5 Ways to “Power Up” Your Education Support Staff’s Lights
I am regularly contacted by School Business Managers and Leaders from Ballarat, Geelong and Melbourne who are seeking help to motivate their Education Support Staff to keep providing excellent service.
They tell me they recruited ESS that had the skills and the enthusiasm for providing consistently excellent service and in the first few weeks or months of them commencing in their role, they did provide that great service.
But over time, the motivated and customer-focused employee “care-factor” for providing excellent service had diminished, and their own needs started to replace that of the school and the customers – which includes everyone from students, parents, and the community.
When one, two or a few ESS are allowed to drop their standards, you risk existing service excellence-focused staff feeling taken for granted. Before you know it, you have a team of people providing inconsistent levels of service. Once the school community senses staff are losing interest in them, they will lose interest in the school.
Service excellence lights don’t go out overnight. They dim and flicker first, and this is the sign you need to do some maintenance.
If you are in this place, or you are worried it could happen, below are the 5 things you can do to re-ignite (or keep bright) the service excellence lights in your ESS.
1. Be clear on what you expect
Don’t assume your ESS knows what service excellence is and how to do it. Too many times, employees are left to use their common sense in this area. Service excellence is not common sense or a “one size fits all” approach. To have all customers delighted and tell everyone they know about your fantasy team and school, you need service excellence standards in place. Be proactive and put time aside to create your own specific customer service standards and yes, write them down.
2. Talk to your ESS
Once you have written standards, you need to confirm your staff understand them and have the skills to implement them. Talk to your staff – preferably face to face. Your ESS can make or break a school, so you must make time for individual Service Excellence conversations. Hearing you speak about your service standards will confirm to staff how important the standards are and how much power and value they (the staff) have at the school.
3. Ask staff what they need
Once the team is clear on the standards, ask them what would stop them from achieving those standards consistently and what they would need to remove that stop sign. Let them share their limitations and write those down. Writing limitations on paper or a whiteboard, with a column for solutions, shows that you intend to help them solve the problem. Encourage the team to help each other with any limitations.
4. Consider outsourcing the solution
Well, of course I would say that, I am a service specialist trainer, after all. But, there are many reasons why you should consider engaging external training support. Whether it’s the soft skills (people skills) of the role or the hard skills (technical skills), do you really have the time and skills to train your ESS? Do you understand adult learning styles, customer expectations, what motivates people to learn and how to adjust your training to suit each staff member? If you do, great, but if not, get an expert for expert results, or you could be wasting time – yours and your that of your ESS.
5. Step back and let them try
Make it OK for staff to make mistakes – it really is a powerful learning tool. Give them feedback on interactions that were carried out well, and help your ESS review the ones that could have been better. Build their confidence by telling them you know they will do better next time.
Final Note: When creating your service standards, be specific and most importantly, ask your school community for input. After all, it’s your community who determines if your school provides excellent service, not you and not your staff.
To create a culture of service excellence, ESS need to feel valued and motivated. The best way to do that is with practical, relevant and motivational professional development. Find out how you can keep those service excellence lights of your team on full power with The Zone and Onsite Training services.
By Cate Schreck – Author of “The A-Z of Service Excellence”.