The labor market has been experiencing tight conditions in the recent past. Employers around the world are struggling to find recruits to fill open positions. As a result, companies are striving to retain their workforce and reduce their turnover rate to avoid labor shortage. Filling these open positions is no longer smooth and quick like before.
However, most of the techniques and tools that employers are using to navigate the tight and competitive labor market are already built into their workforce optimization and workforce management tools.
Track and Reduce Shrinkage
Most tools used in the call center will only allow for a specific shrinkage tracking. Shrinkage refers to times when agents or call center workers can’t take calls. Times like during a break, training, development, and meetings. Two factors, which include real-time analysis or workforce optimization and workforce planning are the ones that define workforce management (WFM) toolset.
Call center teams are now using these tools, specifically workforce optimization to interpret and analyze their shrinkage time. Workers are likely to develop a habit of being disengaged while at their desk if you allow them to spend much of their time not answering calls or addressing customer concerns. However, you can set shrinkage hours to try to cut down the hours that each worker spends not addressing customer concerns or answering calls. Setting maximum shrinkage hours will prevent call center workers from forming habits of getting disengaged while at work. Of course, setting shrinkage time for training, meetings, and rest breaks are inevitable. Employers should do their best to limit the hours their call center workers spend away from their desks.
Use Workforce Optimization Resources to Monitor Productivity
The latest report on American workers revealed that 67% of workers feel disengaged at their workstations. 16% of those disengaged workers only take actions to hurt the productivity of their fellow workers and employer.
Of course, the performance of workers who feel demoralized at their workstations will undoubtedly drop. This might fuel the desire to quit their job. However, employers can now utilize workforce optimization tools to monitor their workers’ productivity trends. This allows them to notice when the level of their workers’ productivity begins to decline.
Experts recommend employers to begin to emphasize workers’ engagement immediately a new worker joins their company. Making them engaged from the first day of their tenure at the company will prevent them from becoming disengaged after a few months or years. Though changing the attitude of a worker isn’t impossible, employers won’t have to exert effort to make a disengaged worker engaged if the worker was never disengaged the first day he or she joined the company.
Retaining the engagement of a worker is far easier than changing their attitude. By making a worker engaged in the first day of their tenure in your organization, you will ensure that the worker won’t hurt the company’s bottom line or get disengaged in the future.
Make Your Management Team Motivated
Recent research has shown that only 29% of managers in the United States feel engaged in their work. The engagement of a management team has a direct impact on the commitment of workers, and it creates an effect known as the cascade effect, where the link between workers and their management team is compelling. Employees overseen by a highly engaged management team are more engaged than those supervised by a disengaged management team. That shows how important an involved management team is to have highly active and engaged workers on the front lines.
Companies should focus on their management teams first to have a highly engaged workforce. Of course, managers are responsible for developing and training front line workers, and their level of engagement will affect the overall commitment of the entire team. Companies can use the same approaches as those used for front line workers to monitor the level of productivity of their management team.
You can try to implement a cycle of transparent reporting or monitor their daily performance. The chances are that reports of a management team will be unproductive if it is unproductive. It is also probable that disengagement trends on managers are affecting the productivity of front line workers. However, researching on productivity and engagement trends will make your workforce management strategies more useful than ever.
Provide Ongoing Feedback and Set Intentions and Goals for Your Workforce
Feedback is central to employee engagement as well as their growth. A recent study found that workers who receive feedback are less likely to quit their job than those who don’t.
Companies must, therefore, deliver feedback and nurture their worker’s engagement to make the most out of their workforce. Setting clear goals for both front line workers as well as management will make it easier to provide objective feedback.
Setting goals will allow an organization to provide specific feedback. Such as how to exceed its monthly income and how to improve its call volume instead of general feedback. Companies can use their workforce to utilize toolset to track these metrics and make their workers more engaged than before. Using these tracked metrics along with clear intentions and goals will help make your call center workers more involved. This ensures that they stay at your organization for long.
Retaining highly talented workers and reducing their turnover rate has become more crucial than ever in a tight labor market. Workers have the upper hand in a competitive labor market. Employers must do anything they can to retain their top talent and ensure they are always engaged and motivated.
Most of the tools employers need to make their workers engaged are already in their workforce optimization tools. However, utilizing workforce optimization tools that are compatible with your other software will give your organization a competitive edge during talent recruitment and retention.
Have Integrated and Compatible Technology
Technological solutions should work in your favor, not against you if you want to maximize your workforce to the fullest. Your workforce strategy will probably sink if you are using different procedures, standards, and tools in your call center. Your company will eventually fall victim to inconsistent data quality, deteriorating morale, and crippling inefficiencies.
Integration ensures that workers in the office receive any data sent by the sales representatives in the same format, and vice-versa. Your workers probably utilize the same structures and formations and use the same systems no matter where they are located. Employing integrated technological solutions can help improve the overall customer experience, streamline sales processes, and make it easier for call center workers to answer calls and address customer concerns.
Standardization
The easiest way to manage workers that are scattered and working at different locations is to standardize everything.
Using different protocols, incentives, performance standards, and rules can make some call center workers feel as if they are operating on a separate field. Apart from treating your workers equally, standardizing your processes can make it easier to manage your workflows. As such, companies might need to set guidelines that they can turn to when they want to identify sources of bottleneck or assess the efficiency of their processes. It has become critical for companies to review every aspect of their workers’ management to determine its value.
Increasing the performance and productivity of your workforce takes a lot of effort and time. However, companies that take steps to make their workers engaged can uncover inefficiencies and make necessary adjustments to improve their operations. With the right technology, companies can simplify processes such as data gathering, employee scheduling, and clocking-in, which will in turn help achieve goals of workforce optimization and increase productivity and overall efficiency.
