Campfires. What good idea.

Consider the following situation: you are rolling out a new software solution that will allow management to track and report your customer service reps’ performance more effectively. This has the potential to be a tough sell to employees.
You know from experience with previous attempts to make large internal changes that it can be difficult for your reps to accept at first.  Typically, when the change is rolled out, you and your supervisors spend substantial time and energy trying to respond to employee’s very real and often unstated fears. You know the whole process would go a lot faster, smoother and be less arduous if you could get everyone’s concerns out in the open so you can deal with them.

Jodi Wire, the Manager of We Energies’ 150 seat Customer Contact Center in Pewaukee, Wisconsin was faced with this challenge a few months ago. She decided that this time instead of having to spend time handling employee reactions to the impending change, she would get out in front of it.

Last week when I visited their center, Jodi told me that in her meetings with employees to explain the change, she removed the tables from the conference room and had the employees gather in a circle around a “campfire.”  (This wasn’t a real fire, but an ingenious facsimile constructed of plastic and twigs painted flame red on the top.)

In the meeting she told the “story” of why they had decided on the new software and how it would work. What was remarkable, Jodi told me, was that the simple act of sitting next to each other (without the “protection” of the conference room table) created an environment in which people were more open and willing to talk about what was on their mind.

Thanks, Jodi, for allowing me to tell your wonderful story.