Tag Archives: Training

Management, People Management

Why Your Company Needs a Tech Support Scorecard

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For leaders of technical support teams, a tech support scorecard is a great way to evaluate how your tech support team is performing. If you’re not familiar with a tech support scorecard, I hope that this post will provide you with the knowledge you’re missing, but simply put, it’s a tool that helps you measure your team’s performance against the metrics that are most important to your organization.

A tech support scorecard can be useful for a wide variety of teams and isn’t just restricted to technical support teams (although you might want to change the name). You can use the principles provided here with help desk teams, customer service and support teams and even internal IT support teams.

With a tech support scorecard, you can quickly assess your team’s performance and identify opportunities for improvement. When you’re evaluating your tech support scorecard, here are some metrics that can be helpful:

Support Scorecard – Quality

Measures the quality of the customer experience. Quality metrics include customer satisfaction, NPS scores, customer complaints, and other metrics that indicate how well your team is meeting your customers’ needs. Quality metrics that are non-numerical are harder to come by as they require more manual work. However, they can be extremely powerful in improving the underlying customer experience being provided.

  • Training – an area that I like to include in the quality section is the training and skills that an employee has gained or has demonstrated. If your tools allow you to use skill-based routing capabilities, having this understanding is essential.
  • First Call Resolution (FCR) – Another metric that should be considered under quality is First Call Resolution (FCR). This metric measures the percentage of calls that are resolved during the first call. In some ways this measurement feeds into the training measurement as having an understanding of FCR can help to identify gaps or deficiencies within the team.

Support Scorecard – Quantity

Measures the amount of work your team is doing. Quantity metrics include the number of calls, tickets, or requests your team is handling, as well as the amount of time your team is spending on each call, ticket, or request.

Quantity measurements are generally easier to compile using most case management and telephony systems. However, it is important with quantity measures to ensure that you do not simply look at the number of cases being handled, but how many of these are “returned” and require rework. If your support team is a revolving door where the team is constantly redoing work, your efficiency will plummet as will your response times.

  • Mean Time to Resolve (MTR) – MTR measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a specific case. This measurement can be useful in identifying your team’s efficiency, as well as in identifying specific individuals who may be taking too much time resolving cases.
  • Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) – MTTR measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a recurring issue. This is especially useful in identifying any patterns that may be causing problems for your customers.

Quality vs. Quantity

It’s important to measure both quality and quantity. While measuring quality is more difficult, it allows you to ensure that your team is providing the best customer experience possible.

By measuring both quantity and quality, you can ensure that your team is providing the best support possible while also identifying opportunities for improvement and training.

Creating a Balanced Scorecard – Looking at the team

Gathering all of the data is great, but what happens next? This is where a balanced scorecard comes into play. In creating a balanced scorecard for your tech support team, you should focus on metrics that are most important to your organization.

Many leaders have copious amounts of data, but they do not put that information into context. They understand the average speed of answer but aren’t really able to talk about how well the team is performing from the point of view of the customer and the business.

A balanced scorecard helps provide an integrated picture across the organization. It helps talk about how your teams performance impacts the bottom line and gives you a quick snapshot view on whether or not your team is improving, remaining static or degrading.

This is an excellent tool to help give the SLT an understanding of what is working well, so we’ll explore this topic in more depth in the future – from the point of view of leading teams, a balanced scorecard is less useful.

Creating a Scorecard for the Employee

While building a scorecard from the team point of view can give you a large, holistic view of the support department as a whole, how do you manage your individual employees?

This is where the employee scorecard comes into play. Hopefully, your leaders and managers are already providing regular feedback to the people within your organization? If they aren’t doing that yet, then that absolutely needs to change.

Those feedback sessions should not just be a touchpoint and a discussion about the weather. Rather, they need to provide useful, actionable information to the employee that they can use to improve and grow.

  • With an employee scorecard, you can tell your employees how they are doing, where they are excelling, and where they need to improve.
  • Regular feedback sessions help you keep employees motivated and engaged, as well as provide an opportunity for you to identify and address any issues that may be impacting performance.
  • Employee scorecards should be specific to the individual employee and should include information about how they are doing against specific measures that are relevant to the employee or to their role.
  • Team measurements should be included from the point of view of comparative analysis. as that can help motivate and inspire the employee.

Measurements within your team are essential in ensuring that you are doing a good job. However, if these measurements are not shared with your employees, they won’t know what they need to focus on to get better.

Having individual employee scorecards that are discussed regularly are an excellent tool for aligning performance with annual reviews and salary improvements too! If regular sessions are held to discuss performance, these conversations tend to be a lot simpler as there are no surprises.

Education, Education and Training, Management, Organizational Behaviour, People Management

An Introduction to Organizational Behaviour

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I’ve spoken earlier about OB and how it is used within businesses, but I thought that it might be useful to be a lot more detailed. So, over the course of this year expect regular posts on this topic which you can use in your own learnings.

Organizational behaviour can be defined as the study of how people interact within groups. This study is generally applied in an attempt to come up with more efficient business organizations. The main idea of the study of organizational is that organizations can apply a scientific approach to manage their workers. Generally, the theories of organizational are used for human resources to maximize the individual output of people from group members.

A Breakdown of Organizational Behaviour

There are different philosophies and models of organizational behaviour. The focus on these different areas of study is:

  • Increasing job satisfaction,
  • Improving job performance,
  • Encouraging leadership and promoting innovation.

Managers may adopt different management tactics to achieve the desired results. These tactics may include modifying compensation structures, reorganizing groups and changing the evaluation of performance.

Brief History of OB

The field of organizational behaviour dates back to the late 20s when a company called Hawthorne electric company set up experiments. The experiments were designed to discern how environmental change changed employees productivity.

Between 1924 and 1933, various studies were conducted by Hawthorne electric company. The studies included the study of the effects of different types of breaks on the productivity of employees. The most famous finding from the studies is what is known as the Hawthorne Effect, the change in people’s behavior when they know they are being observed.

Some people have argued that the focus on the finding is to ignore a wider set of different studies that would be credited for the development of organizational behaviour as the human resources professional and as a field of study. The idea of looking at behaviour and productivity in an organization scientifically with the aim of increasing the quality and amount of work an employee can do was backed up with the idea that employees were not resources to be used interchangeably. Instead, workers are unique regarding their potential fit with the company and their psychology.

Organizational behavior has focused on different topics. During the 1940s, organizational behavior focused on management science and logistics. The emphasis was mainly on statistical analysis and mathematical modeling to find the best answers for problems that were deemed complex.

In the 70s, theories of institutions and contingency, as well as resource dependence, organizational ecology, and bounded rationality, came to lead the study as the field concentrated more on quantitative research. These sets of theories and findings helped organizations to understand how they can improve decision making and business structure.

Since the 70s, a good amount of work being done in the field of organizational behaviour has based on cultural components of organizations, and this includes gender roles, class, cultural relativism and gender roles and their unique roles on productivity and group building. The studies take into account the ways in which background and identity can inform decision making.

Focusing On The Academic

You can find academic programs that focus on organizational behavior in business schools. You can also find them in the schools of psychology and social work. They draw from the field of leadership studies, anthropology, computer models and ethnography and use qualitative, computer models and quantitative as methods of exploring and testing ideas. One can study different topics within the field of organizational behavior depending on the program.

Organizational Behaviour in Practice

Human relations professionals and executives can use organizational behavior to understand better the culture of the business and how the culture can hinder or facilitate employee retention and productivity. Executives and human resource managers can also use organizational behavior to evaluate the skills of candidates and the candidate’s personality during the hiring process.

The knowledge or theory application from the field of organizational behaviour can be narrowed down to the following sections:

  • job satisfaction,
  • personality,
  • leadership,
  • reward management,
  • power,
  • authority, and
  • politics.

There is no single way of assessing the suitable way of managing any of these things, but researching organizational can be used to provide topics and guidelines to follow.

  • Job satisfaction theories are different, but some people dispute that a satisfying job is composed of compelling work, concrete reward system, satisfactory working conditions, and good supervisors.
  • Personality plays a significant role in the way people interact with groups and do work. You can know the personality of a person through a conversation or a series of tests. Knowing the personality of a person can give you an idea of whether they are the perfect fit for the particular environment you want to hire them into. You will also know how best you can motivate the employees.
  • Authority, power, and politics depend on each other in an organization. It is therefore essential to understand the appropriate ways and adhere to the rules at the workplace, and the general ethical guidelines in which the elements are used and exhibited are the main components of running a cohesive business.

Why Managers Should Study Organizational Behaviour

The pressures on firms continue to mount, and companies around the world need to utilize their resources in the best way possible.

The success of every organization depends on the effectiveness of the management of the employees. The people’s behaviour in an organization is governed by feelings, ideas, and activities. For businesses to effectively manage people, it is vital to perceive their needs. However, the behaviour of people can differ from one individual to another. This makes it impossible to come up with standard solutions to the problems in an organization.

For this reason, it is crucial to consider the social and psychological aspects when designing solutions to solve different issues in an organization, and that is why managers should study organizational behaviour.

Management, People Management

Management and Technical Problem Solving

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Managers are often stuck in a very hard place. Organizations depend upon them for their ability to manage the teams, but at the same time, they are often called upon to be the escalation point when a problem inevitably goes sour. This is quite difficult as managing people often means giving up managing technology simply due to the pace of change.

Some of this can be mitigated by offering tiered support levels where agents with increasingly more complex and technical skill sets handle customer issues prior to the management level, but unfortunately, not many companies can afford this level of complexity or cost.

I’ve worked in a variety of industries around the world and this pattern tends to repeat itself in almost every organization I’ve worked in. Frequently businesses assume that by promoting managers from the team working the issue, then the problem should solve itself. After all,

“the individual was a great technical resource so they should easily make the transition to management – right?”

Management & Technical Skills

Unfortunately, this rationale simply does not work. During the time the manager was simply a technical resource, they were rewarded for gaining new and more complex technical skills. This reward could be in the form of compensation, but it could even simply be by the peer recognition of skills. While continued growth in technical skills might work in lower level management positions, it simply will not suffice in more senior positions, where managers are expected to demonstrate more strategic abilities. If managers demonstrate conceptual and human skills as well, their promotion prospects and, more importantly, their performance potential are both greatly enhanced.

A great example of this from the early days of my career was working with a senior network administrator – the manager of that team. As the leader of the support organization, I was frequently forced to interact with him when dealing with complex customer issues. I quickly learned to dread those conversations as his initial reaction was always the same:

“It’s not us! The customer is doing something wrong!”

Internally we started to call him Dr. No. However, he was simply doing what he was used to which was defending his team and department, instead of realizing the larger issue. The customers pay all of our bills and if we lose them, we have no team or department, or company! With Dr. No, there was a simple solution – have him meet the customers. Once he understood the problems and could actually see the impact our service (or lack thereof in this case) had on their business, he was able to conceptualize it in different terms.

Over time I’ve come to realize that many organizations have a “Dr. No” or the equivalent. Someone woefully lacking in people skills but a superstar in the technical department. Unfortunately, individuals like this tend to reduce a firm’s operational effectiveness. 

Perspectives on a Manager’s Job

We’ve talked previously about a manager’s role and their importance in greasing the wheels of operational effectiveness. Businesses in today’s more decentralized workforces need these skills even more than in year’s gone past and manager’s need to evolve from an authority-derived ‘issuer and interpreter of rules and orders’ to a role responsible for creating an entrepreneurial work climate that facilitates teamwork regardless of where a person physically sits while doing the work.

As someone interested in management and managing teams in general, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that research has stated a manager’s day is “a series of discrete, fragmented episodes.”  What this means in simpler terms is that managers are often pulled in hundreds of different directions at the same time! Managers are often unable to spend more than 5% of their time on a single discrete task and technology in the modern office with tools like Slack, Chat and Chatter only make the interruptions more frequent.

To understand what managers do, it’s important to realize their job comprises the following:

  • Managing employee performance (supervising).
  • Guiding subordinates (teaching and training).
  • Representing one’s staff (advocacy).
  • Managing team performance (facilitation).
  • Allocating resources (decision making).
  • Coordinating interdependent groups (collaboration).
  • Monitoring the business environment (scanning for adaptations).

Regardless of where you are in the management hierarchy, these tasks are common across all companies. What does change is the amount of time spent at each level as strategic planning (tasks lower in the list) tend to take a greater amount of focus as you rise in levels in your career. As companies and employees continue to migrate to digital tools and remote working, managers that are only comfortable with exercising authority and command are being retrained or replaced by those who know how to coordinate the work of interdependent teams.   Customer expectations are changing. Now and in the future customers will support only companies that deliver high-quality goods and services at the best price anywhere in the world. All firms have easy access to the tools of total quality management (TQM) (continuous improvement) and use it as a principal method to sustain operational effectiveness. The successful twenty-first-century manager moves easily in the environment of continuous improvement and develops in his subordinates the dedication to improve products and customer services.   

How can Managers Grow and Evolve?


Well, that’s really the point of these series of articles! While there isn’t a single “magic bullet” that can solve all problems there are things that can be done to improve managerial skills in a timely and effective manner.

When managers are interviewed about the problems they face, they invariably turn to annoying workplace issues. They talk about the fact that their employees “won’t go that extra mile”, or they simply “aren’t customer focused.” Many managers talk about their teams basically being “seat warmers” and complain about the siloed organizations they work in where teams simply do not talk to each other! If you’re in that type of an organization you have my pity. I’ve been there but I’ve also managed to turn things around. Feel free to reach out if I can help.