Workforce Management Featured Article
Your Quality Improvement Process Should Focus on the Positive for Great Company Culture
Once upon a time, companies used to pride themselves on the loyalty and staying power of their employees. It wasn’t uncommon for young people to begin a job after high school and ultimately retire from the same company. For a number of reasons, this seldom happens anymore, nor is it always desirable for either workers or employer. But “staying power” is still a good thing. Taking on new workers is expensive and time-consuming, and new workers – particularly in customer-facing positions – are unlikely to be in a position to “wow” customers just yet.
A modest investment in worker retention can go a long way toward saving money and improving customer service. It starts before workers are even hired by choosing the right people. Too many companies today focus on resumes rather than people, and in the contact center industry, this can be a critical mistake. Some people are simply better suited to helping strangers with problems than others are, and identifying these people requires speaking with them and meeting with them. This is the way to create a positive company culture, according to a recent blog post by workforce management solutions provider Synerion.
“A person with a great resume can fail in the wrong working environment while a person with an average resume can excel and spur their team onto greatness,” wrote the company. “It's all dependent on working relationships. If your HR process is entirely dependent on qualifications over company fit, you probably aren't creating a positive company culture.”
Keeping workers happy is also critical. You’ve gone through the effort to recruit them and train them, and they’ve learned the ropes. Now is the time to make sure you’re monitoring and reviewing them in a positive way rather than simply to track mistakes. Quality improvement is an important process and tracking errors keeps them from being repeated, but blaming them on individual workers rather than overall processes is a mistake.
“While quality improvement may be part of your company, if that process focuses on fault rather than process improvement, you may be contributing to a negative company culture,” according to Synerion. “Take a look at your quality improvement process to find out how errors are investigated. If you find more witch hunting than problem solving, start there to improve company culture.”
The end goal is a more collaborative and supportive work environment with an “open door” policy with managers, and an easy way for workers to ask one another questions and help each other solve problems. In a large contact center, this is a challenge. Small startups have the advantage of an intimate company culture in which everyone knows everyone else.
“When businesses expand, compartmentalization of departments and work groups makes employees feel more like a cog in the machine and less like a pivotal part of the process,” according to the blog. “If you have a company where employees don't know the people outside their department, you probably have a disconnected corporate culture.”
What you’re after is a supportive environment with open communications and honest (but respectful) discussions about what can be improved, and how. Ensure that worker reviews are at least 50 percent focused on not what the employee is doing wrong, but what he or she is doing right, and how small changes can help that worker achieve better goals. Companies with a great company culture are those poised to succeed, and they also have a knack of keeping their workers for far longer…which helps them keep their customers more interested and loyal.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi