Overview

One of the largest municipal cemeteries in Europe, The City of London Cemetery and Crematorium is a stunning Grade I listed landscape in the heart of East London, dating from 1856.

The Need

The teams who run the cemetery and crematorium pride themselves on delivering a high standard of service to visitors and customers and in order to maintain that they are aware that their own internal team work needs to be of an equally high standard.

One area that the management team identified as needing some clarity was that of communication between team members and particularly identifying a consistent approach to behaviour at work – what is appropriate and what isn’t.

The Solution

We worked with Landscape Team Manager Michael Bryan and Superintendent, Gary Burks to design a series of workshops with supervisors and managers and then team members.

The workshop for the supervisors helped them to consider their responsibilities as managers and helped them identify how to strengthen communication with their team members . It also facilitated a discussion around what was acceptable and not acceptable in terms of behaviour, so that they had a clear benchmark for managing their teams in this area.

The team members’ sessions gave everyone a chance to consider and agree what the boundaries should be when thinking about appropriate behaviour at work and helped them focus on taking responsibility for their own behaviour in particular. It covered the importance of showing respect to others, understanding the often thin line between banter and offensive comments and the impact that language can have when communicating with others.

Finally we ran a follow up session for the supervisors once they had had a chance to implement their actions from the first session and start to see some results.

Michael has been delighted with the outcomes, citing “a better attitude from team members”, “far more willingness to share knowledge and help each other” and “better listening all round”.

The Managers and supervisors had some very specific examples of dealing more confidently with a range of performance issues from managing instances of long term sickness and easing people back into work successfully to addressing a dip in one team member’s attitude and seeing an immediate difference for the better.
One manager summed up the results by saying “We work better together than at any time in the past”

Gary comments “We have seen some real differences in how people are communicating and what we are particularly grateful for is how Focal Point tailored the training to our very specific needs and environment, rather than just give us an “off the shelf solution.“