Workforce Management Featured Article
Want to Make Workers Happy? Update Your Workforce's Technology
Contact centers are often clustered in geographic areas of high unemployment for a reason: a ready supply of workers. States with military bases are a big attraction because, it’s reasoned, there will be a large group of military spouses looking for work. Companies often choose areas with low property values to keep their costs down. The problem happens when too many contact centers cluster in the same area: in order to attract workers, companies may offer an extra dollar an hour to “poach” from their competition. The reasoning is that since one contact center is much like another, workers will be willing to switch for an extra $40 per paycheck.
While this may be true for the short term, it won’t be enough to keep workers for a long time. In fact, there is evidence that company culture, and not money, is what keeps workers the longest.
EventBoard, a developer of cloud-based meeting tools and analytics for workforce productivity, recently released the results of its first Employee Happiness survey. The goal of the study – which examined all workers and not just contact center agents – was to identify trends related to happiness in the workplace and demonstrate the importance of new technology in helping today's workers be more content and effective. As any good contact center manager knows, happy employees are more productive, more empathetic with customers and less likely to leave.
The study found that, overall, nearly 40 percent of employees still struggle to find happiness in the workplace. So what’s making workers unhappy? Poor conflict resolution procedures, unnecessary and time-wasting meetings and workplace technology that’s not up to par are the three most oft-cited complaints. Interestingly, younger workers from the millennial generation are the happiest at work, but they’re also the ones who cite inefficient workplace technology as being a problem.
In the contact center, too many companies are relying on poorly integrated and outdated solutions that waste time, introduce errors and require employees to invent “workarounds” for the barriers. For a generation that values work-life balance, updating to newer methods of workforce management could be an enormously useful way to retain workers. In fact, the study found that updating workplace technology could have twice the value in motivating workers than introducing gimmicky “perks.”
“Nearly forty percent of employees would be motivated by innovative tech tools compared to twenty percent of respondents who would be fueled by out-of-office perks including health club reimbursement or discounts on products or apparel,” according to EventBoard.
If you’re still managing your workforce on paper, it’s probable that you’re doing no one a favor: not the companies, not the employees and not your customers. Upgrading to modern workforce management solutions can simultaneously cut costs, increase efficiencies and boost agent retention. While happiness is at the core of employee engagement, sufficient tools to do the job are at the core of worker happiness.
Edited by Alicia Young
