Call Recording Featured Article

A recent Gallup poll showed that less than a third of employees are engaged in their job. This has been consistent since the polling organization started surveying on this topic in 2000.

One of the key factors in employee engagement is engaged management; Gallup found that management accounts for roughly 70 percent of the variance in engagement among companies.

This is good, because it means that contact center managers have an opportunity to boost engagement; the lack of agent engagement is not necessarily a rule set in stone.

How do boost employee engagement? Here are three tips to guide a more engaged contact center workforce.

1. Communicate Often. Consistent communication is a key to employee engagement, according to Gallup findings. As humans, we need and crave the feeling of being connected. By communicating with employees more, be it through email or regular meetings, managers can help contact center agents feel this connection. This, in turn, drives agents to be more engaged in their work.

Engagement is highest among teams that have daily communication, according to Gallup, so make sure that a day does not go by without agent interaction with each other and management.

2. Center Performance Management on Clear Goals. We all want to do our job well, and clear goals help us know what must be done to succeed in our work.

When work goals are amorphous or too hard to achieve, it is easy to tune out and stop putting in full engagement with the work. So one way to drive engagement in the contact center is to review team and individual goals to ensure they are reasonable.

3. Emphasize Strengths and Not Weaknesses. Gallup has studied human behavior for decades, and the pollster suggests that employees respond much better when their strengths are emphasized by management.

The latest study by Gallup found that 67 percent of employees who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their strengths or positive characteristics are engaged. This is in contrast to the 31 percent engagement by employees who reported that their managers focus primarily on their weaknesses.

The takeaway: Talk strengths, not weaknesses for an engaged contact center workforce.

Employee engagement may be low at most businesses, but savvy managers can defy the odds.