Ms Emily O'Reilly:

Yes. I will give a very practical example. We get complaints about failure to reply, which is literally that. A communication to the Commission will state that it has not responded to someone and that they are going to approach my office. Sometimes, these are failure to reply because it just did not happen. The correspondence just got caught up in the system, or sometimes there might be a deeper reason as to why there has not been a reply. It could be a tricky issue or something of that nature. They are not the same. We deal with many of these. We wanted to speed up the way in which we processed them in order that we could quickly get to the nub of any issues that were relevant and deal with ones that could be remedied more easily. We did a time-and-motion study whereby we looked at every step: the complaint comes in to Mary and Mary passes it to Anne and Anne passes it to Patrick – these are not their names, by the way, as members can probably guess – and so on. I remember seeing a visual of all the sticky notes that represented the various parts of the system we have for dealing with failures to reply. There must have been about 30 sticky notes. Now we are down to about five or ten as a result of the fact that we could see where the faultlines were in the system. There was a touch of people taking the approach that this was the way it had always been done. There was also a touch of them being a little bit shy about taking responsibility, making a decision and then moving on to the next step. It was also about empowering people at less senior levels to have the courage to make decisions once they were properly trained and so on. If they were stuck on something, there would be others who could be asked. Basically, we were going around in circles a lot and people were not really happy to take responsibility to sign off on things.

I remember talking to colleagues and saying that in the past, when something like this was done in a factory, it was called a time-and-motion study. Someone would look at a conveyor belt in order to find out what everyone was doing at different points. It was then a case of seeing how production could be speeded up. It is not rocket science. We also have to think about it in the context of the culture, however. It is really important that people are responded to in a very human way and quickly, even if it is not good news. We heard about the colleague we advised to go to the European Court of Justice, but I was glad to hear that we responded quickly. That is important because stress levels are brought down when people get an answer and when there is genuine communication. Those of us who have wrestled with phone companies or banks through their call centres or talking to people who are reading from pieces of paper know that one does not feel as though one is being listened to. Part of what I try to do in my office, to the greatest extent possible, is to have people believe that there really is somebody listening to and hearing them. Even if we cannot help someone, we advise them as to who might do so.