The complaints SOP!

As a Stem cell laboratory technologist, you communicate and interact with so many people of different divisions and entities such as collection facility, testing laboratory, or quality assurance personnel. Most of these interactions are positive, or neutral at the minimum. Occasionally though, your interaction gets a negative and unexpected detour, how are you supposed to handle those situations?

If not handled well, negative interactions can impact the relationships at the personnel and at the division level, and could also negatively impact the work environment.

In this post I will list 3 potential scenarios and the best practices you could utilize; these practices take the “stress” out of the experience and make it a “procedural” one.

1. Defer

As a cell therapy personnel, you occasionally are faced by a member of another division or external entity who blame you for a division related matter. For example, a currier is complaining about a delayed pick up, or a testing laboratory personnel is complaining because the sample size was insufficient. Here, what you need to do is to defer the currier or testing laboratory personnel to your supervisor and move on. Your supervisor could then adjust the currier agreement to add more flexibility in pick up times. Similarly, the supervisor could adjust the production protocol to ensure sufficient sample size. In both examples, YOU don’t have to deal with such complaints and suffer from them.

2. Report

At other times, cell therapy personnel may get complains from peers or colleagues. For example, the quality control member was scheduled to run tests in your GMP facility, but was delayed because your clinical production activities were not concluded at the scheduled time. In such situation, report the event to your supervisor to improve the scheduling of clinical production and quality control activities, and to prevent this situation from happening again in the future. Your relationship with your peers and colleagues should not suffer from a scheduling matter.

3. Discuss

The last scenario is when you receive complaints from your division’s leadership. For example, not knowing you are busy with clinical production, your director complains that you did not complete the review of a document of which the due date is approaching. Talk to your director and explain the situation, and how your participation in clinical production activities takes up all your time. If your director still wants to assign review tasks to you, then ask them to adjust your duty schedule and dedicate more of your time to desk work activities.

The bottom line is you don’t have to live with the stress created by anybody. Change the complaint into a procedure to improve the division’s performance internally and externally.

Let us know if we missed anything, or if you would like a specific subject to be discussed, write to us. 

About the author

Naseem Almezel, earned his MSc degree in Cellular Therapies in 2010, since then his career focus is to support Bone Marrow Transplant and Oncology programs. Naseem likes to work in the lab doing translational research, or in the cleanroom doing GMP production. When he is not working, Naseem likes to read and to spend time outdoors. Find more about Naseem here