This is a true story happened in the
marketing department of MMI. In the marketing department, one part of the responsibilities
of employees and interns in this department is contracting potential customers
or attendants for the coming events, that is, making introductions to them and
then persuading them to come.
One day, one of the supervisors of MMI added
his name and numbers to the contact list and thus got called by one of the
marketing employees. He tried to test the communicating skills of the employee
and pretended to be not very interested to the events. To his surprise, the
marketing people quickly apologized and thus ringed off the phone, without much
promoting the events. The supervisor then reported back to the marketing
department and criticized the performance of that employee for his passionless
of treating potential customers.
After that, there are a lot more managers
add their names to the contract list to test the attitude of their employees in
treating customers and the employees try to be careful with everyone they
contract. All in all, the performance improved greatly after this event.
Hi Sophie,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your sharing! This is a pretty good way to test subordinates' attitudes to work and I learnt it.
Yes, attitude is important, but always very difficult to handle
DeleteHi Sophie
ReplyDeleteYour story sounds quite interesting! But I'm wondering if it is a sustainable way for organization improvement? Do you think it can work under most of the situations? Once some employees knew the "joke or test", will they perform honestly the next time?
Agree! I am not on the side of my company and I think this way is too exhausting :-(
DeleteHi, Sophie
ReplyDeleteThe supervisor described above is very smart to use this method to test the necessary skills of employees. Communication skills are really important for marketers.
Smart idea but could be very stressful for our employees :-P!
Delete