Spotlight on the charity who dazzled the world of HR
Case Study Crunch: Mencap
Three year financial targets smashed within two years, a nomination for a Personnel Today award and one very happy CEO – Mencap’s AskHR team are proving every day, how coaching in the conversation creates results and benefits beyond expectations.
A need to engage, empower and enable managers – by phone
The Royal Mencap Society, the UK’s largest provider of support services to people with learning disabilities, began with a bold vision. They wanted to build a highly-skilled, HR call centre to support managers out in the field. These managers need to be able to respond to everyday HR related challenges, whilst building positive relationships with employees. Rather than create a false dependency on the call centre, Mencap also wanted to develop the confidence and ability of managers to handle HR issues for themselves, over time. There was also a clear desire to set the HR team up to succeed before go-live, and achieve high levels of performance right from the very first call taken.
To bring this vision to life, they needed to give Call Centre Operatives the conversational skills to enable and empower managers – which we at Starr Coaching know, are the skills of coaching.
So what happened?
Working in collaboration with Mencap, Starr Coaching designed a programme of development events for the AskHR Team. First, Starr helped Mencap to develop and align to a ‘whole team’ vision. When asked, individuals were quick to describe the type of reputation they wanted to create for the team. They also knew what types of behaviours would most support their joint success, such as openness, ownership and proactivity. The consistent focus on these behaviours helped to build levels of emotional maturity and personal resilience across the whole team.
Crucially, Starr also built the team’s ability to adopt coaching styles of telephone conversation. By offering simple, clear coaching principles and real-life demonstrations, the team’s own practice sessions were engaging, fun and productive. The AskHR team gained conversational skills and techniques which projected a mature and engaging style. Team members were shown how to handle potentially tough situations, such as disputes or conflict, by facilitating the managers through their own thought processes to decide for themselves what they needed to do. Winning principles included:
- It’s usually more beneficial to help the caller (manager) think and act for themselves, than tell them what they should do
- Sometimes callers don’t need brilliant ideas, they just need support to empower them to do what they already know is right
- Effective enquiry can surface the caller’s own insight; so ask open questions, use summaries and make observations (before giving advice)
- Coach the person not their issue – don’t be drawn into playing ‘fix it’
- You can’t coach knowledge – sometimes someone simply needs the right information
By practicing different responses such as open questioning, observations, opinions, advice or even direct instruction, the team learnt which of their responses create effective influence during a call. AskHR now have the judgement and skills to know which principle or response will help a manager deal with their current issue, whilst helping them grow in confidence, ability and resilience over time.
What were the results?
Mencap’s goal of using coaching behaviours to build capability has reduced the number of calls coming in to the AskHR team. Also, the proportion of straightforward or ‘common sense’ types of queries, has reduced, allowing the team to focus and add value in more complex situations. Caller (manager) satisfaction results show a marked decrease in the amount of central support callers feel they subsequently require.
To justify Mencap’s investment in training and consultancy support, financial savings were expected from year three onwards. Delightfully, the team have achieved these targets within their second year. The team is now hailed as “a positive example at Mencap” by CEO Jan Tregelles who also said of them:
“Their support is Zen-like, they are our gurus and Dalai Lamas, keeping calm and offering us wisdom and guidance at times of often great turbulence and emotion. They are a unique, high performance service team, a centre of excellence for employee relations.”
Mencap have also been shortlisted for the Excellence in Employee Relations Award by Personnel Today. AskHR’s coaching culture has enabled them to go beyond their own expectations and achieve an incredible result. Starr Coaching would like to offer our heartfelt congratulations to Carole Godding and Mencap’s AskHR team – we’re super-proud of you all!
To discover how Starr Coaching can help you develop surprisingly effective coaching behaviours in your workplace, get in touch we’d love to hear from you.
