How to Help Your Managers be Better and More Efficient.
By: Kirill Medvednykov
Tags: Team, Efficiency, Leadership, Growing Teams, Blue Ocean

How we collect data

First of all, we had to collect honest reviews from our workers and get the information we needed to work with. We decided to speak with every employee, intentionally avoiding anonymous surveys. We planned to have a free form conversation, in this way we wanted to avoid influencing people with any of our assumptions.

In the beginning, before our conversation with people, we didn’t even know what we wanted to know. So, we created a small list of questions about what we wanted to discuss. Here some of them:

What do you think your manager does? What are his responsibilities? What do you think they should do? What must they do more or less of?

How is your leader hindering you and how can he help you? What motivates and demotivates you?

Can you give examples of successful work by a manager or vice versa; unsuccessful work. Maybe you have examples from previous places of work or somewhere else?

So, we decided to speak with all the staff who work directly with the clients in one of our offices. We chose the smallest office and calculated the people (we call them “agents”). We came up with 70 employees with whom we needed to speak. For honest conversation, we had to find people (form the work group) that have trust in the collective. Only in this way are we able to get really true and interesting information from people. We found people whom we know in this office, explained to them our goals and tasks. Then we asked them to give us a list of people who are unspoken leaders in the office and able to have one on one meetings with their colleagues. As a result, we got several unique lists from different sources.

The first interesting thing we found was: there were no “top agents” (employees with highest results) in these lists. This case is worthy of a separate article.

After working with the lists, we were left with 5 people. We used some common principles while filtering candidates. For example: we skipped any managers, because we thought it could impact on honest answers, comfortable conversations, and so on. Also, we had a conversation with the candidates, and explained to them what we want to achieve. All of them gladly agreed to take part in this. We trained with them personally, giving them samples of conversation, explaining which information we were looking for, and showing them the questions we created beforehand. But we didn’t spend too much time on this, only a few hours.

These conversations took about one month. The reason was: we are a 24/7 organisation, and sometimes it is very difficult to catch a specific person. Because, when the interviewer arrives in the office, the agent has already left, or when the interviewer has time, the agent is on a call with a customer which is really drawn out, and so on.

There was no limit to my disappointment, when I saw the results for the first time. In these results, I saw how interviewers were anchoring the agent to specific topics, and not giving them an opportunity to step away from those topics. Sometimes, agents drop hints about what they think, and the interviewer just has to ask additional questions to get more information and find interesting things, but nobody did that. All our interviewers were very smart guys, but unfortunately, they had no experience with this type of work. As a result, I had to personally contact some agents, whose answers were interesting for us. Only after adding this information was the data we collected even remotely suitable for analysis. But, if we do surveys in the right way, we will have much more relevant data which will explain many more features.

What we needed to do differently: