Forty-five minutes to say the difficult thing
You manage a contact centre of 40 staff. From Monday week, opening hours must change from 8am–8pm to 9am–5pm for at least three months because your directorate must cut £600,000. Those most affected are shift workers and carers who ring before 9am; you already know of at least two regular callers who rely on the early line. Staff have heard a rumour and morale is low; three people have asked you privately whether jobs are at risk. The union rep has asked for a meeting and has already described the change in a branch newsletter as 'a cut to service, not a saving'. You have one 45-minute all-staff slot on Thursday, and the public announcement is on Friday.
1. How do you use the 45 minutes?
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The room will have decided two things before I speak: that this is a cut, and that I know more than I'm saying. Both have to be addressed in the first five minutes.
Structure: five minutes on the decision - the hours are changing, here is the £600,000 and where it comes from, this part is fixed. Five minutes on what is not decided: rota patterns, how we handle early callers, whether anything further is coming - each with a date when I will know. Twenty-five minutes of questions, toughest first, unfiltered. Ten minutes on what I need from them next week.
Three things I would not do: run a pretend consultation on the hours; promise there are no redundancies unless I can guarantee it; open with 'I know this is difficult'.
Instead: state the fact, name the specific harm - the two carers who ring at 7.30 - and say what we are doing about it. The three people who asked privately get their answer in the room, not through a rumour: 'I don't know yet. I will tell you on the 14th.'
2. How do you handle the union rep and the newsletter's claim?
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Meet them before Thursday, and give them the same information at the same time as everyone else. A rep who learns about a change from a member is a rep who fights it.
On the newsletter: I would not demand a correction. 'A cut to service, not a saving' is a defensible description of a reduction in hours, and arguing about the wording makes me look like I'm managing the narrative rather than the service. What I can correct is factual - what the £600,000 is and where it goes. If the branch has that wrong, that is the correction. If they have it right, I say so.
Then work the common ground that genuinely exists: both of us care about the early-morning callers and about staff hearing the truth early. I would offer a joint briefing and ask them to collect rota concerns for the mitigation work.
I can't control their newsletter. I can make sure it isn't the only place staff hear about this, and that when they compare notes with what I said on Thursday, the two match.
3. Two weeks in, calls abandoned between 9am and 10am have doubled. What do you do?
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First, resist the temptation to explain it away as displaced demand. Some of it will be; the two regular early callers have to ring sometime, and 9am is when everyone who used to spread across 8am and 9am now arrives at once.
Look at the shape of the data before acting: is the spike only in the first hour, or is the whole day higher? Are the abandoned calls concentrated in one enquiry type - repairs, payments - which would point to a self-service fix rather than a staffing one?
Then, in order of cost: move one advisor's start time to 8.30 so the 9am queue is pre-briefed and warm; put a recorded message at the top of the queue pointing early callers to the online form and callback; offer callbacks on the 9–10 slot rather than making people hold. All three are within my authority and can be live within a week.
I'd tell the union rep what I'm doing and why, and report the abandonment figure to my manager rather than waiting to be asked. If it's still doubled after two weeks of fixes, that's evidence the hours change needs revisiting, and I'd say so with the numbers.