Your senior leaders might have a “feeling” on creating a Return-to-Office (RTO) policy.
That’s why you need facts.
If remote and hybrid work has resulted in benefits and advantages for the business, you need to speak up. Use this checklist to guide the conversation and challenge assumptions before an RTO decision gets mandated.
As return-to-office (RTO) discussions continue to dominate headlines, contact center leaders need to be ready to articulate the strategic value of their remote/hybrid work program. RTO mandates assume that in-office work leads to better performance, ignoring the business benefits of a well-structured remote model.
If you want to gain support for your remote program and avoid RTO pressure, it needs to be clear that the program brings value to the business. If you don’t already have objective proof of this, you need to validate if it’s true and start sharing it with your senior leaders.
Below are some of the most common benefits of a well-run remote program.
We are starting to see some Workplace data points emerge that are interesting, and could be calls to action in WFH and hybrid environments both within and outside of contact centers. While the data is not at all specific to call centers (more the enterprise in its totality) we can safely draw some conclusions around the impact for CX functions.
1. Gauge employee engagement regularly. Once a month, ask 2-3 questions in the form of a pulse survey. Change the questions out, based on your business priorities and what's going on with your employees. Include things like quality of supervisor interactions, tools to do the job, customer feedback, professional development.
How much are you paying job boards to fill the top of your hiring funnel, and more importantly – why?
Rethinking Hiring in the WFH Era
Starbucks CEO Harold Schulz announced last week that they are “ordering” employees to return to the office a minimum of three days per week, after his earlier request fell short of 100% compliance. He also states that working from home is a “privilege.” Wow.
The pandemic period has proven something really important for contact centers, and that is that Work From Home on scale is a huge win. Separate from the impact that the health emergency itself had on overall service levels and customer experience, all in all the outcome of WFH for contact centers has been extremely positive. So much so that many organizations are now taking a very large stake in permanent work from home as a workplace strategy (see Contact Center Pipeline/WFHAlliance 2022 Benchmarking Survey Results).
Understanding what others are doing with hybrid work and work from home is more important now than ever before. For many, large populations of contact center employees and support staff will now be in office only a few days a month, or (for many organizations) will remain fully home-based. It was one thing to piece together the operating game plan during the health emergency, but now we need to think about long term strategy, and the road to getting there.