Workforce Management Featured Article
Employee Engagement Begins and Ends with Call Center Management
While the economy still seems to be straggling to most American workers, many of whom have been stuck in jobs they don’t like for years - as the high unemployment rate kept the “help wanted” lists meager- conventional wisdom tells us that eventually, the economy will pick up. When it does, hiring will escalate and employees will have more choices about whether to stay or depart from their current jobs. This, in turn, will spike turnover for most American companies.
No company wants a mass exodus. It’s expensive and disrupting to business. For this reason, it’s critical for companies to begin boosting employee engagement today. Engaged employees (which represent only a small fraction of American workers) are more likely to stick around, value the work they do and contribute to company goals. This puts the onus on managers to take steps to increase employee engagement, according to a recent article by William L. Bouffard writing for Monster.
“The key to engaging employees is to first understand how they feel about the company, culture and business practices,” writes Bouffard. “Equally important are their perceptions of management effectiveness. For many management teams these are unknowns. While there’s no patented recipe for insuring employee engagement, there are many harmful management attitudes and behaviors that can make achieving employee engagement downright impossible.”
The steps good managers must take ensure that employees understand the company’s goal and vision and can translate it into real-time actions. It also means that managers must practice what they preach and be accountable for their own actions. It means banishing internal competition, which leads to harmful behaviors, and encouraging collaboration among teams and departments.
One of the most important steps is to listen to employees, according to Bouffard.
“Do employees readily provide suggestions to improve the business?” he asks. “If not, then it means they feel management doesn’t want to hear their opinions. Is criticism stifled from flowing up the organizational structure? If so, then the organization suffers from a culture of fear which is the antithesis of employee engagement.”
Contact center technology such as workforce management can go a long way toward achieving these goals, ensuring that employees are properly trained without disruption to the schedule, that agents have time to collaborate with one another, and that managers are coaching front-line workers regularly, sometimes in real-time as they handle difficult transactions. The transparency that modern workforce management solutions lend to contact center work – ensuring more fairness and banishing accusations of favoritism – can keep morale up and be an important tool to fostering employee engagement.
In the end, employees who feel that they have more control over their jobs and a bigger stake in personally contributing to the company’s success, will be the employees who stick around and increase their value with experience.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi