Playing with our balls at work

One of the things our performance at work is measured on is the number of missed calls.

If we're all busy and there are no agents available a missed call goes through to message bank. We try to keep the number of missed calls down to below five percent of the total calls. If it stays up for too long it usually means we need to employ another operator, or we're all being slack.

Now, someone has to get the messages off the message bank and this causes problems. It usually falls to one person to do it, and that usually means they're the one doing all the call backs too. It gets a bit unfair, especially if we're busy or the database crashes (that happens all too regularly) as there will often be quite a few messages to reply to and one person doing them.

Yesterday our team leader came up with a solution. He grabbed an orange stress ball, wrote "message ball" on it, and we use it like a baton.

The idea is, whoever has the ball is responsible for getting the messages off. If you have more than one message you pass the others clockwise around the room, along with the ball. That way the job gets shared around. You don't have to bother with rosters that get all confused when someone is off sick or on leave, which sometimes happens with other duties we perform. You just pass the ball.

Such a simple solution.