Empowering front office employees with counseling affordances

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the face-to-face citizen service encounter in public administrations' front offices, and present a novel qualification approach to empower service personnel on-the-job, and thereby deepen the knowledge on the role of information and communication technology for advancing governmental reforms. Design/methodology/approach -The presented study follows a design science research methodology, conducted in collaboration with the public administration of a major German city. Data were collected using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and video analysis. Findings -A novel on-the-job qualification approach for empowering public employees in their job-related skills, building on the concept of affordances, is developed. Thereto, six design principles for equipping artifacts with counseling affordances are presented. Evaluations in real-world environments provide first evidence that "learning with counseling affordances" constitutes an effective qualification measure to initiate experiential learning on-the-job, helping employees in the resource-restricted work environment of public front offices to obtain the skills to provide superior advisory services. Research limitations/implications -The "learning with counseling affordances" approach was developed in collaboration with an individual major German city and the paper provides first evidence of its effectiveness and suitability. Hence, the study's insights should be approved by further research to strengthen generalizability. Originality/value -The paper highlights the previously neglected aspects of employee's skills and qualification for promoting governmental transformation. By highlighting the beneficial relationship between affordances and on-the-job learning, the paper provides novel insights on the role of information and communication technology to promote governmental transformation. Keywords Affordances, Design science, Learning on-the-job, Qualification Purpose: Investigating the face-to-face citizen service encounter in public administrations' front offices, the paper presents a novel qualification approach to empower service personnel on-the-job, and thereby deepens the knowledge on the role of information and communication technology for advancing governmental reforms. Design/methodology/approach:The presented study follows a design science research methodology, conducted in collaboration with the public administration of a major German city. Data was collected using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and video analysis. Findings:A novel on-the-job qualification approach for empowering public employees in their job-related skills, building on the concept of affordances, is developed. Thereto, six design principles for equipping artifacts with counseling affordances are presented. Evaluations in real-world environments provide first evidence that "learning with counse...

Pen-and-paper Rituals in Service Interaction

“…While CSCW has addressed institutional interaction in several contexts (doctor-patient, teacher-student, etc.) [24,29,51], it hardly ever went beyond analyzing the social interaction between the parties, such that only few IT-based solutions were presented [23,42], and yet more sporadically systems were tested that improved the interpersonal character of the institutional interaction [28]. Furthermore, this paper derives design requirements for a system to support co-located advisory services from previous literature and attributes them to the physical configuration.…”

“…Marketing research sees advisory services as a customer relationship channel [46,61,65,73]. Literature concerned with supporting collaborative work frames advisory services as work [16,22,24]. Finally, sociologists and linguists see advisory services as a form of institutional talk and investigate how the sequential character of the services corresponds to the institutional identities of the participants [30,59,71].…”

Modelo para la escritura de artículos científicos a distancia mediante tareas colaborativas

“…Son las descripciones relacionadas con la forma en que se llevan a cabo las actividades. Los thinklets son interacciones predecibles, repetibles y transferibles que ocurren cuando las personas realizan actividades colaborativas [16]. Un thinklet es la unidad fundamental intelectual necesaria para crear un patrón de colaboración [17].…”

Changing Things so (Almost) Everything Stays the Same

“…It increasingly advocates strategies oriented at long-term co-creative and mutually profitable relation rather than a one-time sale -it challenges the status quo and proposes new communication and listening routines to make the service appealing to the client (Macintosh, 2007;Ramsey & Sohi, 1997;Schmidt-Rauch & Nussbaumer, 2011;Verhallen et al, 1997). Literature concerned with supporting collaborative work frames advisory services as work -it approaches various collaborative practices and tries to improve the overall service by providing digital support for the existing or new practices (Dolata & Schwabe, 2018;Fischer et al, 2017;Giesbrecht, Schenk, et al, 2015). Finally, sociologists and linguists see advisory services as a form of institutional talk and investigate how the sequential character of the services corresponds to the institutional identities of the participants -they contribute an understanding of the fundamental conversation processes in various advisory service or selling situations (Heritage & Clayman, 2010;Pinch & Clark, 1986;Svinhufvud & Vehviläinen, 2013).…”

“…Rooms dedicated to service provision influence the encounters too. Consequently, designing technology while focusing solely on the material used during advisory services, as it has been done previously (Giesbrecht, Schenk, et al, 2015;Kilic et al, 2016), can be risky. The studies report on collaboration breakdowns attributed to changes in external conditions such as sitting position (Heinrich, Kilic, Aschoff, et al, 2014;Kilic et al, 2016).…”