Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Reducing Employee Absences Can Improve the Contact Center's Schedule Adherence
If you run a call center with more than a half dozen employees, chances are good you use some solution for scheduling those workers. It might be a time-attendance solution, a spreadsheet or a formal workforce management and scheduling solution. These methods are great for ensuring that the contact center is covered with the right skills at all times…provided your workers show up. Many contact centers have problems with attendance, and not even the most powerful scheduling solution will be able to cope if enough workers call in sick or simply don’t show up. At this point, it’s essential to understand the root causes of absences, and if the problem is a lack of morale, take concrete steps to make employees happier at work.
“When employee morale is low, employees will not be eager to come to work and some will even look for lame excuses to miss work,” wrote Melissa Hankin for HR.com. “Boosting employee morale can be done in several ways, such as organizing group lunches, offering prizes to employees who have shown some improvement, allowing them to work from home, and so on.”
Employee engagement is a hot topic in corporate America today, but most companies still haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. While it’s certainly about fair pay and working conditions, it’s also about more intangible things such as a feeling of helping people, having one’s opinion respected and fairness from managers. It also needs to be about minimizing unnecessary stressors, which can lead to absences.
“Having a huge workload is among the various factors that can create workplace stress for an employee,” wrote Hankin. “Workplace stress will not only encourage frequent absences; it will eventually cause stress-related illnesses, such as high blood pressure and heart attack. Poor working conditions can also cause frequent absences from work.”
Good managers ferret out the reasons for absences, which may be due to family obligations, boredom or lack of interest with work, alcohol or drug abuse, unreliable childcare or workplace conflicts. Since there is no “one size fits all” solution for absences, managers may need to build an employee engagement plan for each worker. Simple attention from a manager may be enough to improve a worker’s outlook on his or her job, and constructive (and kind) criticism that is balanced by assurances of the worker’s value may help that worker improve his or her attitude toward the job. In the case of family obligations, a change to the schedule – confirmed with the contact center’s scheduling solution – may be all it takes to decrease absences.
“It is always a wise idea to speak with an employee who is always absent from work before taking a disciplinary action against them,” wrote Hankin. “Having a personal talk with an ever absent employee might uncover the root cause of the frequent absences, after which the manager or supervisor can determine the right way to handle the issue.”
Edited by Stefania Viscusi