For any telephone company to provide quality service to their customers they first need quality work from all of their employees, from the CEO of the organization to the clerk in the mail room. From the field aspect, quality and cooperation is the name of the game. Engineering, line crews, construction crews, cable maintenance, installation and repair techs, business techs, HI CAP, and Central Office technicians must communicate and work as a team to provide service as effectively as possible at the least expense.

If one group drops the ball the cost of business goes up, the customer suffers, quality drops, and complaints increase. My question to you is this: in your organization where is your biggest road block?

Recently, I have encountered a very dysfunctional team situation that I will describe. If you see yourself or your company as you read through this, I hope you will do something about it.

I am a trainer and I completed a very successful POTS, ADSL2+, HDSL, and T1 training session for Company X - a company with a good reputation for caring about its employees and investing in them. After the training session, the company manager then asked me what could be done to further improve the processes. I recommended an upgrade of test equipment for the installation and repair team, from standard Volt/Ohm meters to multifunctional test sets that could also test for ADSL. They did invest in the new sets.

When the installation and repair technicians received their test sets no training was provided at that time but those good technicians took the sets out and worked with the basic functions, digital Volt ohm meter operation for identifying faults on feeder and distribution cable pairs and trouble shooting from the Network Interface to the jack in the residence.

If the customer had ADSL, the technician would test the ADSL portion of the circuit to make sure that the customer could sync at the provisioned rate and that the customer's modem was functioning properly.

The company then asked me to return for another training session and this time they asked me to work on training the installation repair technicians on the proper operation and use of their test equipment and to train them on ADSL. The goal was to help everyone move beyond the basics and really strengthen their cable locating and maintenance skills by learning the advanced features and capabilities of the test set including how to interpret the results of the testing when their test set displayed the results of the test, such as capacity, attenuation, margin, FECs, CRCs, and so on.

They also invited a portion of the cable maintenance crew and technicians from the Central Office to attend the class so each group of technicians would have an appreciation for the other group's job and how to work as a team to provide quality service. It's amazing to find a company who cares enough to invest in training and to encourage such team work.

What surprised me was the response to the offer for more training: at starting time (8:00 AM) the installation repair technicians and the cable maintenance technicians were in class ready to go. Instead of sending all or most of his techs, the CO Manager decided that he would only send one. That one person showed up an hour late and spent his time in class going through his emails on his computer and didn't bother to show up the second day.

While I'm hard on giving techs the tools and the training, teamwork is equally important, and sometimes it just doesn't happen even when the company is supporting that goal. It is very obvious in this case as to which member of the team is not performing to specification.

What's going on in your organization and how do you promote and succeed in creating a good team environment? Or does your company care?

What’s your take on this subject?  Leave a comment and get the conversation going.