This is the first post in a 3-part series where we will explore the common experiences from the initial move to work from home en masse, and look at the areas to strengthen this strategy as we continue to leverage the home office in the regular course of business.
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, many companies quickly migrated most, if not all, staff to work from home (WAH). But was that effort successful?
On the surface, yes, or so it seems. Across the country many are at home, and they are working. On the surface that looks like success, and to a large degree it is, but the definition of success can be layered.
To simply check the box “Are we working at home?” as a Yes and call it a day doesn’t take into account the quality of work, or the employees’ satisfaction with the new standards. While that simple Yes may have been the criteria when we exited our workplaces en masse back in March and April for what we hoped to be a few short weeks, the need to continue working from home has been extended through the end of the year for many companies.
A successful WAH program is one where there is a seamless divide between the performance of those working on site and those working from home. It’s time to optimize the process the process and raise the bar for the standards; in a sense we need to move on to WAH 2.0.
There are 4 key factors to evaluate in your WAH program: Monitoring, Motivating, Measuring, and Managing your staff. In this series, we’ll explore each in turn.
Monitoring
When we are working together in the contact center, it’s easy to see what someone is doing. Supervisors walk the floor, interact with their teams, look over their shoulders, and keep people on task. Moving to WAH, we can lose sight of people, literally and figuratively.
Many phone systems have silent monitoring (“Service Observe”) capabilities; the key is to make sure all those who need this feature have it. Some contact centers may have Service Observe buttons on the phones in the contact center, but those phones do not always plug-and-play in the WAH environment, and deploying internal desk phones to the WAH office is an expensive, and risky, task for asset management.
But hearing the calls doesn’t cover all the bases. There’s still off phone work, not the least of which is Wrap-Up (a.k.a. ACW/After Call Work), but we also have email chat, and social media to monitor. For these activities, we need to remotely monitor an agent’s desktop. If someone is in ACW for an extended time, a view of the live desktop activity can show if it’s warranted or not. Simple tools like webcams and video conferences are also helpful in validating that the WAH environment is up to standards.
If your in-house systems don’t support this, it may be time to consider investing in new technologies. But sourcing and implementing a new telephony or recording/monitoring system can take time, and it may not be a budget-friendly endeavor. If you haven’t looked at third-party BPO solutions, this may be the time to consider the advantages of the technologies a partner can bring to the table.
These are real-time monitoring tasks, and should be considered separately from your quality assurance evaluations. We’ll cover QA in more depth when we discuss Measuring your WAH staff later in the series.
One last note on this topic: Don’t be shy to let your staff know your real time monitoring tactics.
Monitoring activity helps to improve standards through the Hawthorne Effect: that is, our behaviors change when we know we are being watched. This is a tool that is crucial, but also must be used judiciously. While the Hawthorne Effect does have positive impacts, there’s a need to control the perception your staff has of the monitoring program. Remote monitoring should first be leveraged toward rewards and incentives, and then for discipline or coaching. We’ll cover these areas in more depth when we discuss Motivating and Managing our teams.
