Crafting a Service Vision in Your School
Last week, you took the assessment to measure where your school stands in building a culture of legendary service to support and serve students, parents, teachers, and other staff members. If you missed the post, you may go back to last week’s post and take the free assessment.
As a starter, Henry will suggest the first two ideas that you can put in place to set your school’s customer service on the right foot in this week’s post.
Create a Service Vision
First and foremost, the school needs to have a service vision. A vision determines what kind of service you want to provide to your internal and external customers. A service vision is the cornerstone of a customer-friendly environment. It acts as a compass to guide every employee to move in the same direction. You can use the school vision as your service vision. Some schools have core values. The core values can also be interpreted and linked to customer service. If the school mission, vision, or core values are difficult to decipher into understandable service expectations, create a customer service vision.
At the first school as a business manager, Henry didn’t have a service vision, but he knew he wanted a customer-friendly environment. Here was the school’s mission: Our mission is to educate and empower our students to attain personal excellence and positively impact the world.
It didn’t directly help Henry in requiring high service standards from his staff members. The school’s values were relevant:
Embracing diversity and treating everyone with dignity and respect
Nurturing students in a caring, safe, healthy, and stimulating environment
Striving for excellence
Taking responsibility and learning from our actions
Working for a better future by helping others and conserving our planet’s resources
Living a balanced life
The IB learner profile
He emphasized values like “treating everyone with dignity and respect,” “striving for excellence,” and “taking responsibility and learning from our actions” here and there. It was a hit and miss. He didn’t have a service vision as a focal point.
As a director of business administration at the second school, he created a service vision for his division. Henry was overseeing all non-teaching departments and offices of the school. The school had been in operations for about 15 years when he joined them. These are their mission, vision, and core values:
Mission: XX International School provides an excellent international education to the children of expatriate families.
Again, the school’s mission wasn’t exactly helpful with regards to developing service standards expectations.
Vision: The staff, students, and parents of XX International School work in partnership to create a learning environment that encourages and enables students to be self-motivated, lifelong learners, who value other cultures and are responsible, meaningful participants in the international community.
This school’s vision had some relevance, for example, self-motivated, life-long learners, valuing other cultures, and responsible, but it was geared toward the students.
Core Values
Personal Rigor
Principled
Open-minded
He could have capitalized on the core values and used these three values as his service vision. Again, he wanted something more direct, and therefore Henry developed a service vision for his division. He used this service vision for subsequent schools as well. Here is it:
We are a support team; let’s be supportive – passionately, proactively, professionally, promptly.
Henry wanted his staff members to be passionate, proactive, professional, and prompt in supporting teachers and/or other staff, students, and parents. He fondly spoke about the 4Ps.
Next, Communicate the Service Vision to Employees Regularly.
After crafting a service vision, communicate the vision to every employee – new hires and long-time employees. Not just to employees but also to share the vision to contractors, volunteers, and part-time staff.
In communicating the service vision, keep these two words in mind: repetition and novelty. Below are some examples of repetition and novelty.
It is advisable to regularly remind middle managers, frontline employees, part-time staff, contractors, and even volunteers of the service vision. You want to communicate the service vision to all (not just the frontline staff) who support and serve your internal and external customers so that you create a culture of service throughout the entire school. All must be trained. The purpose of reminding middle managers is to elicit them to be your advocates.
Every Monday, Henry convened a short stand-up meeting with all his staff members. During the meeting, either he talked about what a P stood for and what it meant or a staff member would share a success story of how they had been supportive passionately, proactively, professionally, or promptly.
Every day or every other day, he emailed a quote of the day to all his staff members. These quotes included customer service tips and a series called “Making Your School a Visitor-friendly Campus” tips.
You have probably heard, “I am responsible for what I say, but I am not responsible for what you understand.” As school leaders, we cannot have that kind of attitude. So, Henry quizzed his staff members occasionally. He asked them what the 4Ps stand for. They explained what the 4Ps meant and how they contributed.
At the end of Henry’s emails, he had a standard signature, and it was the service vision. You would find the Service Vision signage in all Henry’s non-teaching staff offices.
How many of you have read or heard of this book, Legendary Service by Ken Blanchard. It’s easy to read; it is practical. Henry used it to conduct book discussions with every staff member. We talked about the service vision during the book discussions.
As you can see, Henry repeatedly communicated the service vision to his staff members in various ways. Use different channels to share the vision, for example, divisional team-level meetings, departmental meetings, town hall meetings, one-on-one informal meetings, and one-on-one performance appraisal meetings. Site visits to various departments are also helpful.
Communicating the service vision is a two-way street. If you want to gather direct feedback from parents or teachers, talk to your receptionists. They are essential members of your team. Parents and teachers often speak or complain to the reception personnel. Somehow, they are more candid when they talk to the receptionist. The staff members at the reception area see and observe more than any of the other employees. Frontline employees usually have a lot of customer feedback information for you if you bother to chat with them. They probably have good ideas on how to improve the school’s services. Hear them out. They must feel respected for the job. Schools often put the lowest paid people in this role. Remember these two things about them: they sometimes get yelled at because they are the first to face frustrated and angry parents. And, they are the face of your school. Please treat them with high respect. Pay them well.
Henry will share two other suggestions in the next week’s post. Be sure you lookout for it.
