TJ - The Publication for Learning and Development

Spotlight on Ian Nicol

By Mike Levy (July 2004 Issue)
0 Comments Comments
Article Rating:

Poor Best

Email to a friend | Print Version

Here is a an unusual scenario: a mature, male executive struggles to get a pram onto a crowded tube train. Even stranger is the fact that this man is a director of London Underground. This is all part of a highly innovative, and supremely challenging, programme to turn Transport for London (TfL) into a customer service orientated business.

That is the challenge facing Ian Nicol, who has been TfL’s head of Learning and Development Operations for a year – and he’s loving it. Nicol has brought an almost missionary zeal to TfL’s learning function, which serves an organisation of 18,000 people across the capital and has set himself a huge challenge: ‘One of the key elements of our new thinking is to involve line managers in the learning and development process – in fact, to turn managers into customer service trainers.’

The scale of Nicol’s task is hard to take in. He readily admits that some of London’s transport providers have been slow to recognise the importance of excellence in customer service. ‘When I came into the job, I found an organisation that had a very traditional, old-fashioned, “industrial” training function – typical chalk and talk, trainer-centred learning,’ he explains. ‘The first thing was some root cause analysis: where were the blockages? How did the function operate? A lot of processes were missing: the course management system was not robust; the course content had rarely been challenged. The way we delivered courses was more like a comprehensive school.’

TfL manages London’s buses, the Underground, the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and London Trams. It also runs London River Services, Victoria Coach Station and London’s Transport Museum. Add to this formidable mix the management of a 580 kilometre network of main roads, all of London’s 4,600 traffic lights and the regulation of its famous taxi cabs, and you will see why Nicol’s job is such a challenge. ‘We train, for instance, all the London Underground staff: people you see at the barriers, train operators, technical support, track safety personnel, traffic wardens and many more,’ says Nicol, who heads a team of 179 staff – including 122 training deliverers. ‘Everything we do here we make ourselves. All our materials are very specific to what we do.’

London Underground makes up 75 per cent of the Learning and Development department’s work. One major programme of work here is new recruit training for customer service assistants. ‘There was a big turnover in those front line staff who have to deal with many customer problems and complaints,’ says Nicol. Another element is promotional training as staff move up the Underground ladder. ‘For many years it was seen as a sheep-dip model (push people through the programmes); there was a huge emphasis on operational knowledge and very little on behaviour. Customer service skills were dealt with in a very perfunctory way.’

How did Nicol turn round this culture of operations over customers? He began by looking at training needs from the customers’ viewpoint. ‘We started with a fundamental training and needs analysis (TNA),’ he answers. ‘London Underground is the biggest and deepest metro in the world. It is going to require up to 30 years of repair and upgrade – none are quick-fix jobs. We need staff who can understand the customer viewpoint when things do go wrong such as signal failure or operational incident. We need people who can put themselves in the customer’s shoes: what do they need to know when things go wrong? What help do they need to make their onward journey.’

So what does Nicol expect his people to be doing differently? ‘We asked our customers in the operational business and involved them in the TNA. We also involved the most senior managers in the organisation in this customer service ethos,’ he explains.

This last sentence may sound familiar, but how do you get senior managers brought up in an operational culture to fully sign up to this? Nicol’s approach was simple but revolutionary: ‘We asked the senior directors to learn to be trainers and spend the day with new recruits teaching them TfL’s Customer Service Challenge. They deliver the whole day’s training. We want them to lead by example. We also wanted them, as leaders, to take ownership of the L&D function and underline that all managers in our organisation have a responsibility to develop their people. I did not want senior managers just putting a signature to a policy document; I wanted them to take an active interest in training.’ The result is that each week a senior manager comes to give a training session to raw recruits.

How did Nicol ‘sell’ the importance of customer service training to senior and line managers? Nicol organised a leadership programme that included learning how to train staff. It also underlined to managers that the objectives of training must be aligned with the objectives of the customer. That meant shifting the balance from technical and operational training (which remains essential) to contextualised behavioural training. ‘The message is always: you only need to know this because it affects the customer’s journey,’ says Nicol.

There was also a very practical side to the management ‘buy-in’ of this customer service culture: ‘We took away the managers’ tube passes, gave them some money and asked them to spend a morning on the system to see what it was like for a young person lugging a big surfboard, a tourist with heavy luggage or a tired mum with a pram.’ It’s too early to assess fully the impact of this new approach, but Nicol confidently expects big changes in the standard of customer service in the capital’s transport system. Part of this improvement will be down to a senior manager struggling to get that pram on the crowded Central Line.

 

Back to top | Current TJ

 

Readers Comment

Comment on this story here >

Be the first to comment on this news story