Aligning Employee Goals with Strategic Enterprise Goals through Performance Coaching
1 Jan, 2008
By: Mark SelcowIn order to drive stronger connections to the enterprise, contact centers must ensure that both operational and individual employee goals are aligned with corporate strategy. With thousands of employees, a dynamic organizational structure and dozens of call types, contact center frontline objectives can, at best, be disconnected with corporate strategy. At worst, they can hinder enterprise-level objectives.
To develop a stronger connection to the enterprise and ensure goal alignment, leading contact centers are leveraging coaching as the centerpiece of their performance management program. As a critical process in the operation, coaching helps organizations contribute to corporate objectives first by aligning individual and group goals with corporate strategy and second by reinforcing individual accountability at every level of the organization. Within the context of performance management, coaching is tuned, empowered, accountable and tied directly to overarching company goals – ensuring positive returns on organizational strategy. This approach presents an organization and individuals with actionable plans that are measured, managed and bottoms-up. Performance coaching gives contact centers the confidence and assurance that their customer operations are not only performing to enterprise standards, but also that their activities are contributing to the bottom and top lines.
The Link: Coaching’s Impact on Operational Results
A 2007 coaching best practices and benchmarking study* found that the more time an operation invested in coaching agents per month, the more likely the operation was to report performance at, above or significantly above goal for revenue, customer satisfaction, productivity and quality. While coaching is inherently time intensive in terms of human resources, an organization must understand what the up-side is in spending additional hours coaching, and equally as important, ensure supervisors are establishing the correct rhythm with the time available to them.
However, in many contact centers today, coaching is not managed with the strategy and rigor necessary to deliver business impact at the enterprise level, jeopardizing the success of the organization as a whole. Yet, if enterprises treat coaching as a first-class practice, spending the time and energy to effectively implement a deliberate and controlled coaching process connected to overarching company objectives, it can be a lever for significant business improvement.
The practice of using systematic, cadenced coaching sessions and development plans based on data that is personalized to each individual is called performance coaching. When compared to typical coaching practices today, performance coaching helps an organization achieve its high-level strategic goals by establishing and managing a set of highly personalized and focused performance targets for every employee, thereby establishing the appropriate balance between productivity, revenue and customer satisfaction anchored in overarching enterprise objectives. For example, if customer satisfaction and loyalty levels are the best indicators of business success for a certain company, and customer satisfaction and loyalty levels are dependent upon first call resolution, performance coaching can help enhance agent coaching and development activities around first call resolution to achieve these vital business targets.
The Bottom Line -- Performance coaching allows organizations to take a holistic view of the organization — by coordinating both its financial and strategic plans with the individual abilities of its personnel — to help an operation execute on enterprise objectives.
Standard Coaching Impediments
Unfortunately, contact centers have been slow to adopt the institutional changes necessary to improve coaching and development activities and as a result, coaching is largely one of the most misunderstood, underestimated and overlooked enterprise processes. While most contact centers utilize at least some version of coaching, operations are generally missing key aspects of the performance coaching process.
Performance Coaching: Who, What, When and How
Who to Coach --- Old coaching methods often result in supervisors spending a disproportionate amount of time with the worst performing segment of the agent population – typically the easiest target to identify, but often the least likely to impact operational performance. Performance coaching promotes a focused and efficient approach by helping supervisors rapidly pinpoint development needs and opportunities for each individual at an appropriate tempo.
Through personalized dashboards delivered to every employee in the operation, performance coaching not only gives supervisors and managers visibility into an agent’s entire performance, allowing them to identify improvement opportunities, but also empowers agents to self-correct. Tools such as automated alerts and tasks notify Supervisors when a targeted development session should occur, with whom, and on what topic, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of employee development sessions by ensuring individual agents get the right attention at the right time.
What to Coach --- Unfortunately, common coaching practices today often lack focus on facts, goals and actionable data. Coaching sessions typically take on the form of superficial status updates rather than development consultations. This intuitive approach to coaching does not take into account enterprise goals, but rather is meandering in direction and purely procedural. In contrast, Performance Coaching zooms in on and tackles specific areas for improvement which are most critical to managing a successful organization, allowing supervisors to deliver appropriate content to improve individual behavior, and on a grander scale, boost operational success.
After gaining a clear understanding of who needs to be coached, with the help of highly personalized reports and dashboards, performance coaching allows supervisors and managers to balance the desired outcome with the particular behaviors of an agent. Automated alerts, tasks and coaching forms prompt and track specific coaching sessions by topic – ensuring that development sessions address emerging trends and reward exceptional performance, efficiently. Performance coaching’s head-on approach to identifying and managing individual performance trends makes certain performance issues have the opportunity to be addressed before significant problems occur, and before employee performance falls out of line with corporate objectives.
When to Coach --- Old coaching is casual and retroactive. Coaching sessions are not regular or cadenced, and often only occur when agent performance slips below satisfactory levels. Performance coaching, on the other hand, not only emphasizes the quality of coaching sessions, but also the steady rhythm and frequency of these sessions. Alerts facilitate a steady coaching pace maintained across the agent population. Further, with metric-based alerting, supervisors can be notified immediately when an agent falls above or below a specific threshold so action can be taken to prevent a slide in performance. Frequent and methodical coaching sessions combined with performance alerts help frontline employees stay focused on the key metrics that ultimately drive corporate success.
How to Coach --- Finally, old coaching methods often deemphasize employee accountability to individual goals as well as overarching enterprise objectives, overlooking the importance of coordinating initiatives across the organization and tracking progress against action items agreed upon during each coaching session. Performance coaching automatically tracks each agent’s milestones and correlates agent performance to both individual and company goals through online forms and advanced analytics. This process allows supervisors to utilize the coaching method that is most effective for each agent, while simultaneously helping organizations define, control and achieve their strategic performance targets.
Next Steps
Coaching practices in call centers today come in many forms, but it is the organizations with standardized and institutionalized coaching processes and tools that are able to elevate both individual and operational performance, allowing them to attain enterprise objectives. Yet even with a set of synchronized tools and practices, operational success in the long run calls for commitment across all levels of the organization, coach and agent compliance with standard coaching practices, clockwork regularity of coaching sessions, and the ability to accurately measure progress and effectiveness and enforce individual accountability.
Conclusion
Performance coaching should be used and regarded as a continuous cycle of calibrating performance to reach short- and long-term enterprise goals. By linking individual goals to strategic performance objectives, performance coaching establishes and enforces key employee behaviors that allow operations to meet high-level objectives. With such an effective tool at the disposal of operation executives, the lever of operational success is waiting to be pulled.
*The Merced Systems 2007 Coaching Best Practices and Benchmarking Study
