A culture of employee engagement – there’s more to it than just happy employees
Colin Hay at Puzzel suggests that there’s more to employee engagement than just creating ‘happy’ or ‘satisfied’ employees
It’s often claimed that engaged employees are generally considered to have a greater emotional commitment to their organisations than disengaged employees. They are also said to care more about what they do, where they work, and whether their organisations are successful in meeting key business goals.
However, there are no hard and fast rules to define what an engaged employee looks like – which makes it a highly complex issue. Employee engagement is difficult to define and tricky to measure accurately. And because it’s tricky to measure, it’s difficult to know how to evaluate problems when things go wrong, as well as to show a return on investment on new employee engagement initiatives. These are issues that won’t go away anytime soon.
Employment engagement influences productivity and customer service
There is a great deal of guidance available, however, on best practice to help contact centre managers. When it comes to measurement, Bright Index[i], a customer service benchmarking organisation, has set out a range of criteria to evaluate employee engagement. It covers achievement, recognition, development, support, knowledge and more. Interestingly, it also claims to have proven an irrefutable correlation between employee engagement and important measures of contact centre success such as C-SAT and efficiency.
Global research company Gallup adds a different perspective, claiming that employee engagement is a hugely influential factor in everything – from reducing employee churn and absenteeism, to improving productivity and customer experiences. Recent employee engagement research from Gallup[ii] revealed that 73 per cent of US employees are ‘actively disengaged’, with 56 per cent of ‘not engaged’ employees looking for jobs or watching for opportunities, compared to 37 per cent of ‘engaged’ employees. It also found that the service sector faced one of the biggest engagement challenges, noting that only 31% of service workers were engaged, compared to 38% of managers and executives.
What contact centres can do to change?
So what can the service sector in general, and contact centres in particular, do to turn this situation around and make themselves more desirable and ‘preferred’ places to work, with high staff engagement?
Our White Paper 20 Strategies and Initiatives to Improve Employee Engagement in your Contact Centre explores this in detail, touching on each of the twenty areas highlighted by Bright Index namely,
– Offer flexible working hours – Move to a work-from-home model – Empower your employees – Collect employee ideas and feedback – Regularly survey employees – Build specialist skills – Optimise the workspace environment – Ensure people are remunerated fairly – Provide opportunities for career progression – Invest in effective planning tools – Recruit the right people – Ensure effective two-way communications – Try gamification – Use metrics to drive positive engagement – Ensure the commitment of senior leaders – Encourage transparency – Engage employees in projects outside the contact centre – Build a super knowledge base – Empower advisors with desktop data – Constantly review/refresh your strategies and programmes
Winning strategies have multiple strands and clear objectives
Of course, none of these points in isolation can solve the issues. Successful strategies typically involve several strands and multiple initiatives to put ‘employee engagement’ alongside ‘better customer engagement’ at the heart of an organisation’s goals. They are also likely to be very clear in their objectives. In other words, what is the employee engagement strategy/initiative designed to achieve? Greater skills and knowledge? More employee empowerment? Enhanced two-way communication? More flexible working hours? Better career prospects? And what does ‘improvement’ look like in each case?
It’s also useful to consider innovative new employee engagement techniques alongside more traditional ones. For example, moving to a work-from-home model is a strategy that has already proven to be hugely successful for many organisations, in terms of improved productivity and lower attrition/absenteeism, while their employees enjoy a better work-life-balance, reduced travel and lower costs.
Gamification, a technique that uses game mechanics to influence behaviours and measure/motivate people, can also help with motivation. One contact centre that introduced gamification for its 20,000 frontline advisors reported that 80% of advisors chose to complete training via gamification[iv], with 72% volunteering to complete skills courses that weren’t even required. As a result, customer satisfaction improved 10 points, with call handling time falling 15% in just three months.
In global markets, where the difference between success and failure can be marginal, managers must use every tool at their disposal to gain a competitive advantage. And employee engagement is a hugely powerful tool. As former Campbell’s Soup CEO Doug Conant so succinctly put it, “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”
Additional Information
Colin Hay is VP Sales at Puzzel
A full white paper on this subject is available ‘20 Strategies and Initiatives to Improve Employee Engagement in your Contact Centre’ – To download the White Paper Click Here
For additional information on Puzzel visit their Website or view their Company Profile
