Practical Example

“Competent and superior action competences for employees with citizen and customer contact.”

A project for the city of Mülheim an der Ruhr as part of workplace health promotion.

Requirements of the client:

Since years, conflicts and a “harsh tone” among municipal employees and citizens are increasingly registered in the Ruhr region city of Mülheim an der Ruhr, a problem that not only the city of Mülheim is faced with. Today, employees who are working in various posts and functions with citizen and customer contact get more often involved in debates, thus experiencing insults, threats and even encroachment. In these cases, employees require other skills in addition to their specialist knowledge in order for them to prevent escalations and to present themselves with confidence and professionalism.

On the one hand municipal employees are supposed to be protected and strengthened, and on the other hand their contact with citizens is supposed to be characterised by kindness, a service-oriented philosophy and mutual respect. In order to realise this, the city of Mülheim an der Ruhr has already started in 2009, as part of workplace health promotion, designing an internal strategic organisation and HR development project intended to systematically promote and develop the personnel’s skills and to prepare the employees for their future challenges. In this way, the municipal administration as an employer is aiming to support and qualify its employees with regard to the meeting point “citizen/customer and administration.”

Our approach:

During the first stage of a three-stage “participatory-strategic HR development project,” a workshop process was conducted in cooperation with a “pioneer group” of experienced municipal employees. The results hereof have been integrated together with the requirements of the heads of administration into a strategic planning aiming at organisational and HR development.

In the second stage, after having identified fields of action and staff employee groups, a modern coaching and training concept was customised for them. In addition to training, our team developed application-oriented guidelines as reference work and a table display as quick and compact help.

During the third stage, training will be standardised and established as integral part of the training catalogue of the municipal administration. During training sessions are practised amongst others: behavioural strategies, body language, conversational skills, certainty in action, conflict solutions, formulating and reasoning. Seminar participants learn how to maintain their self-protection and to strengthen their personality. This reduces stress at work and enables the employees to shape the agreed corporate culture as well as to live the city’s philosophy.

Our trainings are becoming a decisive factor for managers and executives and they are an important contribution to promoting workplace health.

The result:

A business-wide strategy to manage and develop skills for managers, executives and employees as a successful change management process. The operating results of the project – training, guide, table display – have been presented to the press as „competence development set” on 7 April 2014 under the title „Meeting places instead of tension areas” by the mayor of Mülheim, Dagmar Mühlenfeld, the city director, Dr. Frank Steinfort and the chairman of the staff council, Dirk Neubner.

Many years of development work have paid off. The city of Mülheim an der Ruhr and its cooperation partner Nicole Schlegel have set an important milestone in order to promote and train future-oriented competences of the municipal employees.

• The participative strategic HR development project is a successful change management model based on an approach developed by Nicole Schlegel.