Transport for London (TfL) was created in 2000 as the integrated body responsible for the Capital's transport system. The organisation oversees more than a billion passenger journeys each year by bus, tube, train, tram and boat. They also maintain London’s roads and cycle paths, regulate taxis, and run both Victoria Coach Station and the London Transport Museum.
Group Customer Services (GCS) is a TfL department of six hundred employees that sits within Marketing and Communications. They are responsible for 80% of all customer contact across the transport system.
The Challenge
Group Customer Services are currently facing a challenge: an unprecedented growth in the projected volume of their work. Approximately 7.7 million tickets are available for sale for the London Olympic Games, with a further 1.5 million spectators expected to watch the Paralympic Games. Add these numbers onto the 20 million daily journeys already made on London’s transport system and it amounts to a considerable volume of traffic. Such a surge in traveller numbers will undoubtedly create a similar increase in the need for customer services.
The second factor causing an increase in work-load for the Group Customer Services department is that ten new train operators are joining the Oyster system for the first time. This means thousands of new passengers will be able to use Oyster for their journeys, resulting in a significant increase in the volume of Oyster and journey enquiries to be handled by Group Customer Services.
The Coaching Solution
Together with technology developments, GCS believe they will be able to meet the demand by enhancing the skills and knowledge of GCS staff and that coaching has a part to play in achieving that aim. By stepping into the role of coach, managers can help to strengthen the capability of their team. This means that, as the work-load increased, managers would have the confidence to delegate work that might previously have fallen under their own remit. The more junior staff would also benefit from a coaching approach, as not only would it help their personal development, but it would also give them the means to request any additional training they needed.
When Learning and Development Manager Rob Burlace joined Group Customer Services he was determined to ensure that managers began to apply coaching to their monthly 1:1 sessions with their direct reports, and also to record sessions so that there was an evidence log for performance-based salary reviews. He began to look for a piece of software that would help him create a standardised approach.
Coaching Management System
Rob found the software he was looking for in mye-coach, an online Coaching Management System that provides a user-friendly online environment where a coachee can log coaching sessions, access development tools, securely share personal documents and capture the performance conversation of each coaching session. The system also helps managers to monitor a structured programme of coaching throughout an organisation, ensuring a consistently high quality of coaching across the board.
The Software in Practice
In March 2008, the Group Services Team started to use mye-coach. Rob wanted a system that would allow the Group Customer Services to upload their own developmental tools without the cost and hassle of going through a third party. mye-coach was the only software that enabled him to do that. Another consideration in choosing mye-coach was that in order to persuade some fifty managers to change their habits he needed a system that was not overly complex. He found mye-coach to be very simple and easy-to-use. Rob’s final consideration was one of value for money. As a manager within a public body, Rob needed the cost of the coaching software to be economical when implemented on a large scale. The fee structure of mye-coach gave TfL excellent value for money.
From a personal standpoint, Rob was happy with the system, saying ‘I found it very simple and easy to use.’ However, he was disappointed with the take-up; only 14% of managers used mye-coach over the first few months. Rob decided to seek the advice of Trayton Vance, Managing Director of mye-coach Ltd. Together they decided that the managers’ lack of familiarity and understanding was not with the system but with coaching itself. To overcome this anxiety Rob decided to work with mye-coach to provide external Leadership Coaching to all the managers within Group Customer Services.
The Coaching Programme
In August 2008, mye-coach began coaching 13 middle managers within Group Customer Services. The Coaching Programme began with a ‘chemistry’ event where all the coaches gathered together around four tables in one room, and then met two or three managers at a time in fifteen-minute rotations.
At the end of the meeting, managers had three hours to submit a preference for their choice of coach. For TfL, the event was successful in terms of creating an appetite for coaching, so much so that one manager - who had previously not wanted coaching - changed his mind entirely. They were also able to give 99% of managers their first choice of coach. As Rob says, ‘It was a very pragmatic approach that achieved such a positive outcome.’
TfL’s Coaching Programme will continue into 2009 with 6 hours of face-to-face coaching for each manager, and a further 2.5 hours of telephone support.
The Results
Although the coaching programme is still underway and therefore has not yet undergone a formal review, the team at Group Customer Services are already seeing results:
- There are now a total of 40 users on TfL’s mye-coach system
- Now that the coaching programme is up and running there are almost 3 times as many managers using the mye-coach system
- There have been over 150 hits on the tools within the mye-coach coaching toolkit
- Informal feedback from the managers about the coaching has been overwhelmingly positive
Now that mye-coach has been implemented successfully at middle management level, the intention is that middle managers will start using it to coach junior managers, who will eventually coach the level below. Rob says ‘a trickle-down system is obviously longer in duration, but I think it will prove to be sustainable’
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