Understanding Agents' Feelings is a Critical Part of Workforce Management

The job of a contact center manager can feel a bit like juggling. Managers are in charge of ensuring that key performance indicators (KPIs) and service levels are met, but beyond that, they’re in charge of ensuring that all the wheels and cogs below the surface are running smoothly. Given just how many moving parts a contact center has, this is a tricky prospect.

The workforce management of today is far more complex than it ever has been. Once accomplished with a pencil and graph paper, and later with a spreadsheet, scheduling the right number of agents for the right channels at the right time is critical for success. Today’s workforce management solutions go far in ensuring that forecasting and scheduling happen with maximum accuracy. But the “moving parts” in a contact center are human beings, so even the best workforce management won’t be successful if a manager doesn’t know and understand the feelings and motivations of the workforce, according to a recent article by Meghan Biro for Entrepreneur. Biro notes that the task of understanding what drives employees, and how to deal with their feelings, isn’t easy, but the payoff can be enormous.

“Being emotionally aware lets you balance your workforce to meet new challenges, get day-to-day work done and innovate,” she writes. “Plus, emotionally-aware leaders build engagement with employees. In turn, these employees are more committed to the organization, deliver better results, please customers and drive value, according to a report by the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. Fail to build engagement, and employee retention and business results will suffer.”

There is a conventional wisdom at work here: companies cannot attain customer engagement until they attain true employee engagement. Disgruntled, angry workers who feel they aren’t understood or appreciated will never be able to provide customers with the service they expect and deserve. Biro notes that effective leaders lead with emotion. They do this by learning or using four skill sets: 

• Self-awareness: understanding their own emotional state;
• Self-management: the ability to control their own emotions and reactions;
• Social-awareness: the ability to pick up emotional cues from others; and
• Relationship-management: an approach combines communications and team building with the ability to manage conflict and influence employees.

In the contact center, it may be about understanding which types of employees work well with different types of customers. It means recognizing agents’ strengths and making the most of them, and understanding that yelling or threatening is unlikely to improve performance in weak areas. It means being sensitive to conflicts between agents and getting to the root of why an employee is not motivated. It also means spotting “toxic” individuals in advance and avoiding hiring them, or putting them where they can do the least damage. By understanding employees better, managers can help engage them with their jobs and give them the tools they need to excel.

“Many people are experts at hiding their emotional states,” writes Biro. “While this skill may help them feel more in control, it can have a toxic effect on the organization, which is why it’s so important to be sensitive to non-verbal and verbal emotional cues.”

Understanding your agents is the first and most critical step to understanding how your contact center works. If you believe that you can truly never operate a machine effectively unless you understand all its components, then it’s time to tune into your agents’ emotional states and see how things can be improved. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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