Once Again, What Exactly is Performance Management?

1 Sep, 2005

By: Mark Selcow

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Performance management is an oft-heard buzzword in today’s corporate world. Its meaning varies by industry, function and operating context, but the general concept revolves around a core notion:

The use of data to set goals, measure performance, increase productivity and improve results.
More practically, performance management is an initiative to enable better, more consistent, fact-based employee management through the use of data. Employee behavior change is the ultimate goal of performance management and is effective only if an organization uses a combination of people, processes and technology to transform an entire culture.

Applications
In the contact center, performance management has emerged as a standard management activity, and in leading operations, has become as critical as workforce management, quality monitoring, call scripting and proper call routing. As new management techniques, such as Six Sigma, have evolved over time and been adopted by contact centers, data integration has become one of the largest performance management hurdles - until now.

With the introduction of integrated performance management applications over the last several years, contact centers can now successfully address and overcome many of the data integration challenges they have faced in the past to empower employees with the information they need to perform at higher levels.

Even before the introduction of commercial performance management applications, most contact centers were collecting critical performance data. Historically, the difficulty has been the cost of accessing, organizing and distributing the information. Because data has traditionally been stored in dozens of different silos distributed across the operation, organizations have had to dedicate entire teams of analysts, or develop home-grown systems that are difficult to build and maintain. It was very costly to organize, analyze and distribute critical information throughout the organization.

Integrated performance management applications have solved these problems. By collecting, organizing and distributing enterprise-wide data throughout the organization, performance management applications are providing every employee with access to the critical information they need to guide and optimize their day-to-day activities—increasing the productivity and effectiveness of the entire operation.

Going beyond just delivering information, leading applications are influencing and driving employee behavior change through the use of integrated workflow. By integrating specific management tools such as coaching tracking forms, these applications link data directly with specific actions to measure and guide employee behavior.

Making Technology Work
Below are some simple rules to maximize results in performance management implementations.

Have a focused vision. While you may want to integrate hundreds or thousands of metrics in your performance management system, try to pick and emphasize the key metrics that drive your business and where you most want employee behavior change.

• Think big, but execute in phases. You can always add metrics, reports and dashboards to the project scope later, but it is critical to find the right business-driving metrics up front.
• Pick the right software architecture. You want maximum flexibility to change and iterate over time, so find the right product technology.
  Build the right data foundation. Collect and integrate the data in your centers from all possible sources (ACD, IVR, HR, CRM, quality, workforce management, training, etc.) as multidata source metrics can be the most powerful.
• Be sure to include data on the entire business, including employee lifecycle information (hiring, training, coaching, incentives, etc.), in addition to productivity and quality data.
• Personalize each person’s view so they can see their own data, that of their team and any other relevant contextual information (rank, percentile, attainment, etc.) that will help motivate behavior change.
  Capture data that lives in paper and in spreadsheets. Capture information on hiring, training, coaching, surveys and other key processes in a centralized data repository to unlock true measures of performance and not just information that is easy to gather.
• Use web forms to digitize your paper processes, the best software tools available include forms as part of their workflow modules.
• Track the completion of forms to build process metrics such as coaching frequency, recognition consistency, and timely delivery of performance appraisals within your performance management application.
  After roll-out, run experiments. Create new metrics and reports, and introduce new incentives and rewards. Even let supervisors set their own goals and create their own development plans. Performance management is a commitment to continuous improvement.
• Pick a system that permits frequent changes to metrics, reports and dashboards by business users—you shouldn’t have to call the vendor or rely on the IT department to make changes.
• Enable people to take action based on the information they see, and then track what actions corresponded with the best possible result for ongoing process improvement.

Cultural Impact
For performance management work, it is crucial to understand that technology alone is not a complete solution. It is important that an organization recognize the cultural impact of performance management and take steps to weave the systems and management practices—people and processes—into the human fabric of the center. Specifically, successful contact center performance management requires management will to implement and enforce and requires a buy-in process.

Management needs to:

• Use data consistently, hold people accountable, and build incentive systems around the new model
• Allow no more excuses. Be sure that everyone knows what they’re accountable for
• Re-examine processes—hiring, training, quality and other functional processes can all benefit
• Get people to buy in and use the system
• Be patient for “A-ha moments” where people reach new levels of understanding. For example, everyone thinks they are above average performers. But when people see where they rank on a team or unit, and managers observe the variation in per-person performance on their teams, behavior will change. Note that this won’t happen until people see and believe the data
• Be clear that it’s not big brother. On the contrary, people get excited about owning their own performance and can even start teaching each other how to use it
• Be transparent. The more you reveal, the greater the impact on acceptance

Summary
Managing a contact center for top productivity and performance is no easy task and requires an investment and commitment from the entire organization. Performance management is about thinking about people and tasks in new ways and putting in place the right tools and processes to drive performance toward specific goals. It’s about moving away from casual or intuitive management to management by data and facts.

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Data Management Improvements

Performance management applications are solving the data management challenges for contact centers in three important ways:

1. Creating a single version of the truth by consolidating data from disparate sources. This allows every role, team and individual to manage to common objectives and goals
2. Delivering highly personalized information to every role and individual in the operation. This ensures everyone sees only the data that is relevant to them and empowers every employee to make better fact-based decisions
3. Integrating workflow features to directly link data with specific actions, influencing and driving targeted employee behavior change. (For example, trigger a coaching task if a particular agent falls below a target, automatically initiate a recognition process when an agent exceeds expectations, etc.)

Guidelines for Success
The recommendations below are driven by what works, rather than by a single behavioral ideology or set of buzzwords, and have been developed from working with dozens of contact centers in diverse industries and business challenges.

• Make sure you get the data integration and validation right. The goal is a single version of the truth, a set of reports everybody is working from and consistently managing against. Make sure your performance management application’s data integration tools excel at integrating data from production systems, databases, legacy applications, flat files, spreadsheets and other format, and then cleansing and normalizing the data for maximum utility.
• The project must go beyond dashboards. It should leverage personalized dashboards, but add analytical reports, workflow and other means for people to take action—in the end, data alone will not drive improvement to the business; people must act on the data.
• Your tools should be flexible, and adaptable to the changes in your business. Your technology must not be hard wired. You must be able to use any metric, alert setting or workflow you want, not just one of a pre-selected ten. It must be flexible enough to handle subtle variation in how individual contact centers handle their business logic—such as how you calculate sales, AHT, adherence, bonus—and needs to be administered by business users, not the IT department.
• Ensure your tools are easy to use and low risk to deploy. Ensure the performance management application you select is easy to install, does not require any custom software code, and unlike other systems, requires minimal IT support and vendor support after rollout.
• Select technologies that fit your enterprise requirements. They should be open, standards-based, scalable and secure—in other words, fully consistent with your data and applications strategies across the corporation.