Funployability

Funployability had to be the word of the day.  The whole management team had been brought together for a morning of development lead by Darran and Pete, the irrepressible lads from ON-Brand Partners.  They had split the group into four and asked each of us to look at a set of questions to get us to think about our work:  What does good customer service look like? How is our service offering different? Why do our customers like to deal with us and what is the pay off if we get this right? 

Each small group of us, a quarter of the management team would gather round a flip chart and scribble away the words that we felt fitted best against the question (in our neatest writing).  After a few minutes we were moved on to the next flip chart to add to the collective wisdom of the previous quarter until each group had responded to each question.  It always amazes me and encourages me when, under the right circumstances and facilitation, a group of colleagues gets stuck in to such a simple task with great gusto.  And so we did.  There was good engagement or a good connection between the team and the task with everyone getting involved, sharing the role of scribe and chipping in with ideas.  Writers were writing even after they were asked to move on, words were flowing and flip charts were filling up, so much so that they had to be ripped from their pads and blu-tacked to the walls. 

My group, the threes, were at the ‘what is the payoff’ question and the juices were flowing.  We were all enjoying ourselves when it became clear that the biggest payoff would be that our work would be fun.  Quick as a flash, our man with the marker said that we needed funployment a word that we thought he had made up in his genius and the word was played with until funployability was written on the paper.  How we laughed at the concept.  (Our genius later confessed the word to be a bastardisation of “funemployment” where a person takes advantage of being out of a job to have a great time but this did not take any of the shine off his creativity.  It did remind me however of a previous blog Don’t retire, pretire.)

After the exercise we went through what we had all written and discussed what we had meant.  There were a lot of common themes running throughout and on reflection it became obvious that the four questions were really the same one asked in four different ways.  So in the end, what did good customer service look like? How was our service offering different? Why did our customers like to deal with us and what did we decide would be the pay off if we get this right?  It is a  sense of belonging, making a difference, a strong set of values, honesty, rewarding work and above all having fun.

What we definitely need is funployability.  Excellent!