The following post is the first in an ongoing series of brief articles aimed at giving you practical tips your business or team can use today.
We think the best tips come from real-world examples so we will be using real questions from our fantastic clients (completely de-identified and with their permission of course!).*
Many of the questions come from our clients using our help-desk support service – we love answering these so keep them coming!
We’ve kept our answers high-level as every situation is different and we want to provide a starting point rather than overload on the details.
We are setting up a new HR Team in a different business region. We want the team to understand the importance of a well-run complaint/incident management process. So everyone is on the same page, what are the key things to keep in mind when dealing with these issues?
This is a great question. Implementing rock-solid processes means that the staff dealing with the issue know exactly what needs to be done every step of the way, removing pressure and minimising disruption and risk.
Our 5 top tips are:
- Great processes yield great outcomes – the best processes are easily understood, easily replicated (and therefore consistent) and can be used by any member of your team without impacting quality.
- Keep your stakeholders front of mind – usually these are your staff, customers and shareholders.
- Prioritise and centralise your information gathering – many problems stem from skipping steps or missing material (and these are the easiest to avoid!).
- Build ‘procedural fairness’ into your processes – following it means you can’t go wrong.
- Seek advice – the stakes can be high across the board and early advice means early detection.
*Sometimes we slightly modify the questions to broaden the application of the answers, aimed at helping as many people as possible.