Job swapping is swapping roles with another person in another department for a specified period.
The idea of ‘job swapping’ is for employees to understand and appreciate the challenges other colleagues face on a day-to-day basis, to provide the employee with a clearer and wider understanding of the business and even suggest improvements or ideas to help operationally.
This week, the office and field-based staff had an amazing opportunity to swap roles and see how each team manage their workload. From feedback, both teams felt it very beneficial and commented that it had in fact changed their perspective on what hardships each team face.
Jane, one of our finance assistants had the opportunity to accompany one of our Senior Technicians, David James, on an all-day job. Due to the location of the job, David informed Jane that they would have to leave their houses at around 6am to get to the job on time. Jane was shocked to hear how early the technicians get up for work most days. After travelling over an hour to the job, Jane & David were greeted by the customer. Jane commented how detailed and skilled David was, so much so when the repair was complete, it brought a tear to the customer’s eye. The customer was so grateful for the repair completed she even wrote a card to our Magicman HQ to show her gratitude and pass on thanks to David. Jane thoroughly enjoyed her day out and said it has given her a better perspective on the effort put in by all Magic Man technicians.
David then had the opportunity to sit with one of our schedulers for a full day in the office. During the day, David was on the phone to customers, dealing with taking payments, technician queries and scheduling work for his fellow colleagues. David commented how insightful he found the whole experience and commented “it was good to see how the scheduling was done and how much goes into it. It isn’t as simple as give the nearest technician the job, there are so many other things to think about like skill level required, customer preference, stock/paint requirements, moving jobs to get as much work as possible in” David said that the scheduling is such a vital operation of the business and he can appreciate all the hard work that goes into this, he was more than happy to return!
Our second office team member out on the road was Anne-Marie, one of our enquiries Co-ordinators. Anne-Marie was out with Stuart Field, another Senior technician. Anne-Marie got to experience first hand one of the biggest gripes from field-based staff, dealing with customers face to face. Once their first job had finished, they were instructed to attend another job about an hour away, both Anne-Marie and Stuart waited over two hours for a client who never turned up. Anne-Marie expressed how frustrating it is sitting around doing nothing and could see how on a weekly basis, technicians who deal with this frequently could become agitated. Of course, this is not something controlled by the Office staff but a common occurrence and irritation of the technicians’ daily encounters.
Stuart then spent the day in the office with our schedulers and commented “I couldn’t do the job of the office staff, as technicians we get to travel around whilst on the job. The office work is intense, with so much to deal with at once, credit to you all”.
Overall, we think the ‘Job swap’ went very well and has given both teams a better understanding of the business and more sympathy to just how hard everyone works.
