Service Management Training Tips:
Unlocking The Potential Of Frontline Service Managers
Instead of administrative work and meetings, they should focus on
coaching their employees and on constantly improving quality.
A retail manager responsible for more than $80 million in annual
revenue, an airline manager who oversees a yearly passenger volume
worth more than $160 million, a banking manager who deals with
upward of seven million questions from customers a year. These
aren't executives at a corporate headquarters; they are the
hidden--yet crucial--managers of frontline employees.
Found in almost any company, such service managers are particularly
important in industries with distributed networks of sites and
employees. These service management industries--for instance,
infrastructure, travel and logistics, manufacturing, health care and
retailing (including food service and retail banking)--make up more
than half of the global economy. Their district or area managers,
store managers, site or plant managers, and line supervisors direct
as much as two-thirds of the workforce and are responsible for the
part of the company that typically defines the customer experience.
Yet most of the time, these service managers operate as cogs in a
system, with limited flexibility in decision making and little room
for creativity.
In a majority of the companies we've encountered, the frontline
service manager's role is merely to oversee a limited number of
direct reports, often in a "span breaking" capacity, relaying
information from executives to workers. Such service managers keep
an eye on things, enforce plans and policies, report operational
results and quickly escalate issues or problems. In other words, a
frontline manager is meant to communicate decisions, not to make
them; to
ensure compliance with policies, not to use judgment or discretion
(and certainly not to develop policies); and to oversee the
implementation of improvements, not to contribute ideas or even
implement improvements (workers do that).
This system makes companies less productive, less agile and less
profitable, our experience shows. Change is possible, however. At
companies that have successfully empowered their frontline service
managers, the resulting flexibility and productivity generate strong
financial returns. One convenience store retailer, for example,
reduced hours worked by 19% to 25% while increasing sales by almost
10%. It achieved this result by halving the time store managers
spent on administration; restructuring their work (and that of their
employees) to focus on the areas most relevant to customers, such as
the cleanliness of stores and upselling efforts at the cash
register; and creating easy-to-understand performance metrics that
service managers now had enough time to coach employees on daily.
The key is a shift to frontline service managers who have the
time--and the ability--to address the unique circumstances of their
specific stores, plants, or mines; to foresee trouble and stem it
before it begins; and to encourage workers to seek out opportunities
for self-improvement. In difficult economic times, making employees
more productive is even more crucial than it is ordinarily.
The Reality of the Front Line
To unlock a team's abilities, a service manager at any level must
spend a significant amount of time on two activities: helping the
team understand the company's direction and its implications for
team members and coaching for performance. Little of either occurs
on the front line today. Across industries, frontline managers spend
30% to 60% of their time on administrative work and meetings, and
10% to 50% on non-managerial tasks (traveling, participating in
training, taking breaks, conducting special projects, or undertaking
direct customer service or sales themselves). They spend only 10% to
40% actually managing frontline employees by, for example, coaching
them directly.
Source: Aaron De Smet, Monica McGurk and Marc Vinson.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/12/managers-productivity-quality-leadership-managing-mckinsey.html
Subject: Service Management
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