This exercise, from Laurence Rogers-Jones, helps staff think about customers’ needs, to enable organisations to address those needs, with some pretty impressive results…

An approach which proved incredibly successful for our organisation: we asked all our employees (off site, in mixed groups of 20 per session at all grade levels) on a customer relations /development programme, to brainstorm all the things that customers expected of us as an organisation, particularly when they telephoned, wrote or arrived in person.

With each group of 20 participants we normally filled four pages of flipchart.
We then went through each item and asked: "Do we always provide this to the customer?"

Sometimes answers needed to be challenged with facilitators eliciting examples of when we did and didn't meet customer expectations. As a result, each item on the brainstormed lists received a plus or minus sign or both, according to the degree to which the participants believed expectations were met.

We then asked each of four groups to take a sheet of the brainstorm and, with no holds barred, tell us how to turn each minus into a plus.

As each session had a number of supporters in the form of supervisors and managers, and nothing was sacrosanct.

It worked.

Of course, lots of follow-up was needed and above all, the commitment of the organisation’s management to listen and respond in the most positive way even when suggestions could not be implemented.

Over 12 months by involving all employees we achieved a 67% reduction in staff turnover, 15% reduction in absenteeism and an improved cashflow to the business of over 30%.

From a trainer/facilitators point of view it was probably one of my most uplifting experiences to see individuals take ownership of issues and respond positively. Truly motivational.

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