Guy,
Quality and ops sounds like the ultimate in team building,
the following is an exerpt from a newletter published by TRG ( its free), which I thought might be appropriate. The team building issues are the same between Ops and Quality.
"This is likely one of the most common questions I hear when assisting contact center operators to improve the performance of their contact center. This element of teamwork is a critical element required to achieve operational innovation breakthroughs.
In order for you to achieve your desired results you need the Supervisors to improve their skill base. You need them to improve but also want them to understand that they can lose their job...eventually if they don't buy in to improving their skill sets, if it comes down to that.
The first thing needed is to build an effective team consisting of you and your supervisors (and any other stakeholders who should be included). There are 5 key elements required to make a team effective. They are;
1. Trust- you must all trust each other. To engender trust you must be vulnerable to each other. That means you have to be open and get to know each other better. Because without trust you cannot have healthy conflict.
2. Healthy conflict is essential to any team. Now I am not talking about personal attacks, I am speaking about ideological conflict...conflict about issues not personalities. Once the team trusts each other and is vulnerable to each other they can (and will) engage in issue driven conflict. Because without conflict you cannot get buy-in.
3 Buy-In- once you have had healthy conflict with everyone participating in a focused discussion you can get them to 'buy-in' to a decision. Without healthy conflict they will not participate and will feel any sense of commitment or 'buy-in' to the decisions made. Without this commitment or buy-in' you cannot hold them accountable.
4 Accountability- once they have committed to a decision they can then be held accountable to deliver the promised results. Without Buy-in they will not accept responsibility for "somebody elses idea" or will fee that "it is somebody elses problem". With Accountability you can pay attention to results.
5 Results focus- Once your supervisors are accountable you can then focus on improving the results of the teams efforts and improving the effectiveness of your operation.
So you should apply this management technique to your contact center. There are more articles on this topic available under the news section of the TRG website"
I hope I have added some value, if I can be of any further assistance please email me at
ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com
Colin