Workforce Management Featured Article
A Goal for 2016: Eliminate Interdepartmental Disconnects and Blind Spots
The goals for any contact center in 2016 are pretty easy to guess: improve the customer experience, improve employee engagement and keep costs down. For most organizations, improving the workforce management and scheduling function can accomplish all these things. Specifically, solving some scheduling problems that are probably plaguing most organizations is a good place to start. It begins by closing the gap between human resources and workforce management.
In most departments of an organization, it’s human resources that takes the lead in managing worker issues. Human resources professionals are trained to understand how to keep employees content – with regular hours, for example, and Monday to Friday work weeks. But the qualification that HR takes the lead in “most” organizations is just that.
The contact center, which is probably the most rigidly scheduled department in any company, is a different bird. Here, the workforce management manager is the one who builds the schedule and follows up with adherence. Often times, this puts the workforce management manager in conflict with the human resources department.
The biggest conflict often stems from the fact that the two functions have very different goals, according to Patty Isnor writing for Business2Community. HR strives to give workers regular hours and consistency.
“Often for employees, consistent schedules and set shifts are preferable,” wrote Isnor. “However, limiting scheduling flexibility is most likely not the most efficient strategy for the workforce management team. Unlike other departments within a company, the contact center is driven by fluctuating volume by the day, time of day, day of week, and season, which can have a significant effect on workforce needs. To most effectively meet this fluctuating volume, strategies like staggered shift starts, split shifts, and part-time employees are highly valuable.”
Is it possible to plan an employee engagement system that meets the needs of 9:00 to 5:00 workers AND contact center agents? Probably not. Different job functions have radically different needs. You’d never try to motivate, accommodate and compensate the mail room personnel in the same way you would the sales team, so why assume that contact center workers’ needs can be met with the same framework as the accounts payable team?
So how to close the gap between the two departments? Since it’s impossible to change the needs of customers, it’s not going to be possible to change the idealized contact center schedule. A closer working relationship and some understanding on the part of HR is necessary in 2016. Both departments, after all, are striving for the same productivity goals. For executives looking to run a better company, the secret is to really understand the needs of each department and realize that they may sometimes conflict.
There’s a broader set of implications at work here. In America’s business climate of 2016, analysts and management consultants are pointing out that the gap in knowledge between c-level executives and ordinary workers (and the people who manage them on a day-to-day business) is vast and growing larger. In some cases, the companies that CEOs and other executives think they are running bear no resemblance to the companies they are actually running. (See Gretchen Fox’s excellent article for Forbes on the topic.)
2016, therefore, should probably be “The Year Executives Start Managing the Companies They Really Have Instead of the Ones They Think They Have.” A disconnect between management and executives and ordinary workers isn’t only a human resources time bomb, but it’s very likely having a powerfully negative effect on customer relationships, as well. Until the blind spots are eliminated and the real needs of each department are assessed and met, this disconnect will continue to bring companies low. In the contact center, these problems are the most urgent: your customers will suffer until the problems are rooted out and identified.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi