Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Employees Benefit Psychologically from Regular Work Schedules
Many companies build work schedules from the point of view of their own convenience. How can we ensure we’re not overstaffed or understaffed? What schedule will result in minimum coverage to keep costs low? How can we reduce headcount and suppress labor costs?
Increasingly, forward-thinking companies are looking at scheduling as a way of improving the work lives of employees, as well, in an effort to keep turnover down. Customer support is a stressful job, and call center scheduling should look at the employee side as well as the company’s in the cost-benefit analysis. For starters, workers need to know their schedules in advance so they can plan their lives around it.
A recent study conducted by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco and published in the journal American Sociological Review found that only 39 percent of workers polled reported having a regular work schedule, and that these workers experience their available hours fluctuating by around 30 percent each week. Furthermore, 16 percent of workers polled reported that they receive fewer than three days’ notice of their schedules, and 14 percent reported having had a shift canceled in the month prior to the survey. Workers with the most variable schedules reported increase stress and anxiety, financial problems and poorer sleep quality.
While modern scheduling solutions have allowed companies to create more precise schedules, which may translate to less regular schedules for workers, the researchers did not conclude that the schedule software is the problem. Instead, they say, it’s a change in labor market attitudes.
“Since the 1970s, as worker bargaining power has weakened and American ideas about individual responsibility have changed, employers have increasingly shifted economic risk from business owners and shareholders to workers,” wrote the researchers.
Stressed workers, of course, don’t lead to customer service excellence. Instead, they lead to high turnover, poor customer experiences, lost sales and opportunities and short-term gains at the expense of long-term growth. While the study focused on the retail and food service sectors, the wisdom can easily be extended to contact centers. In short, more regular schedules made available to workers well in advance lead to healthier workers, lower turnover and better long-term business prospects. Call center scheduling solutions that can be self-administered and managed by employees thanks to the cloud can help.
“Researchers have shown that improving schedule quality along these dimensions can grow employer profits and may strengthen the economy as a whole,” the researchers concluded.
Edited by Maurice Nagle