Contact Centre Colleague Wellbeing Research: Your Questions Answered

How can one hire for resilience? Are there any tools or tests?

Bridget Colloby: We’re used to looking at customer journeys, it’s important to look at employee journeys as well. Ensuring that you’re setting a realistic expectation, but framing it positively. It’s really important to frame the roles around the fact that you’re, you’re helping customers, you’re possibly helping customers at a stressful time for them. And that anything you can do, regardless of the system constraints that probably everybody’s working with, you’re helping them to make progress. That framing and using positive language is really important. When you’re interviewing and talking to candidates, getting across the challenges of the role, you can do that positively. For example: we’re finding is our customers are currently really concerned about this. And what we’re doing to support you to help our customers is this.

Bridget Colloby: When interviewing, you can try to ask specific questions around the points of resilience. Tell me about a time when you were having a difficult time or a friend was having a difficult time. What did you do? How did you manage it? What did you learn about yourself? That will help establish whether somebody might be able to grow their resilience with more exposure, training and coaching.

Bridget Colloby: And everybody takes in information differently. So it might be verbal at the interview, it might be experiencing the office. But equally, it could be visual. So we were putting together at the moment, we’re updating a brochure where there’ll be a section around the customer and bringing them to life, sections on wellbeing, the training that’s on offer, and the career pathways on offer for you. If you’re not working with your marketing and communications team, they can help especially with framing positive language.

[Audience member] If you want to recruit for resilience, I would recommend that you ask specific questions to the candidate where they have been under stress and how they responded or how they overcame a failure at work. Also, if they have set goals and missed them, how did they deal with it.

What made you decide on 2-3 days in the office, have you tried less and if so how did that work, e.g. once a week?

Emma Dark: That’s a directive from our global team and in our region that is what we’ve been asked to follow. But we do allow flexibility. If someone’s got a particularly challenging week, they’re just not feeling and don’t want to come in, or they’ve got personal reasons why it’s better for them to work from home, we do allow them to do that. In other regions some of the contact centre teams work less days. I’m really relaxed about it possibly being less days going forward. But as a business, because we’ve invested so much in the physical space and the real estate, we are trying to maximise the use of that. And actually, I’ve not asked for it to be less, because it’s working for us. If I saw a high level of absence, or people were really resisting it, then I would challenge that, but actually, my people are responding positively to it. And so I listened to my team and I haven’t tried any other ways because the one we’ve got is working.

I like that Emma said they don’t police the number of days people coming in and they have flexibility to choose, do you encourage them to be in when their Team Managers are in?

Emma Dark: We have anchor days. Throughout the week or the month, we think of themes to make it more purposeful for people to come into the office, making it more fun and engaging and a reason to come in. They don’t all align with their team leaders. But the team leaders do ask for them come in on those same days with us if they can, but we try and keep it as loose and flexible as possible. And we don’t raise eyebrows if they don’t come in on the same days. But as a leadership team we make sure that we have anchor days. There’s always someone from the leadership team physically in throughout the course of the week.

When you do ‘spot prizes’ how do you manage this budget? Is this via a central team or is it at manage discretion who has a budget fo their own team?

Emma Dark: I have central OpEx within which is a budget for incentives. And because we’re taking products from stock, we’re able to just kind of cross charge the cost price of that and just declare it so we know what we’re using and spending. That is for me an easier way of kind of doing the spot prizes. We’ve got a full audit trail and I don’t have to go and get my expenses signed off every time. It feels like a more flexible way of giving spot prizes.

How do you best equip Operational Team Leaders and managers to be resilient also – in terms of balancing supporting their people & trying to give them the flexibility you suggest whilst under pressure from senior leaders to hit certain targets?

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: For team leaders it’s key to developing empathetic skills and emotional intelligence to be able to have really open and kind of rich conversations around what the employee experience and what can be done to help each individual and make sure everybody feels supported. On a wider scale, being open to change is really important, as an organisation and as individual. Being equipped to be able to deal with situations that occur, and feeling confident when you’re going through a rough patch. A future-looking flexible mindset is absolutely necessary to cope with the changing world we all live in.

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: A lot of different smaller things add up to make a big difference. Sometimes we our actions can seem kind of insignificant, or people don’t necessarily recognise the smaller things because they think it won’t make much of a difference. But when all of these things come together, they do make a huge difference. That’s because resilience is not just one thing, but is built across across lots of different areas of the organisation. We should think about resilience holistically. It’s not the responsibility of an individual or reliant upon a particular are. It’s all of these pieces coming together, and organisations can create resilience by recognising the different core pillars that contribute to it. For example, employee fulfilment. Fostering a sense of meaning in work, or creating increased trust or autonomy with individuals who are feeling overly scrutinised or bound by really strict scripting, that type of thing. Going back to what Bridget said, it could also be through building really clear career pathways.

Being in retail and experiencing significant peaks, how are the team targeted whilst also factoring in wellbeing? Customers can be unforgiving in peak times, especially what we saw with the carrier delays over Christmas.

Emma Dark: It is a balance. All of the carrier impacts have been challenging. You’ve just got to keep calm We are in a live operation. That’s what we’re there to do. You’ve just got to normalise things as much as possible. When you go into peak, you know that you’re not going to be delivering your BAU KPIs, and you have that conversation with your exec team well in advance as part of your budget planning so there is no expectation that you’re going to be hitting your Rolls Royce service levels during that period. Ongoing communication is key. As a business, when we were going through peak peak, we were having twice-daily calls as a cross-functional team. We talked about where we over forecast, dealing with things that we were unplanned, so that it was really transparent to the brand VPs and our wider business, how we were coping with the demand that we were dealing with. And we were really transparent about our service levels across the different channels. It was job to lead all of that and make sure that we were really transparent and clear about the things we could influence and the things that were out of our control.

Emma Dark: Within the contact centre, we told everyone when the busy periods were coming, that they just needed to do their best to focus on quality and customer experience. If you’re stuck, stop and ask and don’t panic. We had to keep saying that day after day because the volumes go hockey stick not an even trajectory. It was the job of the team leaders and the Ops managers to be as present as possible virtually or physically, not tasking but listening out for someone’s having a tricky conversation, noticing if someone’s just walked off in tears, building a safe environment. Some of the ops managers were taking tea trolleys around. We absolutely tried to have as much fun as we could throughout that period. My mantra was: let’s enjoy it, ride it, keep communicating, watch out for one another. We’re not robots, we are people. My role was to take the heat out of that and make sure that the senior people in the business understood what was in our control and what wasn’t. And making sure that afterwards, you do a proper retrospective and you look at where the business could have helped you perform better to serve the consumer during those unprecedented times.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

How can middle managers create a supportive environment when they are facing the same challenges? In a way, how can they pour from an empty cup?

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: Middle managers and team leaders need to be supported in their role and their wellbeing is just as important as their team’s. Rather than “pouring from an empty cup” , which suggests that addressing wellbeing will add to the already limited time managers have, we need to find wellbeing solutions that alleviate some of the stressors managers face. Improving wellbeing successfully will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the support they provide to their teams.

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: A challenge managers often face is not knowing where, why or when issues are arsing, and finding it difficult to get to the root of issues. Compounding this, managers can feel lost in how to tackle and improve these issues, meaning they can feel exhausted and drained in their support of colleagues. Key to solving this for managers is improving the insights managers receive about team wellbeing. This means collecting the right data as regularly as possible, to feed information back to leaders and identify red flags. Providing targeted and specific advice, managers can have the right conversations at the right time. It also means empowering managers and employees with the tools and knowledge they need to recognise problematic social norms, working practices and employee behaviours. These skills will not make things more difficult for managers, but will help to improving absence and attrition rates caused by low team morale, as well as improve managerial experience and confidence. It also means building skills across teams in how to demonstrate empathy and how to best build a supportive community. Creating a supportive environment relies on recognising the responsibility of everyone to identify issues and work together to solve them.

What do you suggest is the best way to influence senior stakeholders who are reluctant to test out giving more flexibility to the frontline operation around breaks etc.?

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: Collecting data and/or providing evidence is crucial when convincing stakeholder of the benefits to changes and to help to support initiatives. For example, the benefit of taking breaks at crucial points in time between calls is evidenced in a recent study by Microsoft (2021). A study of brain electrical activity in people participating in back-to-back meetings revealed that activity associated with stress increased as the number of consecutive meetings increased. For the participants deprived of breaks, researchers also noticed that the transition period between calls caused stress levels to spike. It is likely that if you have had a more challenging or emotionally loaded call, that this effect will only increase. Evidence showed that taking even a short break in between meetings to ‘reset’ helped to reduce this compound stressor effect.

Indeed, the research by the CCMA (2022) identified that the simplest and most effective action you can take to improve wellbeing in contact centre agents is to allow them to take a break between calls.

You could also suggest trialling an initiative with a pilot group to collect your own data, before rolling out to a wider employee base.

How can managers best support teams who are split across regional offices and a blend of hybrid and WFH – leaders may not see their direct team face to face/in an office? These are our biggest priority for wellbeing at the moment

Dr. Phoebe Asquith: There are four core factors that need to be in place to ensure that the right support is provided to hybrid workers:

1. Collecting data that can help you to identify red flags even if you are not working together physically. This may be part of the WEM data (but with a focus on wellbeing linked to performance), it can also be through regular feedback from employees on how they’re getting on. For example, currently Sabio is developing wellbeing technology that can collect subjective data from an employee that maps to a framework of wellbeing, to provide a team-level view to managers to help them to recognise wellbeing patterns.

2. Having systems in place that can allow employees to reach out to managers and their colleagues easily. This may be a virtual “open door” hour a couple of hours a week, a social group chat that can provide respite and regular 1:1 meetings.

3. Training for managers, employees and wellbeing champions that help to create a culture of care and connected community. This includes skills and knowledge around wellbeing and psychology, empathy and teamship. This helps teams to share a common language around wellbeing, as well as helps them to spot signs of someone struggling and how to address matters in the right way.

4. Finally, organisations needs to prioritise wellbeing as part of their wider business strategy. Employee wellbeing feeds into customer experience and staff retention, as well as talent acquisition. Making wellbeing part of a systematic and embedded approach to everyday working processes is a step-by-step and gradual, but crucial, process.

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