Dispute In The Workplace

Dispute in the Workplace

The dispute that I will write about is one between members on my team. I will explain how we operate so that the dispute will make some sense.

Supporting customers and their computers is often challenging. As a company grows, so does the number of computers. I support around one thousand computers with a team of five technicians. When you do the math that is about 250 per person. When one of our customers has a problem, they call in to our support center in Madison, Wisconsin. The staff at the support center will try to resolve the problem over the phone and if they are not successful, they will create a trouble ticket in our Remedy system and route it to us. These tickets have six different severity levels. Levels one through four, level one being the most severe, are for problems, level five is more of a "how do I do this" level, and level six is for general requests. The technicians will take these tickets as they come into our queue in any order. They accept the ticket, fix the problem, and resolve the ticket. Sixty five percent of each person's performance evaluation is based on resolving these trouble tickets.

Several weeks ago, one of my team members came up to me and stated that he had been in a dispute with one of the other members. This dispute was about how he felt that the other member only accepted lower severity level tickets to boost his ticket closure rate. I ran the statistics on our queue and found that in fact this person had a higher number of tickets closed for the lower severity levels.

At this point, I wanted to change the process in which we handle tickets to create an environment where each team member had the same level of tickets across all severity levels. I did not want to dictate how they do there jobs but wanted them to come up with a solution to their dispute. I turned it back to the individual and asked him how we should change the process. I then asked each team member how he or she thought we should change the process. None of the team members really wanted to change the process. As I asked this question, it became apparent to me that I had not set expectations of how I wanted these tickets to be handled. I then sat down, typed out a list of seven expectations, and called a meeting between all of my team members.

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