Reward and Recognition: A Key Component of Employee Retention
1 Jul, 2004
By: Michael TamerEmployee retention isn’t complicated. Yet in today’s contact center business environment, we seem compelled to make it complicated. We treat it as if it’s a mystery.
The basic contact center hiring process is simple. We recruit, hire and train people to serve and support our customers and prospects. Our goal is to help each of them achieve the highest performance possible while they work for us. More specifically, we want them to 1) work when we need them, 2) do what they are asked to do and 3) leave us (if they leave) when the timing suits us. (It is impossible to get everyone to leave or stay according to our time and discretion—but that is our goal.)
Nothing impacts a customer service and sales organization more than turnover. Turnover is one of the key impediments preventing contact centers from achieving operational excellence. However, turnover is not inherently all bad. Some turnover, especially of poor hiring decisions, can be very good. The problem is that we want to be in control of turnover. For far too long, contact centers have accepted turnover and allowed turnover to control them. Think about it. What other division of the company would accept a 30-plus percent turnover rate and consider it OK? Would you accept this rate in accounting, development or sales? Not likely.
So why is such a high turnover rate acceptable in the contact center? It’s probably not because the agents are uniquely suited to job-hopping or because the position is so awful that no sane person would want to do it. More than likely, it’s because companies are unable to see the real potential and significance of front-line employees earning the lowest pay. Even your lowest-performing agent will speak to more customers in one day than your top sales executive probably will in a year! The time has come to address the motivation and reward needs of these often overlooked and undervalued representatives of your company.
Valuable or Value-Able?
If I received a dollar for every time I heard executives say how “valuable” their employees are, I would be independently wealthy. Our companies talk a great game, invest in some small trinkets, debate career-pathing and maybe even invest in some reward programs. Unfortunately, those programs are usually only for the top group; we ignore everyone else because they “won’t be around long”.
Instead, we need to make sure our agents are Value-Able. That is, we want our agents to feel valued and we want to make them able to do their jobs. Breaking apart this important word puts us the path to operational excellence.
As a “valued” employee, we need them to feel important, appreciated, welcomed and—most essential—to feel significant. At the same time, we need to make them “able”. They need to be trained, prepared, excited and ready to do their jobs. Together they become value-able to our firm and value-able to our customers.
Everyone knows that contact centers retain staff by creating a winning environment. Facility, management, workstations, technology, training, compensation and enthusiastic fellow team members—all are elements that can help you meet company and individual goals. But to make your agents feel Value-Able, one of the most important components is establishing a strong reward and recognition system.
Not to be confused with trinket handouts for token reinforcement, a powerful reward and recognition system is much broader and is most effective when the following critical aspects are embedded in the plan:
Leaders that Care about Their Employees’ Futures. Executives have a tendency and a need to think “big”. Leadership always requires a larger focus or vision for the organization. Our challenge is that employee retention is all about small relationships. The one-on-one relationship between the manager and the employee is critical to reward and recognition. Employees must feel that their managers and the leaders of the organization want them to be successful. This means we must really understand each agent’s goal for employment in our company and how we can participate to help them achieve it. For some agents, the driving force is the beginning of a long and focused career. For others it is that the job offers the perfect hours and location to serve other priorities in their lives. In each instance, there is data available that we need to have and use to make sure our employees know we care—and to enable us to participate in fulfilling their employment goals. We must communicate—and demonstrate—that we care and that we are a fan or champion of that employee.
An Empowered Environment. We have done a number of studies to define what motivates a customer service agent to do their job and to do it well. One of the key components of these studies discovers what motivates them the most. Our question is “What motivates you most—Fear, Fame, Fun or Fortune?” In virtually every instance, more than 75 percent choose “Fun” as the area that motivates them the most. That finding may not surprise you, but this one will: follow-up research reflects an additional priority—the desire to do a great job. It didn’t matter the level of performer, superstar or poor performer; in each case, they wanted to perform better. Most centers do not take advantage of this desire, but the tools are available. One such company, Merced Systems, Inc., a California-based company, provides a performance management-based tool that helps front-line agents see real-time how they are performing. This tool not only provides important feedback but also gives them early insight into their impact on the organization.
When these two components are inherent in the reward and recognition system, a firm foundation for success is established.
3 Rs: Reward, Recognition, Retention
Reward and recognition programs play a little-understood role in employee retention. In many instances they actually are the single largest obstacle to the retention of employees. Even programs started for the right reasons can stagnate and become ineffective. Why? Because these programs, by and large, do not improve performance and are not reinforcing positive behavior in the majority of the organization.
To understand how to build programs that work, we must first understand what makes them fail. Perhaps you recognize some of these reasons:
• Rarely do reward programs get a measurable return on recognition initiatives.
• Usually the programs start by executives calculating “how much we have to spend”They identify general results areas to recognize—e.g., Customer Service, Quality and Productivity—instead of specifics.
• Often they are provided only to a few key contributors or as standard items to everyone (which defeats the purpose).
• Too often they reward goals or objectives that compete with, rather than complement, existing company goals.
• The programs start with a bang and then fizzle out due to lack of money or interest.
• Reward and reinforcement all too often become an entitlement.
• Unfortunately, they are usually managed manually, are administrative “nightmares” and are almost impossible to track.
To succeed, reward and recognition programs must do more than avoid the pitfalls of failure. They must be designed so that they:
• Improve business results by accelerating value-added behavior
• Complement existing objectives
• Remind employees daily of important results and behaviors
• Prompt managers daily to acknowledge employees when they have done a good job
• Measure and report results and behaviors in a timely and frequent manner
• Deliver appropriate reinforcement, recognition and rewards to all who earn them
• Enable management to evaluate and adjust behaviors, results and/or recognition systematically
• Re-energize employees throughout the year
Reward and recognition must help employees see that management’s investment in them will contribute value to their community, family and workplace. This means that reward and recognition does not always have to equate to a day off, trinkets or personal prizes. It can be an opportunity to serve the community, roses for a spouse or child, or an opportunity to compete to be a manager. Use creative incentives that hit home, based on what you know about the goals and desires of each employee.
The Bottom Line
What makes agents want to stay at a job may not be so different from what makes you and me want to stay. The effort required to improve retention isn’t huge. The actions to take are not wrapped in mystery. Unfortunately, retention efforts are seldom initiated with gusto, or they are abandoned because they aren’t seen as “fun” and they require an investment of cash and time.
The bottom line is that employee retention in a call center has serious financial impact. I’m sure an ROI done on the investment to retain employees would amaze CFOs if training, customer retention and lost time were considered. Turnover is bad business. And if the change to a corporate employee retention strategy results in a culture that is fun as well as more productive, is that such a bad thing?
