5 Things to Improve your Workplace Culture
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.
2. Take a hard look at Workplace flexibility. What's flexible in your workplace? What's not? What are some things your employees have been asking for that you've been putting off, or saying no to? Get something new into play that is important to your people. And if you're not sure what's important right now, do a pulse survey and find out. Choose one new flexibility component (or refresh one) per quarter. Do a trial with your reps included, share that is is a test, that it might not work out. But try. Talk about it. Get input.
3. Help your leaders rewire their thinking to include more accommodations, exceptions. Help them start with "yes" or "let's see if we can", when they are asked by reps to help balance their lives with the work. And from there, study the types of exceptions and adjustments that are in highest demand. Revisit and refresh your policies and guidelines that are triggering the requests for change. And then brag about it - you deserve it!
4. Ditch your old Attendance Policy. Attendance policies in contact centers are often rigid, punitive, and elementary in design and deployment. Counting minutes, occurences and days causes tons of stress and overshadows the big picture, which is...
We want people to be at work the majority of the time that we agreed (together) that they would work. Establish that range of reasonableness (e.g. 90% of scheduled hours), measure it and give your employees real time visibility of it. When trends arise outside of the range of reasonableness, there’s a discussion to be had. When attendance is far better than the range, give some priority treatment for that (e.g. top spot for building schedules next month or choosing vacation time).
5. Give your Schedules a Lift. From the feedback you’ve collected recently, crank out some new scheduling options. Part-time schedules, self-scheduling, a mix of some fixed schedules and flexible schedules? Swaps and trades for all or parts of a shift?
All of these things are pretty easy to do in WFM. What’s harder is change the thinking of analysts that you’ve trained to say “no”. As soon as they understand you want more innovative and flexible schedule options, they will deliver beyond, with labor savings to boot!