“Accountability breeds response-ability.” – Stephen Covey
On the previous blog I covered how to set clear expectations and establish effective historical schedule adherence goals.
I will now provide a suggestion on how to create accountability within a historical schedule adherence framework.
IDEA # 3
Reminder: This series of blogs was intended to provide suggestions on how to create a motivated workforce within a call center environment.
The key is to create empowerment within your workforce.
To ensure agents feel empowered they must not only be responsible to achieve their goals but they must also have the authority to achieve them.
This authority takes the form of the flexibility to make decisions on how to manage their schedules during the day.
Your clear communication of expectations will govern each agent’s decision-making process.
Your clear communication starts with establishing a daily objective for schedule adherence and schedule conformance.
You should ensure agents are aware of the guidelines on how to manage their time.
Say for example, you set schedule adherence goals at 90% and schedule conformance at 97% after conducting a proper analysis of your cost and benefits of moving from a real time adherence framework to an historical one.
Here is this blog’s suggestion: you provide another level of flexibility by establishing a Hit Rate (Success rate) evaluated on a monthly basis.
(This extra flexibility for the agent will go a long way to making agents feel empowered and less confined.)
The Success Rate is calculated by the number of days the agent has achieved the daily goal within a month.
For example, if an agent worked 20 days in January, and actually achieved adherence goals 18 times and conformance 16 times, the agent would score an adherence success rate of 90% and a conformance success rate of 80%.
What your organization needs to establish next is what Success rate is best suited for their business and their employees’ experience: 80%, 85% or 95%.
Once again, this decision should take into account the delicate balance of Customers, Employees and Shareholders.
The success rate for schedule adherence and schedule conformance is what you track for performance management.
This removes the need to manage daily results even hourly results (which is real time adherence).
Agents should be aware of their daily results to ensure they are accurate so that their monthly Success rates represent their true performance.
This approach lets managers and supervisors delegate the responsibility and authority to agents for managing their goals.
This approach also reduces the cost of managing schedule adherence, and it empowers agents while holding them accountable on a monthly basis.
Join us next time as I will provide idea #4 which relates productivity measurements such as average handling time and employee empowerment.