Removing your Shoes and Cleaning up your Mess Is Communications, Too

Everyone in my house shudders when I fiddle with the cable or Internet service. They know we’re headed for a period of instability.

So it was with trepidation that I called and switched our cable account to SaskTel, the provincial phone company that was an early pioneer in telco TV offerings. We like their Max TV service, but switched back to cable a couple of years ago, because of bandwidth issues. They’ve upgraded their lines, so we thought it was time to give them another chance.

Amid the chaos of me trying to remember how to fiddle with our home network, we had a couple of installers in, running gigibit-ready network cable to the rooms where the TVs are, and helping set up wireless and e-mail on the computers.

What stood out for me was the friendliness and competence of the folks I dealt with, including the help desk guy who helped figure out that I’d dialed up the WiFi signal so high it was jamming our wireless phones and the TV signal.

As I watched the cable installer move from room to room in his indoor shoes (his boots were neatly stacked in the hallway), I was reminded that good manners is an important form of communications by employees and contractors. He took a bag around with him, and carefully tucked away the cast-off bits of wire, plastic and other stuff as he worked.

When he politely refused to dump his bag in our trash bin, I suspected that returning from an installation with a bag of picked-up junk was something a supervisor might check.

What a contrast from living beside a construction site for two years, as first one new neighbour, then another, built houses on the subdivided lot next door to us.

First, I ended up mowing the lawn for the developer, because to him it was just an empty lot in a construction zone. No word of warning when they demolished the house next door. Broken glass and a poorly-marked empty pit sat next to us for months. This was followed by two years of having trucks and trailers partially blocking our driveway, and any number of inconveniences you’d expect if you lived in a construction area.

The workers were friendly, but to them this was a worksite, not a neighbourhood.

The message from one company: respect for our home. From the other: indifference.

You could say that the construction workers weren’t working for us, so they didn’t owe us the level of respect that a customer deserves. Well, they represent the construction company, and most importantly, they represent the home owner, who will move into the house to find neighbours who are either impressed or unimpressed with the way their neighbourhood was affected.

Thanks, Greg and Amit (and the help desk guy, whose name I forget). We only had to put up with you for a day, but you are welcome back, any time.

Photo: one of the workers next door, on a good day.

Tags: business, communications, customer, relationships, respect, employees, courtesy, neighbors, messages, sasktel, installation