If you are looking for a way to bring your team together, gain insight into what others are doing in the industry, raise the level of customer service in your business and get inspired about what you do, I have the solution for you. Get involved in your local service awards as a volunteer.

I know I have talked about this before – but I feel the need to bring it up again. I have spent 2 of the past 3 weeks as a volunteer for the Calgary White Hat Service Awards. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be on the interviewing subcommittee and we just completed interviewing over 500 people in 6 ½ days! Yep that is a lot of people.

More volunteers do the interviews and the cool thing is most of these volunteers are also industry heavyweights. There were Hotel GM’s, Directors of HR, Regional Managers and recruiter for huge companies such as Strarbucks and WestJet and representatives from our local and very reputable Hospitality program just to name a few.

Anyway, let’s get to the reason for this post. What if a Manager or Director were to have their whole team volunteer to interview? Each of these managers/supervisors would spend 4 hours talking to people who have been nominated for excellence at their job and for customer service. Now I want to be clear here, these nominees, for the most part are exceptional. We had expert and seasoned interviewers literally in tears listening to the stories recounted by these industry superstars and more than one of us was moved by several candidates and their efforts to show up and be a part of the process. It was honestly amazing. But anyway, back to my point.

If the Manager/Director in question then held a post mortem with their managers and talked about what they saw and learned and how they could improve their department or business and asked the question “how does our service compare” or “what can we do better?” What if you bench marked your service to that of those you interviewed.

You would also glean valuable information about the environment they work in, if they are empowered to make decisions and what moves them to do what they do.

I think you might also find that empowering your employees is often the key to greatness and in itself empowering. You and your team can really have a chance to see what others in the industry are doing and what great service really is and raise the level of your service.

Seriously, this could be a very powerful tool for team and business building. You know what they say about volunteering; usually the volunteer gets more out of the process that the person receiving the assistance. Well the same is true here!