This is our monthly e-message to people who are interested in leading their lives with passion. Each month we will send you a short note with information, stories, examples, and practical things you can do to lead your life, work, and organizations with passion.

Leading With Passion
We like the term ‘leading with passion,’ because it has two very significant, but related meanings. The first suggests leading off with passion. That is, making the very first priority in your life to live, work, and play passionately, and to fully embrace every possible moment. Second, it means that we can lead our organizations, teams, and projects with passion – creating passionate work environments by transferring our own enthusiasm for the organization to all others who come into contact with it.

What We Can Learn From A Call Center
Have you ever worked in a call center? Imagine coming to work in the morning (or evening, or early, early morning), plugging your headset in, and listening to customer complaints or trying to pitch a product for the next eight or so hours. In this newsletter we’ll discuss how Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has taken its call center and created a passionate work environment.

Within a two year period, Public Service Company of New Mexico’s call center went from a 600 second customer wait time to 23 seconds, a 28% turnover rate to 2.7%, and became ranked #1 in customer satisfaction in a benchmarking study comparing utilities from across the country. Lynn Wood, PNM’s Director of Customer Care, tells us how they did it.

“Two years ago, when I started,” she says, “We had a very bad morale issue with employees.” Call center employees were seen crying in elevators as they were coming to work. On Lynn’s second day as Director she took movie tickets around to all of the Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) just to say thank you and to introduce herself, “…and to tell you where we were at,” she says, “you could see the fear in their eyes as I walked up.” Two or three people even told her, “I thought you were going to fire me.” They had done nothing wrong, but having Lynn standing at their cubicles made them think they were going to be terminated. There are at least seven key ideas we can learn from the PNM Call center about creating passionate work environments.

Put Employees First
“Our main focus for the first couple of months I was on board was on improving the quality of life of the CSRs,” she says. She and her management team didn’t focus on productivity or on how well employees were performing, but on issues like trust, integrity, and communication. They addressed those issues in staff meetings, via email, and by giving employees support when they brought those issues forward. “We did not focus on the customer,” she says. “My management team was assigned to focus on the employee knowing full well that if we got things taken care of with a good environment for the employee, they would take care of the customer. And that’s exactly what they did.” Even with all of their successes with customers, they still focus first on employees today.

Where do your employees rank on your list of priorities? First, second, or, perhaps, last?

Remove Constraints
Then Lynn and her management team focused on the work environment. “It was such a threatening environment for the employees that every time somebody wanted to do something, or I thought up something to do within my own group, I got told, ‘well we have policy that says you can’t do that or we have a procedure that says you can’t do that,’ which were very different from the corporate policies and procedures.” What she discovered was that there were no written call center policies, just ones that had been practiced over time. So they gathered the staff together and Lynn told the CSRs that there were no longer any call center policies, and that in the future they would follow corporate policy. Two years later they don’t have a single call center policy.

Her management team struggled with that decision. “Part of it was control, but part of it was just their fallback position. They really didn’t have to manage, because all they had to do was quote a policy.” What policies and procedures are holding your employees back?

Buy Them Chairs
They worked on a number of work environment issues, but by far the most impactful concerned chairs. Chairs?

Lynn found out that you couldn’t buy a new chair for an employee, even if it was falling apart. CSRs had to “earn their chairs.” So Lynn personally went and checked out the condition of every one of the chairs. “Some of these were being held together with duck tape. There were chairs that I recognized as being in the call center when I came to work at PNM 22 years ago. They were dirty, filthy. They were horrible.” So they bought chairs for every single CSR in the call center. “From that day forward, the statistics never went back,” she says.

Today, a tour of the call center is colorful, full of variety, and filled with personal touches. Employees decorate their work locations and the center looks both dynamic and alive. Are your employees proud of their physical work environment – or are they too embarrassed to bring their families to see where they spend every day?

Let People Know The Goals, Why They’re Important…And Celebrate Everything
“We started celebrating everything,” Lynn says, but it wasn’t just for fun. CRS were told what the goals and expectations were. “That was the first time anyone told them (what we were trying to achieve). They were just answering the phone,” she says. Now the entire organization sees the same report Lynn and her management team do, on a daily basis. Employees can see their results improve. Employees had always cared about their customers. Now, more than that, employees know how what they do impacts the company’s PE ratio on Wall Street, and the importance of their work to the company’s success with regulators.

“We retrained – we did a lot of business literacy training and did things to tie the (CSR’s) job into what the corporation was doing.”

Are your employees in the dark, or do they truly understand the significance of their work to the organization and to others?

Give Rewards
PNM provides a motivating atmosphere by providing fun, yet rewarding activities. “We play games, and one month if we want to pick up our service levels we’ll set a goal. And so if we hit that service level that day, the following day we get to play bingo,” Lynn says. But instead of one winner, the game is set up so that a fourth of the organization wins each time. And those that win get to pick a prize out of her office. They reward for things like service levels, average speed of answers, learning new procedures, and all types of performance goals.

Playing bingo is just an example of how they’ve made the workplace both fun and productive. Where once employees cried on their way to work, now employees have a green food contest for St. Patrick’s Day and a baking dessert contest for Valentine’s Day. They have pizza parties for the night shift every month and they get tickets so that the entire call center can go to a college football game together. “We had a huge tailgate party,” Lynn says.

The so-called soft side – having fun, celebrating, and providing rewards - pays off in hard business results. What are you doing to help your employees have fun?

Design The Work Around The Employee
PNM’s CSRs are diverse, with differing career, family, and vocational needs. PNM focuses on helping employees to meet those needs. “We allow for flexible schedules so they can continue their higher education and we design their work schedules around that. And we also focus on childcare issues, because we are as likely to design a schedule for childcare issues as for higher education,” she says. Out of 110 CSRs, PNM has 42 schedules to accommodate their individual needs.

CSRs were retrained to do transactions on line so they could keep their transaction time down while still meeting customer needs, “which was very important to the people that work out there, because they wanted to make sure they didn’t short-change the customer,” Lynn says. CSRs are served coffee, tea, lemonade, and popcorn at their desks while they work. New employees are placed with an existing high performing CSR to build a buddy and coaching relationship as they go through the stages of orientation and training. New hires spend a day in each of 15 different areas of the company to understand what the company does.

Are you designing the work around your employees, or are you forcing them into boxes where they can’t truly contribute their best talents and skills?

Support from Upper Management
“It is absolutely critical,” Lynn says, to have the support from upper management. Her Vice-President had to exhibit a great deal of faith and trust and respect for her and her management team as they created the conditions for a passionate work environment, and PNM’s COO and CEO are visible and enthusiastic supporters. They are advocates, who tell the call center success story throughout the company and outside it. Call center employees hear this praise and recognition, and it contributes to the pride in their accomplishments and reinforces a productive, positive environment. Are you supporting the key employees in your organization who are putting their reputations on the line to create passionate work environments? Or are you letting them twist in the wind?

Leading with Passion is a regular communication from Michael Kroth and Patricia Boverie. Michael and Patricia have been researching passionate work since 1999, and their book, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving and Sustaining Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace, is about the indispensable necessity of passion for personal and organizational success in the workplace.

© Copyright 2003, All Rights Reserved Patricia Boverie and Michael Kroth