Personnel and Technology When Dealing With Technology,

Personnel and Technology

When dealing with technology, it is not just the components that matter, but also the people. This is especially true with the support team and the technical staff, because they must interact with one another and with many other people who they help on a daily basis. Personality is one of the largest issues to address for these people, and for any leadership when they are selecting individuals to be placed on the support team. The first thing to consider is whether these support team individuals are team players (Kropsu-Vehkapera, et al., 2009). People who work to support others, whether they are helping the people in an organization, the outside public who is calling for assistance, or both, must be willing to work together with others in a pleasant and efficient manner. All too often, support personnel do not seem to be that interested in working with other people, and this causes them to be impolite or uninterested to a certain degree. While unfortunate, something can be done about this by weeding these people out during the hiring phase and not giving them the opportunity to become a part of an organization.

Being a team player is not the only issue for a support team worker, however. There are far more considerations than that. Overall personality can be broken down into many facets, and each facet is something that could be a potential problem if the individual is going to work supporting others. How the person responds under pressure is a serious and significant consideration for support personnel leaders to consider when hiring or not hiring a specific individual (Kelly, 2010). Support teams can sometimes be stressful places to work, especially if there is a widespread outage or problem, or if there is a new system or component about which a large number of people will have questions. When those types of issues take place, there will be an abundance of calls in rapid succession, and the people who have to hold will not like to wait very long. By the time the support team members gets to those individuals, they may be agitated and unfriendly. Becoming unfriendly as a defense to that is not the right way to handle things, and could only escalate the situation. Support team personnel must be cool under pressure and must be able to handle rudeness or anger in other people without becoming rude or angry and "firing back" at another person (Kelly, 2010).

Of course, knowledge also matters (Kropsu-Vehkapera, et al., 2009). Each person on the support team must be knowledgeable, so that he or she does not have to continually ask others for help when a caller has a question. There is no point in having someone on the support team who has to constantly go to others for support. Asking an occasional question is normal for a new person, or for someone who encounters something completely out of the norm. Still, these kinds of issues - and their related questions - should be few and far between. For support people, the goal is to have the answers for the callers who have the questions. If a support person does not have the answers, and/or cannot find the answers without the need to ask others the majority of the time, that person is not really providing the level of support that is needed. He or she may have to be replaced with someone who has more knowledge or can use a manual or other information to get that knowledge without outside assistance (Kelly, 2010).

Personnel who work in technology in a support capacity are well-versed in the work they do. They understand how to do all of the simple things and all of the complex things that customers may call in over and about which people may ask. They are efficient, effective, and friendly, so that they can keep the calls moving and get people on their way (Kelly, 2010). This is true whether they work in a call center for outside consumers of a technology product, or whether they work inside of a company and only assist those who work with technology in that company. Both support teams are equally important, and both should be managed effectively, with transformational leadership skills, so that they are able to bring the best possible service to the people they have been asked to support. If the team does not get along with one another and does not get along with the leader(s), dissention among the ranks could cause a breakdown that would harm the people who need assistance (Kelly, 2010).

Building an effective technology support team takes time, because there are many facets to that team (Kropsu-Vehkapera, et al., 2009). The members of the team may change from time to time, as the leaders see who is performing well and who may be falling behind with the quality or the quantity of the work and the help provided to others. Team members may also come and go for their own, personal reasons, but the goal is to build a good team that will remain together and work together for a long period of time. When teams do that, they become even more cohesive than they were in the beginning, and the better a team works together the happier the team members are overall. That happiness gets extended to the work that they do in support of others, and whether they are in a call center or they have to travel around and help people, they will take their team spirit and happy attitude with them.