Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Call Center Scheduling Helps Millennials Achieve 'Work-Life Integration'
One of the biggest mistakes employers make today is expecting younger Americans – those in the so-called “Millennial” generation – to think and act like their parents and grandparents. “If they want to work here, they’ll conform to our company culture.” Companies with this attitude are increasingly finding they don’t have any good workers. Millennials aren’t big on conforming, and they are increasingly challenging conventional thinking about what a modern career should look like.
Milliennial Americans value autonomy and independence in their jobs, and this often translates to a desire to work outside the confines of a 9:00 am to 5:00 pm work schedule. It’s not laziness: this generation works hard when properly motivated. Rather than a “work-life balance,” Millennials are more looking for a healthy level of “work-life integration.”
The call for better work-life integration is being heard in call centers where business requirements often call for agents to adhere to rigid work hours and regimented break schedules,” according to a recent blog post by Lauren Lee Anderson writing for 15Five.com.
“To be clear, it’s not just the millennials that value flexibility,” she wrote. “A Gallup study found that over half of employees would switch to a job that allows them flextime, and that benefits like flexible scheduling and the ability to work from home play a major role in an employee’s decision to take a job or quit one.”
Customers are increasingly frustrated that they can’t do business with companies on their terms. For people who work all day, a call center that’s open early and late can make a big difference to those of us who have had to sacrifice many a lunch hour on the phone trying to straighten out a problem with a customer support representative. With modern workers looking for flexibility in their jobs, it seems like a good compromise: broaden the hours the contact center is open either by adding early and late shifts, or allow agents to work from home, which adds flexibility and back-up resources for unexpected call volume spikes. Extra flexibility can even save contact centers money.
“Schedule preference is a key source of job satisfaction, and for many agents, their schedule is a higher priority than pay rate or time-off benefits,” said workforce management expert and Contact Center Pipeline columnist Tiffany LaReau. “I’ve seen agents willingly choose to work less favorable skills and more difficult caller groups in exchange for a closer match to their schedule preference. I’ve also seen agents quit and take a lesser-paying job because the hours were better. The schedule is the fulcrum in the work-life balance scale, and the scheduling process deserves a maximum amount of care and consideration.”
With a modern, cloud-based call center scheduling solution, companies can build more flexible schedules – even allowing automated schedule swapping for agents – that cover the contact center for longer hours while simultaneously meeting younger workers’ need for work-life balance.
Edited by Maurice Nagle