Workforce Management Featured Article
Using the Right Tools to Make the Most of Teleworking and Help the Pros Outweigh the Cons
It’s rare when a business model that holds many benefits for ordinary workers offers the same benefits to employers. Flex-time, while popular with workers and a great tool to attract and keep non-traditional employees, often gives managers a headache. Telecommuting, or working from home through networked systems that allow the employee to do his or her job with the same ease as from an office, is a different animal: not only is it popular with workers and a boon to their productivity, it can save companies a great deal of money.
Supporting workers on-site is an expensive prospect. You need building space, parking space, heat and air conditioning, telecom resources, insurance, and break and lunch facilities. In the contact center, crowded work areas often lead to poor quality calls (with a lot of background noise), and workers who are late because of traffic can throw off an entire day’s schedule. Remote contact center working lowers the overhead costs to a minimum and greatly widens the available pool of agents. Home-based workers tend to be older and more experienced, and value their jobs more than the stead “revolving door” stream of agents who come in and go out of the average contact center.
So where ae the “cons” with home-based agents? For starters, it can make proper workforce management a little trickier. You’ll need a workforce management solution that is cloud-based and can be delivered to agents regardless of where they’re located (even on wireless devices!) Ensure that schedule changes are pushed out to workers, and that communications between managers, workers and teams of workers are open and transparent. Be sure, however, that they’re not too frequent that they become disruptive, in the way too many meetings can take away from work efficiency. It’s important to find the right balance, according to a recent blog post by social entrepreneur Dave Nevogt.
“Good communication is important to any team regardless of size, purpose, or whether you’re all located in the same place,” he wrote. “However, since remote teams get almost no face time together, communication is even more important to them. We like to say that remote teams need to learn to over-communicate or default to discussing things in the greatest possible detail. The hardest thing here is to find the right balance: One of the things we hate most about traditional offices (after cubicles) are pointless meetings. There’s no need to recreate them when managing a remote workforce.”
Communication between workers should be in a friendly, social manner (in other words, not email). One benefit premise-based workers have is the ability to bond and do develop friendly relationships of trust and collaboration. This is harder with remote workers, so make sure your workers have impetus to communicate in a way that helps them to get to know one another: video chat is a great choice, since it allows them to see each other and communicate using gestures and body language. According to Nevogt, it’s a great way to help create a culture that encourages openness, honest debate about every aspect of work and a proactive mind-set, all of which are critical to a contact center’s operations.
On the whole, the rewards and savings of remote working far outweigh the disadvantages. Managers need to approach the teleworking business model armed with the right tools and knowledge to work around them and reap the rewards, and they need to be willing to let their inability to physically see employees at all hours not becoming a pitfall on the way to success.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi