Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
How to Deal with Schedule Adherence Challenges
When call centers don’t have adequate resources in place, customer service can suffer, and businesses can miss their target goals and lose clients and revenue. Sometimes the lack of adequate resources in the call center is due to businesses that simply don’t staff the correct number or type of people for shifts. However sometimes the lack of human resources is due less to the schedules themselves and more schedule adherence challenges.
Schedule adherence is a term that describes the extent to which workers do – or do not – appear for their work shifts. It also takes into consideration whether or not workers leave early without permission, or reappear on time (or not) from breaks, lunch, and meetings.
Worker absenteeism can have a major impact on businesses, customer service, and productivity. But even a few minutes lost here and there can add up to big numbers in the long run or when multiplied by many employees.
Nonetheless, many managers often overlook absenteeism. And even more of them fail to address lack of schedule adherence due to workers getting or returning to work later than scheduled, leaving work early without authorization, or taking excessive unscheduled breaks.
So what’s the answer?
Well, the best course of action to take care in the hiring process; to create and enforce an attendance policy; to share that policy with new hires during the onboarding process; and to remind staff members of this policy as needed.
When schedule adherence problems do arise, you can point out to the worker that they’re not in compliance with the policy and let them know you expect them to fix that. This signals to them that you know about the issue and will be paying extra attention to this aspect of their work.
You can revisit that issue with the employee later. Hopefully that will be to acknowledge their improvement. But it may be to revisit the ongoing problem and find a workable solution.
That tends to work better than simply punishing workers without first giving them a chance to improve. (While rewarding those with perfect attendance can encourage better schedule adherence with those individuals and other employees, that alone is typically not adequate. Also, rewarding people for perfect attendance can have its downsides. It can create a culture in which people are rewarded from what’s expected rather than for efforts above and beyond the call of duty. And it may encourage some individuals to show up for work even when they’re sick, which can lead to greater worker absenteeism.)
Edited by Maurice Nagle