When we think about the children and families our nursery serves we may think about them more as part of our family than as our customer base.
However, parents and children are what any nursery is founded upon. They deserve to be treated with care and consideration at all times.
Customer care is all about ensuring that your nursery offers a high-quality service to parents and children. Of course any organisation that cares for its 'customers' also cares for its staff. The first and most important rule in ensuring that staff are fully committed to caring for children and parents is to care for them - in other words, what goes around comes around!
Valued members
When a nursery truly cares for its staff it helps them to become part of the organisation by ensuring that each staff member knows that they are a valued part of the nursery team - whether they are the cook, the manager or the caretaker - because without any one of these people the nursery would not function. Staff who feel valued at work will help create a happy environment where parents and children feel relaxed and comfortable.
So how can we ensure that staff represent the nursery well, promoting a professional image at all times?
First and foremost it is important to appoint individuals who are fully committed to the ethos you wish to promote. Since they are the most important resource in the nursery, new staff should follow a well-developed induction programme so that they are clear about your expectations of them and the practice in the nursery.
An induction programme will be broad but should involve the following to promote good customer care:
* providing all staff with clear job descriptions so that they understand their own role fully
* supporting new staff so that they get to know how their work fits in with other members of their team
* ensuring staff are clear about line management in their work base
* ensuring new staff become aware of the identities of the whole team during their induction period
* giving new staff members time to find out how the nursery is organised and managed so that they are clear about the roles of all other staff members
* sharing clear guidelines about the nursery's expectations of staff in promoting a positive image of the nursery including being appropriately dressed at all times.
Once new staff are fully inducted and understand the way their work complements other people's it is important to hold regular reviews and to provide 'top up' sessions so that longer serving staff members don't miss out on new information.
Longer serving staff can also play an important role in showing new staff how to care for customers by:
* remembering that they are important role models, whose behaviour demonstrates to new staff appropriate responses and behaviour to children and parents
* ensuring that the work of every member of the team is valued equally
* challenging behaviour which is inappropriate so that poor habits do not become established.
Clearly the most important way to be sure that all staff are in tune with one another is to provide opportunities for staff to meet with one another both for 'business' and for 'pleasure'. In this way individuals can develop common interests, share their views and discuss any issues that concern them.
Confidence building
Dealing with parents and other professionals can be a daunting task for members of staff, particularly those who are young or inexperienced.
One of the reasons that things may go wrong when individual staff members are involved in communicating with parents and other professionals is when the communication is unclear and they feel that they have either been ignored, treated unfairly, misunderstood, misrepresented or misled.
The key to ensuring that staff feel confident in handling relationships with others lies in them knowing the following important points:
* how to communicate clearly
* the content of nursery policies and what they say about specific issues such as biting
* what issues can be dealt with by individual staff and which issues they may need to pass on to senior staff
* what information they should pass on to others, such as a speech therapist, and what information is confidential
* when to ask for help from other team members and when to deal with a particular issue on their own initiative
* where they can get support should something go wrong.
Meeting and greeting
Often one of the greatest joys for new staff members is building up a relationship with the children in their group. But one of the first challenges they often encounter is meeting parents and reporting on children's progress.
Again, signals on how to handle these important events come from more experienced staff who provide models of how practitioners should behave and interact with parents. For this reason it is helpful to match new staff in a 'buddying' system with more established staff members so that they learn the 'rules' associated with meeting and greeting parents. Experienced staff will demonstrate the importance of:
* being friendly and polite
* not letting personal problems get in the way of professionalism
* careful listening
* recording discussions in children's records or a day book
* reporting issues of concern to a senior member of staff.
These 'rules' will ensure that new staff members are clear about how to respond to all the events and interactions that take place as children and parents arrive at nursery and leave at the end of a session.
Reporting back
Reporting on children's progress can be very rewarding particularly if in the beginning it is of an informal nature, for example when a child has just become interested in a new area, or is showing signs of developing a schema.
However, ensuring that the discussion is informative and professional is essential at all times, so allowing new staff to observe more experienced colleagues demonstrating this is helpful if they are to adopt a similar approach.
Once this informal approach is established it is helpful for new staff to receive support from their 'buddy' as they increasingly take on responsibility for reporting more fully on the progress of their own group of children. Pointers to ensure that feedback to parents is helpful include:
* knowing every child well
* being positive about every child's individual achievements
* praising and acknowledging children's efforts
* listening to parents and responding to what has been understood - for example, understanding that a parent may be anxious about a child's development
* being sensitive to parents' individual needs and concerns
* being open and honest about any concerns you may have about a child.
Investing in the professional development of staff is an important issue in the nursery business because the actions of all staff contribute to the overall image that the nursery communicates to other professionals, parents and the public at large.
The rewards for this investment will be that staff and parents treat each other with mutual respect and that complaints rarely, if ever, arise. Most important of all, the 'customers' that is, the children and parents, feel completely satisfied.
