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Why DO organisations set up systems that allow customers to contact them with questions and complaints and then leave them unanswered and unacknowledged? It so obviously alienates the very people you’d think the organisations would rather not alienate – their customers. I find the whole business quite baffling.

Is it a question of resourcing? Do these organisations set off with the very best of intentions, only to fall victim to their own success in building systems that tempt unmanageable numbers of customers to call in? Are there sheds full of overwhelmed customer services operatives, wiping their brows at this very moment in horror at the mounting stack of unopened pleas for information? Or are the management of these firms the dupes of slacker employees who laugh in the face of the firm’s mission and values and delete heartfelt customer communications for fun? It must be one of these because the other possibility I’ve come up with – that the businesses concerned don’t care enough about their customers to bother to treat them with basic civility – is unthinkable, particularly in the current trading conditions.

I speak from the heart. I’m currently waiting, with increasing hopelessness, to hear back from the firm that publishes Rough Guides (I queried whether there was quite a serious error in one of their books, on the strength of which I booked a holiday) and Freesat, a satellite TV provider (which has been promising to introduce BBC iPlayer to their service for some time but are vague on the details of when this might happen). Neither acknowledged my emails or indicated what their customer-service standards might be, and since it’s been a month since I contacted them, I’ve pretty much decided they have more important things to do with their time than listen to their customers.

I have actually waited longer than that and still got a response. London Underground managed an impressive two-month delay between my complaint coming in and a response going out, but to give them their due, they did signal their service standards at the outset and they did resolve my complaint fully and to my satisfaction. Unlike the BBC and the Man Ray Trust, an art gallery on the south coast…

Yes, every organisation that’s ever blanked my emails remains seared on my mind. And, Freesat and the BBC aside, because I don’t really have any choice about using their services, I’ve never knowingly given my custom again to any organisation that’s treated me so shabbily. It seems indicative of a general arrogance towards customers that I find unappealing. Of course I could be wrong – maybe tomorrow a whole swath of responses will ping into my inbox. Somehow I doubt it.

If you’ve got any experiences of customer service – good or bad – that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them.

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This could be the worst recession for 100 years, according to Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. But is this one qualitatively different from previous downturns? Is it possible that we’ve learned from our past mistakes and that employers are, in fact, trying to safeguard the collective knowledge and wisdom that we lump together under the title of human capital, so we can come out fitter and stronger when the economy bounces back? Has the penny finally dropped?

Last week I chaired a roundtable debate at which the answer was definitely ‘yes’. HR leaders lined up alongside representatives of employer bodies and the trade union movement with a common message: we are all in this together, and what matters is to hold our nerve and to keep on investing in people rather than slashing and burning for short-term gain. It’s not easy: particularly in manufacturing, where lean techniques have already stripped out all the fat, but increasingly the public sector too is having to do more with less.

But despite the scale of the challenge, people passionately want it to be different this time. Just today I received an email from a firm of Cardiff-based lawyers offering ideas on alternatives to redundancy. Dolmans Solicitors would presumably earn a lot more fees if their clients did resort to redundancy rather than cutting back on their marketing budgets as they suggest, but as they said in their email: “It’s not about crisis management, but long-term planning and realising there’s got to be a different way of looking at things.” Good for them.

On a larger scale, the CIPD and Acas have teamed up to offer guidance on how to manage your way through the downturn, which every employer ought to get their hands on without delay.

My question to you is, what’s the picture like where you are? Are you seeing organisations adopting innovative and far-sighted solutions to preserve jobs while improving their performance? Or is this a Groundhog Day recession?

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Football's a funny old game, as the cliché goes, and English football is funnier than most. Some of the most successful managers in the world have tried their luck in the Premier League and been chewed up and spat out - think of Jose Mourinho or Martin Jol.

And conventional ideas of what constitutes good management seems to bend and warp once you step into the dressing room. Sir Alex Ferguson is brilliant at identifying and nurturing talent, but he has a notoriously short fuse when things aren't going the way he wants – an attribute that perhaps wouldn’t serve him as well in a normal working environment.

But perhaps standard management practices do still have a place on the football pitch. Take these two quotes from the post-match interviews after Swansea City played Norwich City:

1. Norwich City manager Glenn Roeder: "It's just diabolically poor play, poor defending… it's totally unacceptable. It's so disappointing when they don't do what they're told. It bothers me that some of them are quite experienced players. It's just a total lack of football intelligence."

2. Swansea manager Roberto Martinez: "In football everyone must have a dream and ours is to play in the Premier League. But it could take us five years or even 10 years to achieve. Expectation levels are always very high in south Wales, but at the moment all we are trying to do is to consolidate at this level.”

Of course these may be selective quotes. Perhaps Roeder (the losing manager) also accepted his share of the blame for poor preparation or a game plan that didn’t work. He did make some comments about his team’s bad luck in not converting more of their chances. And it must be hard to find positive things to say when your team has just lost a game at home after being a goal up.

But let’s stop bending over backwards to make allowances. The bottom line is that Martinez, still in his first full season as a manager, communicated a clear vision (‘we aspire to reach the next league up’), injected a note of realism (‘it could take us five years to get there’), praised his team and ensured his players would stay motivated by holding out a carrot. Superb leadership and textbook emotional intelligence.

I know which style of leadership I’d rather be following, and which I’d bet on to deliver for the long term.


* The author of this blog would like to declare an interest as a supporter of Swansea City Football Club. For more on long-term sustainable performance, see CIPD Shaping the Future

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‘Pick’ is a fine old word. As a verb it’s been around since at least the 14th century. Its original meaning was ‘to pluck the strings of an instrument’, and since then it’s lived a full and satisfying life as a verb meaning ‘to select’. It’s even turned into a noun, in some rare, specific and charming usages: ‘pick of the crop’ for example, which suggests ruddy-cheeked agricultural labourers relaxing after a hard day’s harvesting fruit in a painting by Constable.

But in the last few weeks, ‘pick’ has undergone a hideous mutation, thanks to the global media coverage of US presidential hopeful John McCain’s ‘pick’ of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Suddenly every other sports commentator and travelling salesperson is talking about their daring ‘pick’ of steak at dinner or a yellow shirt for their presentation. Europe’s Ryder Cup captain, Nick Faldo, told the media: "I feel very good about those two picks." He wasn’t talking about a pair of implements normally used by builders, he was talking about his selection policy for this month’s tournament (which, incidentally, Faldo’s team lost).

It’s hideous and unnecessary. We have a rich and diverse vocabulary available to describe the process or recruitment and selection: why be seduced by one of the clunkiest and frankly rather confusing linguistic mutations to swim across the Atlantic in years? Let’s send it back whence it came – preferably along with its early adopters.
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The closing date for this year’s People Management Awards is coming up fast – 30 April, to be exact. Which means there’ll soon be a flurry of activity and a rush of last-minute entries winging their way to the awards team. As a seasoned people-watcher, I’m always fascinated to see how members of different professions behave according to type, and awards schemes like this are a perfect way of putting behaviour under the microscope.

Over the last few years I’ve judged awards for journalists, purchasing managers and HR professionals. Journalists almost all wait until the last possible moment before submitting their entries – a very small number of uber-organised editors get their forms in ahead of time, and a much larger number ring up the day after the closing date to plead for an extension, but the vast majority regard “surfing the deadline” as a matter of professional pride.

Purchasing managers all get their entries in the day after the competition opens. In triplicate. And they never include any jokes.

HR people, on the other hand, conform much more neatly to the kind of distribution you’d expect from MBTI – lots of neat SJs, conditioned by years of chasing down forms themselves, get their entries in good and early, but they are balanced by equal numbers of adrenaline junky NPs, who find lots of other, more interesting things to do until the last possible minute.

Which is a pity – because entering for the People Management Award can be a great opportunity to reflect on your organisation’s achievements and to turn a complex series of events into a coherent narrative. And along the way you might gain some new insights into what you’ve done and where you should go next.

We’ve made the PM Award a dream to enter – it really couldn’t be simpler. Why not make some time over the next few days to sit down with the form and complete it at your leisure? You might even enjoy it.

Steve Crabb sits on the panel of judges for the People Management Awards

For details visit www.cipd.co.uk/award or call 020 8612 6235

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