Public Safety Insights Newsletter: How Do You Treat YOUR Internal Customers?

How Do You Treat YOUR Internal Customers?
Public Safety Insight:	Your customers aren’t just those outside your agency; they also comprise all of your employees and volunteers, including your civilian staff.

Last week the fire chief of a CFAI-accredited agency was talking with me about his department’s strategy. As we got into a discussion about who the department’s customers are, I shared a story about a work-related epiphany I had in 1989 that re-shaped my definition of customers.

In many ways, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is similar to the fire and rescue service’s CFAI designation. After the award was established in 1987, FedEx CEO and founder Fred Smith sent all employees a memo stating that we would be the first service company to win the Baldrige Award. We immediately went to work to learn how to evaluate our performance and establish processes for continuous improvement.

At that time, I worked in FedEx’s Cash Management department. Part of our job was to make wire transfers to pay for large ticket items such as aircraft leases, equipment, fuel, and payroll. At the end of every month we would fight with Accounting over the same issue: they wanted us to make the journal entries for the wire transfers, and we believed that making those entries was their job. The relationship between our two departments was frosty at best.

One day during a Baldrige-related training session, the instructor dropped a bombshell: performance excellence requires us to treat our co-workers the same way that we treat our customers – i.e., exceptionally well. In essence, our colleagues are our internal customers.

I clearly remember thinking, "You mean we have to treat those folks in Accounting just like we treat our paying customers? You must be kidding!" No, he wasn’t kidding. And so began the transformation of how employees across the company viewed and interacted with each other. For many of us, this culture change was difficult. However, our collective unwillingness to disappoint our CEO was stronger than our resistance to change. I still believe that’s the only reason we were able to meet the high standards required to win the Baldrige Award, which FedEx did in 1990.

How many of you lead agencies in which your definition of "customer" incorporates your employees and volunteers as well as your external customers? How many of you include your civilian staff in that definition? Are you sure THEY know they are included?

Here’s something to consider. When you use the term "members" to refer to those who do the work in your agency, who do people understand that you mean? In many agencies, that term is widely known to refer to sworn staff only. Without going into why it’s used, the reality is that it serves an exclusionary purpose that is dysfunctional in the workplace.

An agency that strives for excellence must foster and maintain a culture in which it treats all its internal customers as well as it treats its external customers. If asked, would your volunteers and civilians agree that they feel included when they hear the word "members?" Ask them. If they do, good for you! If not, you’ve got some work ahead of you.

To find articles and resources that may be of value to you, I invite you to visit my web site at www.PublicSafetyInsights.net.

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©2015 Pat Lynch | Public Safety Insights