It has its advantages when you can always decide for yourself in your work what you do and how you do it. But if you:
- want to improve yourself
- want to stay sharp
- want to keep your knowledge up to date
- want to help colleagues with your knowledge and experience
- want to deliver unambiguous quality to your clients
effective dialogue with colleagues is essential. Listening to each other and learning from each other gives energy and inspiration for your own development and that of your organisation.
How consciously do you really engage in dialogue with your colleagues?
Do you recognise yourself in one of these examples?
“I work in district nursing. For me, it is the most enjoyable and beautiful work there is. The only thing I always dreaded were the obligatory meetings every week. Although I enjoy seeing and talking to my colleagues, I always came home with an unsatisfied feeling. What had we actually talked about? And what did it bring me besides boring management topics with which I could not do much in practice? For some time now, we have been organised differently, so that we now have a small team to decide for ourselves how to plan and approach our work. We determine the agenda for our meetings ourselves and, in addition to organisational topics, we have put sharing knowledge and experiences on the agenda. Since then, I come home motivated after a meeting.”
“I work in a service centre on the telephone. We help people who have problems with their printer. We have both standard scripts that help us to understand the customer’s question as well as scripts for solutions. The other day, a colleague asked me how come her conversations with customers take so long and also result in lower customer satisfaction. I offered her to listen in for a few times. It soon became clear where the cause lay. She was so busy following her scripts that she forgot to listen to what the customer was saying. If she had done so, she could have skipped whole sections of the script several times. Now she was asking unnecessary questions and the customer was getting irritated. She immediately picked up on my feedback and asked me to listen again after a week. There was a world of difference.”
“In my work as a sales manager, I work alone a lot. Let me go to customers, that’s the best thing for me and my company. The office staff sometimes grumble at me when they don’t know which customer I’m going to or when I haven’t updated the CRM system after a visit. A few months ago, I was forced to face the facts: my customers were less satisfied than those of my colleagues. When we looked into the reason for this, it turned out that a number of deals had fallen through because we did not respond quickly enough to customer enquiries and (too many) mistakes had been made. The cause was that the office staff were not aware of the things that I had agreed with the customer. Since then, the account team has a short daily start every morning, which I usually join by telephone when I am on the road. We discuss what happened the previous day and what is planned for that day. Once a week, we discuss the customers in more detail and see if we are still on track with our goals. Apart from the fact that customer satisfaction was immediately back on track and is still rising, this way of discussing things makes sense to me. I enjoy getting to know my colleagues better and I also learn from them.”
Do you know what your dialogue yields?
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