ManpowerGroup 2004 Annual Report Download - page 9

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JUST IN TIME STAFFING
The most important characteristic required by contact
center staff and field engineers at BT Retail is to have
good customer-interface skills. They also need to be
team players and to have a “learning attitude” – adapting
readily to fast-paced industry change, as we introduce
enhanced new services and continually improve our
competitive offering. Our greatest HR challenge in
recent years has been to create a high-performance
environment among our 50,000 employees in BT Retail,
to detect and develop our in-house talent pool, and to
create greater workforce flexibility.
SERVICE PERFORMANCE
We have done a lot to transform our workforce’s per-
formance to meet service-business realities in the 21st
century. A performance improvement plan has raised the
individual and collective employee contribution through
coaching, raising expectations, rewarding, and introducing
a Code of Conduct for our customer-facing “battalions,”
monitored through customer feedback. We have pro-
actively managed our talent pool, detecting, developing,
sourcing anew, retaining key skill sets, and ensuring the
right level of talent diversity for our ongoing business
and growth.
VARIABILITY AND RESPONSIVENESS
Our industry faces enormous variability in HR demand
over short time periods. Bad weather can create huge
demand for engineers to repair landlines after storms;
and competitive initiatives generate a demand for extra
contact center staff when we launch a new program,
such as broadband. At such times, we need to have fast
and flexible access to appropriately skilled and trained
resources or to create a pool of specialist talent (such as
IT professionals) quickly, but without being locked into
operational constraints.
A FLEXIBLE EXTENDED ENTERPRISE
Outsourcing massive contracts to just a couple of HR
vendors has enabled us to focus management effort
on fewer relationships and our vendors to invest time,
effort, and resources into making them work. Temporary
and contract employees come in trained, prepared, and
well managed, with a good understanding of the BT culture.
Having such close strategic partnerships has allowed us
to build a highly flexible and scalable “extended enterprise”
of contingent employees who hit the ground running and
become assimilated seamlessly into the organization,
working indistinguishably alongside our regular BT
battalions. And many of them end up working directly for
BT – making for a risk-free source of quality recruitment.
DEVELOPING A FLEXIBLE WORKFORCE (DANON PERSPECTIVE)