“Do more with less.”
It’s the challenge facing organizations of all sizes as they attempt to navigate a constantly shifting global economy. But just because everyone is trying to solve the same problem doesn’t mean that there is a single solution.
Is there an alternate strategy to overcome this classic business quandary? There is, but it is only going to be found before your organization makes the decision to cut people and resources.
The whole motivation for cutting back on overhead—people and other resources—is to produce better bottom-line results. In some instances, cutbacks may be justified; some organizations may have bona fide areas of waste that can be cut with little or no blowback. But for most well-run organizations, these are exercises in cutting away bone and muscle, not fat.
There is a way to get to the desired results without asking fewer people to work with fewer resources. But it requires a total rethink on how you invest in your workforce.
The secret is to make focused investments in your frontline leaders, equipping them with skills to boost the performance of the people they lead. It’s not a revolutionary strategy, but it is one often overlooked when the pressure to reduce headcount is ratcheted up.
Our client, a multinational financial services company, was experiencing an array of problems in its call centers that were leading to increased operating costs.
Stubbornly high attrition triggered persistently high recruitment and hiring costs. The high turnover also contributed to a higher cost-per-call due to lower performance metrics: first-call resolution, average handling time (AHT) and average speed of answer. This, in turn, was impacting net promoter scores and customer retention rates.
To address those trends, our client decided to adopt a strategy that is not widely applied in the call center industry: Rather than cutting costs, it chose to invest in its leaders.
The client had tried traditional leadership development in the past, but after an initial flurry of improvement, little was done to reinforce best practices. It seemed obvious that this was not the best way to help managers tasked with motivating and engaging call center agents.
Call center managers are typically promoted up through the ranks of agents and thus have little exposure to traditional leadership development. Also, call centers generally ask managers to spend up to 90 percent of their time on administrative tasks, leaving little time for them to develop their call center agents.
This leaves managers trapped in tasks that take them away from face time with agents. When they do get a spare moment, they are only able to provide the most basic of guidance. Performance may improve modestly in the short term, but without the time for leaders to interact with their teams and reinforce new behaviors and approaches, performance returns to suboptimal levels. Frustrated employees typically decide to quit rather than meet increasing expectations without any support from managers.
We helped the client build a solution that focused on developing skills that would allow managers to create a rewarding working environment for customer service agents. A feedback model was used to impart coaching skills.
In all, frontline managers received sixteen hours of training in the solution’s core elements and four hours of coaching each month to develop fluency in the newly acquired skills.
The client organization had high hopes that it would be able to break free from the “less-is-more” strategy and build better results. In the end, the solution met and then exceeded all expectations.
Does your organization have engagement and retention challenges? Are your managers desperate for some leading-edge leadership development?
No matter how you cut it, the solution to both issues starts with altering how you approach the challenge of improving the bottom line. You can try to use subtraction. But in most instances, better performance—and thus a better bottom line—will only come from addition.