Many companies have to deal with the issue of low employee engagement and while not always easy to spot, there are some tell-tale signs you can look out for. Now, more than ever, ultra-low unemployment makes recruiting new contact center employees a real challenge. It also makes it all the more important to retain existing employees and keep them satisfied.
Employee engagement is the ultimate result of everything you do as an organization
Undeniably, increasing employee engagement is far from easy and not something a piece of software alone can solve. On the contrary, I believe the degree of employee engagement is the ultimate result of everything you do as an organization. However, I also think we should task every department with this challenge and have them reflect on how best to make employees happy.
On this blog, we've often discussed ways that the WFM department can boost employee engagement in a contact center setting. For example, suggesting some creative scheduling strategiesthat may increase your employee satisfaction and sharing some broader WFM tactics to boost employee engagement.
The software that you use should make your life as a planner easier. It should automate your repetitive tasks, for example, to free up time for more important work.
Using a WFM software package (for employee scheduling) could prove invaluable when striving to boost employee satisfaction, provided it offers the right set of tools. In this post, you'll learn more about the must-have features WFM software needs to help optimize your employee engagement efforts.
Learn all about employee engagement. Read and download "The Ultimate Guide to Improve Employee Engagement in the Contact Center".
1. Shift bidding lets planners schedule empty shifts, which employees can then bid on via an employee portal. They enjoy more control over when they work, rather than feeling like "meat in a seat". injixo WFM software offers this shift bidding feature as standard.
2. Shift swapping, meanwhile, allows employees to swap shifts with co-workers. A good WFM tool not only gives employees the green light to do so, but also takes the required skill set for each shift into consideration. This prevents agents swapping shifts for channels for which they are not trained.
3. Availability levels allow employees to indicate when they're available for work and to what extent. You may want to keep some parts of the week free of work if at all possible. A WFM tool can automatically take these preferences into account.
4. Working from home is a tried and trusted way to boost employee satisfaction. It allows people to create a working environment in which they thrive, while eliminating those annoying work commutes. But you will also need to configure your IT infrastructure and WFM software accordingly. The software should clearly show who is scheduled to work from home, whether they are currently at work, and what they are working on. The scheduling feature of injixo, for example, includes a dashboard for an at-a-glance view of exactly what your remote employees are doing.
5. Training is another proven method that can underline your commitment to your employees' professional development, thus increasing their satisfaction and loyalty. Good WFM software will come on board with or connect seamlessly to a learning management system (that houses and monitors your training programs). This allows the software to automatically optimize training schedules, underlining the company commitment to professional growth for employees at the same time. At injixo, for example, our own learning management system includes off-the-shelf e-learning courses from The Call Center School.
6. Forecast accuracy may seem unrelated to employee satisfaction at first glance. In reality however, the more accurate your forecast, the more accurately you can schedule employees. This will allow you to hit that workload sweet spot for employees, where they feel neither overloaded nor bored. This can be a real game changer when it comes to employee satisfaction, because agents find it tremendously rewarding to remain productive with scope to delight customers at the same time! At injixo, for example, we apply artificial intelligence to automatically test hundreds of forecasting models and automatically pick the most accurate one for your contact center.