Call Center Management Featured Article
Performance Management Drives Transformational Leadership Goals
In the twenty-first century, management styles have gotten a lot of attention. There is evidence that different management styles can have significant effects on a workforce. Autocrats, for example, may see short-term gains because employees comply out of fear of losing their jobs, but in the long run, this style of management leads to employee dissatisfaction and high turnover. Too lax a standard can fail to motivate employees to do their best and gain skills.
Different leadership styles bring about different consequences, which have direct or indirect impact on the attitude and behaviors of the employees. Management and leadership styles are particularly critical in the services sector, and can have a direct impact on economic development. Leadership directly affects employee attitudes, attendance, performance and turnover, as well as customer satisfaction and retention.
A study conducted of banking workers in Pakistan published in Future Business Journal found that transformational leadership – in which a charismatic leader helps drive workers toward a common long-term goal -- is most positively related to outcome variables. Transactional leadership – the carrot and stick approach to improving a string of key performance indicators – was found by the study to be negatively related to long-term performance. Transformational leadership were also found to have positive influence on employee self-efficacy, motivation, creativity and organizational performance.
How Performance Management Helps
So how do you ensure you’re communicating this common goal to employees and inducing them to strive to attain it? Performance management solutions can help. Transformational leadership distinguishes itself from transactional leadership that relies largely on self-interest as the primary motivating factor among followers. This means using performance management to set goals for employees that go beyond this phone call, that contact and a quick wrap-up of every customer conversation. Employees need to understand how their behavior will transform the organization into a vision that benefits both themselves and customers.
Performance management can help state, explain, clarify, set and measure goals and the actions managers and employees need to take to achieve the goals. Managers can get a better sense of which tasks are most critical, and which will lead to only short-term benefits at best.
The Importance of Regular Feedback
The days of annual reviews are gone (or…should be). Employees need regular feedback – good, bad and neutral – to grow in their jobs. (And this means ALL employees, including managers, directors and C-suite executives.) Feedback should also be a two-way street: just as managers should regularly provide feedback to their workers, so too should workers be able to give feedback on management.
In the call center, ensure you’re using a performance management platform that’s easy to use, flexible, goals-oriented, engaging and allows for two-way performance evaluations. Solutions such as Verint Monet's Performance Management can help transform contact center performance management from a reactive – or transactional -- to a more visionary and transformational proactive approach by freeing up time for supervisors and managers to focus on working with agents, coaching, training and planning to attain common long-term goals.
Edited by Maurice Nagle