programs were centered around case studies and round table discussions. Today, we Google it.
Our contact centers are hours, time zones and oceans apart from one another; yet, we expect to have consistent processes, policies and leadership in all sites and on all shifts. It’s great to have audio and video conference calls to discuss management techniques, but face-to-face conversations are by far the best way to share ideas and build a consistent process.
We try to travel to our centers on a consistent basis. Our centers love to have visitors and do a great job hosting prospective clients, existing clients and other associates. We learn so much from these visits and I believe we can do more.
My favorite site visits are those that include people from several departments. For example, when I got a chance to follow some of our Operations Team as they watched our associates interact with customers and perform data entry work, they discovered several improvements to increase speed and reduce errors. Just recently, several members of our senior management team greatly reduced the preparation time for monitoring sessions. These improvements were initiated by collaboration during a site visit.
Sammy Davis, Jr. said 90% of success is just showing up. If we spend the time to visit each other and work face-to-face on our business model we can greatly improve our chances of long term success. I know that’s true. I Googled it.