A friend of mine used to work for a supermarket chain. While he generally enjoyed it, one of his frustrations was what happened when the shop was very busy. When queues for checkouts were starting to snake up the aisles, managers would look on with concerned faces, but they would never roll up their sleeves and jump on a till to help shorten them.
The view of employees was that managers felt it was beneath them to do any kind of front line work, despite the fact that many of them had been promoted from within. Whether that was the case or not is irrelevant, because it was the lasting impression that employees were left with.
I have seen some great examples of the opposite in our sector recently, most latterly involving a Stagecoach Managing Director who spent an evening with the cleaning shift.
Try to imagine how frustrating it must be to do the same job day in, day out, with the same easily fixed issues apparent, yet nobody fixes them because nobody sees them or knows about them.
When I last drove a bus in service, I identified two timing points that were named after landmarks that no longer exist. I also noted various stops without high Kassel kerbs, stops without flags, buses without duty board holders, timing points with too much running time between them and others with not enough. Timing points where buses cannot stop due to road conditions, huge craters in the surface that haven’t been reported. The list goes on.
In isolation, any of these issues would be frustrating, but when combined into a long list, along with the added irritation that nobody is doing anything about them, this series of issues must be incredibly irritating for drivers who see them every day.
It is so important to get out there and experience two things:
- First, experience your product from a customer perspective. Send an anonymous query to your customer service department and assess the quality of response. Travel on your vehicles and assess whether the standard of journey is what you advertise. Wait at a stop and assess whether you really have done everything you can with the local authority to make it the best environment for your mutual customers
- Second, experience the job of your front line colleagues. Do a swap for part of the day. Sign up for a driving shift – not a short duty that operates off-peak, but a 12-hour shift that crosses both rush hours, or a late duty that finishes in the early hours.
The feedback that friends and colleagues of mine have had from their employees when they have got stuck in and done the job that they expect others to do every day has been extremely positive. I have found the same. Fill a page with a list of improvements and get the whole management team engaged in making things better for customers and employees alike.
It is undoubtedly hard to find the time to squeeze in all these things. If you work for a smaller independent, you are probably busy undertaking all the functions required to make the place tick. If you are with a large PLC, you are likely submitting a significant number of reports every week with rigid deadlines, and time out of the office is difficult.
However, my advice is to pick a day for this exercise, stick to it and get others to do the same. Improvements to service reliability often drive usage and thus profit, but they also reduce stress for employees, which often drives retention.
