The youth charities

The clients: 2 umbrella charities working with organisations representing children and young people.

The need: the clients shared office premises and had, some months earlier, decided to consolidate their respective administration and customer service functions into a single support team. The change had not gone well and, rather than improving as expected, service standards were rapidly dropping. Staff morale was low and turnover increasing.

What we did: we watched people in their work and spoke with the staff to gain their views. We spoke, also, to clients of their service to understand their expectations and feelings about how things were going.

It was apparent that little consideration had been given to how the teams would work together and to establishing working practices, processes and priorities. For example, many staff believed that they were expected to complete all work relating to their previous employers before starting on that of the other charity. There was also confusion regarding the relative importance of work as one of the partner charities was substantially larger than the other, so had correspondingly higher volumes of work.

We made recommendations covering –

• Management and communication of change
• Process improvements
• Defining roles, responsibilities and priorities
• Customer service training

The report was accepted and implemented by the charities… funding limitations prevented them engaging us to do the work on their behalf.