5 ways to check the health of your service team culture

If you hesitated while answering this question, you’re not alone.

Upmarket facilities might make your team more comfortable, but they won’t help you develop great service culture. Culture can only be created by people.

You build good team culture by promoting collaboration, knowledge sharing, transparent communication and meaningful interpersonal connections – and by adopting an unified vision, beliefs and goals.

Promoting team engagement, rather than individual achievement, creates a team that learns together and treats its members with respect.

You also can’t build good team culture without effective leadership. Management that understands how happy and engaged employees lead to happy customers makes a world of difference. Fostering a leadership style that creates the conditions for your team to succeed, means your customers become winners.

Here are five ideas to promote a healthy service team culture:

1. Make sure staff know the reason the organisation exists and its vision, mission and values. Identify and define your team’s culture. Talk to your team about why the business was created and brainstorm the vision, mission and values of the organisation. It’s important not to do too much telling here. Encourage team members to share their ideas and contribute to the discussion. Look for agreement, not difference, and listen with intent to what they’re saying.Ask staff to describe the ways they communicate with customers. How do they explain equipment or service problems to them and how do they describe the manner they’re going to resolve these problems? A well-motivated staff member who feels their views are taken seriously by management will become a source of ideas and initiatives.
2. Examine the effect of incentive programs on the field services team. Writing in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Alfie Kohn argues that dozens of studies over the past three decades have shown how “people who expect to receive a reward for completing a task … simply do not perform as well as those who expect no reward at all”.The takeaway from this HBR article is that “rewards buy temporary compliance”, but no long-term change. It also contends that incentive programs can damage a team’s morale. Rewards over time have a punitive effect because they’re manipulative, he says, and nobody likes to be controlled.Asking staff to compete for rewards can fracture team coherence and undermine cooperation. If you’re going to use an incentive program, construct it carefully to ensure it doesn’t have the potential to damage your team.
3. Talking about customers when they’re not there. We often talk about effective communication with customers, but how we speak about our customers when they’re absent is just as important.Think of it like this. The conversations that take place within the team about customers’ needs and expectations reflect and help shape the customer service ethos of your organisation. Whether the customer is within earshot or not it doesn’t matter.Good customer experience always involves consistency and respect and if team members feel it’s okay to complain about a customer during or after the job is completed, this sets a dangerous precedent. Establish an understanding within your team that complaining or speaking negatively about customers is unacceptable under any circumstances. At the same time, ensure a formal process exists for notifying management if something serious occurs with a customer that you should know about.