From the Director's DeskOctober 4, 2006 |
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Creating a YES culture @your library — Part 2Rolling Prairie Library System has received an LSTA Bring in a Trainer Grant from the Illinois State Library. The title of the grant is “The YES Culture”: Copyright and Customer Service.” The first step in creating the Yes Culture is to first identify those times, situations, or places where library staff are saying “No” to the users of your library or to fellow staff members. How do you discover when “No” is being said in your library? The answer is to keep a No Log. What? A No Log is simply a piece of paper where you record each time a staff member says “No” to a customer or co-worker. I challenge libraries in RPLS to keep this log for two weeks. At the end of those two weeks, discuss the log with your staff members and talk about alternatives that would allow those "No" answers to become "Yes" answers. Saying “No” can become a habit, and like all habits, it may be a hard one to break. By using the No Log and having discussions with staff, you can start your library on the path to becoming a Yes Library. After your staff discussions I would like you to keep a Yes/No Log. Here you will count those times when you say ”Yes” to the library clients and fellow staff as well ”No”. Put a check mark by those that in the past, you might have answered ”No,” but since your staff discussions, have started to say ”Yes”. Are you ready to create the YES Culture at your library? Rolling Prairie is looking for libraries to share their experiences with the No and Yes/No Logs. All this requires is that you keep the No Log for two weeks in October, discuss them with your staff and keep the Yes/No Log for two weeks in November. As part of our grant, there will be a Customer Service workshop in late November or early December. We hope that many libraries that keep the logs will also send staff to the workshop. The full benefit of the workshop will be a report back to the members of the staff who could not attend. After this discussion, keep that Yes/No Log for one more week and see what changes in staff behavior have you observe. Sign your library up to be a keeper of a No Log. We need the name of the library, the contact person for the library, their email address and a phone number. To help us analyze the effectiveness of the logs and the workshop, we will ask the contact person to make copies of the logs and send them in delivery to RPLS, ATT: Bev. This idea of a No Log was written about by Kathy MacMillan in a short article titled “Generating Goodwill: Turning No into Yes – There’s more to service with a smile than meets the eye” in the November 2005 issue of American Libraries. If you dig out your copy, look for it on pages 13 & 14. Rolling Prairie Library System |
