Everyone knows that their mood affects others: spend any time in the company of a grump and you soon find your own mood sinks, while your frame of mind improves dramatically when you’re with a positive, happy person. As often the first point of contact in the building, the power of facilities teams to affect the workplace positively or negatively is therefore enormous.
G4S FM gets in the mood to improve customer service
Which is why G4S Facilities Management has launched a Customer Engagement Training Programme across its catering contracts based around the use of mood cards. The 12 cards, which display dispositions from cheerful, friendly, calm and helpful, to miserable, stressed, exhausted and bored, demonstrate the different qualities associated with each mood. For example, a stressed person might run around, shout, act too busy to help and panic. While a cheerful person would smile, have a spring in their step and welcome customers with a ‘how are you today?” or ‘enjoy your meal!’
“Sometimes it can be easy to let a bad mood affect how you relate to customers and colleagues at work,” explains Ann Belton, learning and development manager at G4S FM. “By taking G4S FM staff through the 12 cards, we show them not only what the different moods are like, but also how they can impact customers in our restaurants. We want to help our employees to understand that whatever might be happening in the world around them, they are in control of their mood and its impact on the customer and their colleagues.”
The training programme fits in with one of G4S FM’s key company values, customer focus: “We have close, open relationships with our customers that generate trust, and we work in partnership for the mutual benefit of our organisations.”