"It is far easier to empathize with the problems of others when there is a basic understanding of the challenges they face."

By R. Bruce Wright, CPCU

One commonly observed effect in any utility is a division between the operations staff of outside workers and the office and support staff of office workers. Most of you know what this means, and may even have your own local variations on what we have seen and heard in our travels. Terms like “the rug people” are even used by the outside workers to refer to the office staff, and they are not always used as endearments!

Okay, it’s true that some good-natured kidding between the office and operations folks is likely to be found in any operation with these separate functions. This can serve as a morale booster, and build camaraderie among members of the separate staffs. But, when relations between the groups get frayed, it can be a significant handicap to providing good service to members and customers. And, even when there are no problems with the relationships, and everyone gets along fine, the lack of understanding about what the “other guys” do can cause unintended problems.

Both the outside operations folks and the inside office workers deal with members, customers and the public. Frequently, each group fields inquiries that must be dealt with by someone in the other group, whether it’s a phone call taken in the office about an outage that a lineman has to respond to, or a lineman who is asked about getting an account reactivated. Clearly, each of these situations (and many others you can think of) requires that members of each group understand something about the duties and responsibilities of the other. The more an office worker knows about how things get done in the field, the better that person is equipped to provide good, reliable information to the public. The more a line worker knows about office procedures and rules, the less likely that worker is to cause a misunderstanding with a customer. Cross training these groups also makes it far easier for your staff members to empathize with the problems faced by their co-workers, inside or outside, since they have at least a basic understanding of the challenges the other group faces.

The chances are that you have had experiences at your facilties that were less than enjoyable as a result of either the lack of understanding or perhaps even as a result of friction between operations and office staffers. Certainly a good number of the folks we meet in our travels seem to have had this experience. We don’t have a magic bullet for you to use, but we have heard of a few ideas that members of this program have tried, and that they say have worked for them. For the most part these are simple and fairly inexpensive techniques that just require management commitment and support to implement. In other words, they are like most of our safety suggestions, easy to understand, but requiring effort to use well. But, there is no free lunch. A number of cooperatives we have visited have formal programs for this type of cross-training. Most often these are part of the orientation program for new workers, and are more commonly used for office workers to learn about operations than the reverse. But some program members put a great deal of effort into this type of cross training, and those who do so all intend to continue doing so, since they find it pays them dividends. Here are a couple of examples of programs we have heard about.

A cooperative we have visited in Mississippi has a formal program for all newly hired office workers. Once hired and finished with the administrative orientation, all new office workers are given about two weeks in their new job, to get some basic OJT and an overall idea of the responsibilities of their position. Then, each new office worker is assigned to a line crew for an entire week. During that time they are, of course, not expected (or permitted!) to do any field work, but they are asked to ride with the crew, sit in the truck and observe what the crew does, and ask questions about what they see. The crew leader provides a description of what is being done (and why it is done) throughout the week, and at the end of the experience even the billing clerks and receptionists at this utility have an idea of just what it takes to set a pole, hook up a meter, or climb a pole. One benefit this cooperative reports is that the office staff is far better equipped to explain to anxious members just what is required to fix problems and why they can’t just “flip a switch” to get the power back on.

Another program participant, also in the south, advised us that in the past their field guys were frequently heard to make wisecracks about how nice it must be to work inside in the A/C all day. (For more northern businesses, it may be the warmth of the office that provokes this type of comment.) As a result of repeatedly hearing this, they decided that the field folks didn’t fully appreciate the challenges faced by the office workers, so they created a process of using field people in office jobs periodically, as light duty, as vacation fill-ins and sometimes just for the experience. Often times they had these “outside” operations folks handle the phones, field walk-in complaints and inquiries, and generally interact with members, just as the office staff routinely does. The manager at this cooperative told us that the most common comment he got afterward was “I wouldn’t trade jobs for anything,” when the field workers returned to their normal jobs!

The last example of building rapport between inside and outside staffs is an example I heard recently from a co-op that has an outreach program for members. They team up pairs of their employees and have them visit a sampling of members each year. The stated goal of the program is to provide members with a better understanding of what a cooperative is and how it operates, to supply some safety tips and brochures, and to answer any questions the members may have. But, in addition to the stated goals, there is another benefit the management staff saw. By pairing an outside worker and an office staffer, and having them work together to decide how they wanted to approach the assignment, barriers between members of these groups began to fall, while the level of knowledge and understanding about each other’s role in the business increased. It was a win-win for everyone involved.

So, there are three examples of approaches where we have seen utilities in our program working to combat divisions between field and office workers, and to provide members of each group with a broadened understanding of the overall work of the utility. If you have ideas of your own that you’d like to share with us, send me a note by clicking - Here's our story! If you haven’t tried anything like this, maybe it’s time to give it a shot. The best endorsement for programs like these is the fact that we have never heard of a program member trying one and later saying that it didn’t help!