Pollyana Says...

One of our customer service people quit from a division that is "over-worked." By over-worked, I mean that in order to get a full-day's work done, the people in that division have show up to work within half an hour of starting time and limit their socializing to half-hour blocks of time.

It was decided that the customer service person, we'll call her Buffy, would not be replaced, and I was charged with the task of finding out how to spread the work out among the other five customer service people.

Now, you have to understand my perspective. When I was doing all of the transactional work in human resources, I supported four hundred employees, processing payroll paperwork, insurance claims, conducting orientations and doing most of the recruiting for twelve dialysis clinics. I did this for three years and never put in a minute's worth of overtime. When I left they hired three people to replace me.

Since that time, I've won two service awards. The first was in creating and implementing a performance management system for two hundred HR managers who did not want to do performance evaluations, and thought they knew more than I did; the second was to receive an award for service in my cafe -- the one I took over in an effort to keep it from being closed and ultimately increased its capacity by two hundred percent -- all with no advertising or major staff changes.

You could say I know a thing or two about customer service and efficiency.

I can't go into specifics about the company where I currently work, but suffice it to say it's in a very competitive and specialized industry. Also, the company where I work has been dying a slow economic death for the last seven years, in large part because of the way they do business. A new management team was brought in to improve things.

So, it will come as no surprise that every suggestion for change is met with, "Well, in our business you can't do that because..." The phrase is followed by a laundry list of reasons and potential Armaggedon scenarios, and the person who makes the suggestion is made to feel like a complete imbecile and un-Christian for even suggesting a change in the way they've always done it.

So, I've met with the remaining five customer service people and gotten a list of their duties. Then I met with the people for whom Buffy's clients. No one will believe me, but Buffy wasn't all that busy, and no one seems to get the concept that a job might have taken half an hour because there was a half an hour in which to do the job.

I'm such a radical!

But what I'm discovering is something new about myself. Throughout my life, I've been in make-it-work situations. You know, situations in which you either make it work, or you don't. And if you don't you might not have a roof over your head or food on the table. Those kinds of situations. And I have found that in every one of those situations, if I ever took the tack that I couldn't make the situation work, it wouldn't work. Yes, I've had a number of failures in situations where I was certain of success; but I've never had a success when I was certain of failure.