A council has defended spending nearly £600 on coasters printed with guidelines on telephone and computer protocol.
Sutton LBC said the coasters were a ‘more cost effective way’ of communicating to employees than using ‘staff time and meetings that take focus away from delivering services’.
A spokesperson for Sutton Council said:'As part of the council’s transformation, we have been running two internal campaigns to improve the standard of service that council staff give to our residents and businesses.
'One is a customer service campaign called 'Putting Residents First' which promotes 10 pillars of customer service that we want staff to follow. The other is a campaign, called Connect Smarter, is to improve communications between staff by following certain steps and was created following requests by staff themselves. We created lanyards and coasters to encourage and remind staff to follow these important guidelines.
'At a time when our shrinking workforce is managing around 800 services for a growing population of residents, it has never been more important to put customer service at the core of what we do."
'We spent £748 on lanyards and £583 on coasters for our staff of over 1,600 and we feel this is a good investment in raising standards and being more efficient.'
