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5 Essential Elements of an Effective Workplace Wellness Program

By Ross Daniels June 27, 2022

Stress in the workplace has always been present, but over the last couple years, that stress has skyrocketed. More and more contact center agents are becoming increasingly vocal about their stressors. They’re rightfully raising concerns to their supervisors, managers, and other leaders, who are responsible for creating environments that support employee success and wellbeing. 

For leaders, however, it can feel like the challenges keep building up. They’re focused on recruitment and retention, ensuring existing staff are happy while also attracting new talent. From there, they’re tasked with employee onboarding and motivating both remote and in-person workers, while also arming them with technology and competitive knowledge needed to thrive in their jobs. And of course, they’re responsible for ongoing performance coaching and mentoring so their teams continuously learn and grow. Wrapped around all of this is the need to create and nurture productive teams—and most importantly, to ensure they’re happy and they feel fulfilled.

This is a long list of priorities to juggle, so we rounded up the different elements that can help guide leaders and support them in tackling everything with ease as they establish wellbeing programs or initiatives. 

How to bring a workplace wellbeing strategy to life

Here are five elements that should be accounted for when creating a workplace wellness program:

  1. Invest in the workforce

When people feel valued, their work becomes infinitely more meaningful and less stressful. In fact, in the contact center world, agent pay is the third reason employees leave their job, after ‘being unhappy in job’ (36%) and ‘limited growth opportunities’ (26%).

Training and mentorship programs that encourage individual strengths while addressing areas for improvement and establishing a clear path for professional growth are just a couple ways to show agents they’re valued and keep them engaged. Take it a step further now and provide upskilling or reskilling opportunities to boost agent confidence and enhance their sense of wellbeing. This doesn’t require a massive amount of time or resources either—invest in automated performance coaching solutions and make them a focal point of the program to help identify both skill gaps and successes, and then foster relevant opportunities for personal development.

  1. Embrace and enable flexibility

Like most everyone, contact center agents are seeking more flexibility with their work time. Try something as simple as giving them more control over their own working day through agent-driven scheduling processes with real-time flexibility to accommodate the unexpected. Easy-to-use platforms can take away the burden of managing schedule changes, shift swaps, or overtime and time-off requests by introducing the latest mobile self-service chatbots for agents. Flexibility, in this case, can look like total ownership to structure the day in a way that works best for them and allow contact center supervisors more time to focus on the larger day-to-day operations.

  1. Adopt empowering tools and technologies

Nearly 40% of agents welcome innovative technology and artificial intelligence solutions to help free them from tedious, mundane tasks. What’s more, new tools and technologies also allow agents to focus on more fulfilling and higher-value services only human experience and knowledge can provide. For remote and hybrid teams, leveraging platforms that have personalized dashboards can support agents in staying focused, engaged and motivated by tracking their own performance, for example.

  1. Simplify the agent (and the customer) experience

As agents deal with more complex customer issues and more channels than ever before, navigating their way around new technology is essential. Importantly, agents need to know what technology they have in their arsenal to make their lives easier, and they need to know how to use it. Take a closer look at the contact center’s systems and platforms and focus on giving agents a consolidated view of customer information all on one screen to support more efficient, meaningful, and empathetic interactions. This improves the agent’s experience by reducing stress of toggling between systems, but it also improves the customer experience. It’s a win-win.

  1. Create and nurture connectedness

Take the time to check in with agents and ask how they’re feeling, if they’re stressed, and what specifically is stressing them out. Ask what they’re enjoying and what’s energizing them as well. While this may seem obvious, not everyone does it. Incorporate these conversations into weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one sessions and capture those insights as part of VoE (voice of the employee) analytics, which helps analyze how frontline staff are feeling to identify agents who are struggling and who are excelling, so they can be provided with adequate training or opportunities. These regular check-ins help to create a connected culture – one that has a positive impact on the agent experience and drives opportunities for personal and organizational growth.

Learn more about the different considerations and tactics for creating a culture of wellbeing in the “Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Kit.”




Edited by Erik Linask
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