The second of our Meet the Team interviews is with Michael Devers, our Quality and Training lead. Michael was voted the Bullen Healthcare Employee of the Year for 2016. This is an award that is nominated by colleagues across Bullens, and is awarded to the person who has consistently displayed our values.
How long have you worked for Bullens, and what did you do before?
I’ve worked for Bullens for 2 and half years- almost! Previous to that I worked for Bosch packaging technology for 2 years as an account manager, and previous to that I worked for Virgin Media for 8 years.
What do you do on a day to day basis?
Well my role is ‘quality and training lead’, and I monitor the quality of all the calls from the call centre staff, branch staff, diary owners and prescription chasers. I identify any gaps for training, which means I may need to design and hold some training workshops with the staff, as well as supporting the call centre management team. At this moment in time I’m also supporting the inbound call team in the lead up to Christmas.
So normally you will find me sitting with my big DJ headphones on, listening and scoring the teams calls!
What’s the best thing about working at Bullens?
I like the people that I work with – everyone’s friendly and I appear to get on well with everybody. Everyone from the Senior Management Team right down to the call centre and warehouse staff- we’re a great team.
I enjoy the actual role I do, it’s nice to listen to the calls and give people feedback, and it’s great when they take the feedback on board. The scores for quality have really improved over the last 12 months and that’s because people have been working really hard to improve.
What’s the funniest question you’ve ever been asked at work?
See some questions aren’t even funny, they’re just ridiculous! They leave me thinking ‘Are you messing!?’. I think someone has asked me before if I’m gay, which is still ridiculous because it’s not rocket science to tell really is it, I mean even the DJ played ‘Dancing Queen’ when I went up to collect my award!
What do you like doing outside of work?
Well it’s no big secret that I train a majorette troupe, it’s something I’ve done since I was 10 years old, so 35 years now. I’ve danced, trained, judged, you name it I’ve done it. So that’s probably my main hobby, my team is called Lee Valley Majestics and I’ve been with them for 6 years. I trained a troupe from Lark Lane for 15 years and I left them to focus on judging, I then went to help Lee Valley Majestics for 1 week… and I’ve been there ever since.
I also like to go out and socialise with my friends, but I don’t like to get myself as jolly as I did at the Christmas party!
Final question, tell us an interesting fact about yourself?
Erm, I’ve just won The Employee of the Year! I also once appeared on ‘Gay God’s Gift’, can you remember it? It was a TV program hosted by Davina McCall and it was just called ‘God’s Gift’ but I appeared on the gay special! I was originally in the audience but before they started filming the producers asked if anyone wanted to be involved in the program, so I stupidly volunteered and it ended up I had to pretend I was getting chatted up in a supermarket and I had to say whether I was charmed or not. It was dead cheesy when I think about it- I hope it’s not on Youtube!