TM4T Stress Armoury 44 - Benchmarking (under development)

How do they do it?

Of course there is stress in teaching, but some people thrive in obviously stressful jobs. It is worth looking round, and seeing how others cope with similar stress patterns: not the tension and trauma of bomb-disposal, but the tedium and tension of the customer complaints call-centre.

This technique is sometimes called 'lateral benchmarking' in business, and it's pretty old hat. In teaching, however, it is horribly under-used. The idea is simple: compare the way that YOU do things with the way the BEST do things. That happens in schools, of course, but the leadership team tend to take a simplistic view: 'why don't you try how MFL tackle their workload?' or 'Maths seem to have some good ideas you might try'. This is sensible advice, of course, but only if MFL and Maths face the same challenges as you do. The trick of good benchmarking is to identify EXACTLY what the problem, the bottleneck, the time-waster is... and then find someone who tackles these specific problems brilliantly. Not competently - brilliantly. The classic example of benchmarking involved an airline in the United States who worked out that their planes spent far too long on the ground being serviced and refuelled when they should have been carrying passengers. In order to tackle this problem, they didn't look at how other American airlines tackled the problem, they didn't even look at airports worldwide: having worked out the exact problem area they then looked at who was the best in the world. The answer, in fact, was Formula One, whose engineers and pit crew achieved phenomenal speed in refuelling and re-fitting their cars.

Don't generalize

You need to look at your own problem, not those facing other teachers, other departments, other schools, or education in general. You need to deal with specific problems, or groups of very similar problems. An example might be: I spend way too long on telephone calls with parents, without achieving anything concrete.

Identify who is best in breed

If you are talking about work outside the classroom, you must realize that you are basically an office worker. The problems that you face are typical of the problems faced by office workers world-wide, and school problems tend to be small beer compared to the challenges routinely overcome in business. Someone, somewhere is routinely handling challenges twice as severe as yours. Using the example above: call-centres routinely handle dozens of calls an hour, Although we may not rate their service particularly highly (teachers tend to be a bit snooty about things like this) there are well-validated surveys suggesting that their effectiveness is very good.

Identify core techniques

It doesn't take a lot of research to identify how business works. There are some standard techniques which apply:

a. Standardisation and proceduralization

As far as possible, if you need to do something more than a dozen times a year, have a standard way of doing it. You can have variations of this standard, but make sure your standard is a step-by-step easily repeatable formula.

b. Environment

Do the right job in the right place. That means if you have ten phone calls to make, borrow an office with a desk and a speaker-phone from one of the managers.

c. Job separation

This might mean teasing apart the routine calls from the stressful-complaint-agitation calls. Do them at different times, do them in different places; ideally get them done by different people (this is what Heads of Department and School Leaders are for).

d. Plan workflow

This means considering where your work comes from physically and goes to physically, it might be a pigeonhole in the department office to an in-tray in the Head's study.

d. Controls

Keep control lists of any repetitive tasks so you never lose where-you're-up-to and you have some sense of how-far-through-you-are

e. Quality control

Routinely review how you do things and improve your process.