A growing number of businesses are learning that employee satisfaction and employee productivity go hand in hand.
Understanding what makes call center employees unhappy – and what makes them more likely to quit their jobs than almost any other type of employee – may seem relatively straightforward. Giving them windows would probably help. So would more breaks. And is there any way to make the people they’re calling be nice to them?
Call center retention doesn’t seem the sort of problem that would require the services of a crack team of MIT geniuses. But when Bank of America hired Sociometric Solutions to try to mitigate the burn rate at its call centers, the bank’s executives were at the end of their proverbial ropes.
“Call centers have been managed one way since the 1950s: You’re on the phone, and then you’re on a break and no one else is,” says Ben Waber, president and CEO of Sociometric Solutions. “That’s worked pretty well and so they’re still managed that way. But Bank of America was convinced there was something different going on.”
BoA has numerous call centers, spread out around the world. While they’re all run the same, Waber says, some perform better than others. “They wanted to figure out why, and apply that learning across centers, and they were convinced culture must have something to do with it,” he explains.
Investigating call centers
Waber and his team, armed with high-tech employee badges, set out to uncover the secrets of effective call centers. Equipped with sensors, the badges measured employees’ locations, movement, tone of voice, volume, and aspects of their communication style, such as how often they face people that they are talking to. The company then took that data and compared it with various performance indicators to pinpoint the sociometric roots of good and bad work performance.
If that sounds like a massive invasion of privacy, that’s probably because it is. However, Sociometric Solutions balances out the invasive nature of its technology by advocating for privacy regulations that would protect employees and by ensuring that, in companies using its badges, only employees have access to their personal data. Employers get aggregate data, which can help them see trends like the fact that their team performs better when they get more face-to-face interactions in a day.
At Bank of America’s call centers, Sociometric Solutions found that giving employees breaks together, instead of forcing them to take breaks alone, resulted in a more cohesive staff. Employing this simple change, the company dropped its turnover rate from 40% to 12%.
Perks, people, or purpose?
Over the last few years, there has been a marked increase in the number of companies touting their happy workplaces – and in the number of consultants promising to make any workplace more palatable. A handful of business schools have begun integrating positive psychology into their curricula, using the discipline to teach students how to create a happy workplace – or a positive business. As interest in the field has grown, so have its names: its strategies are known, variously, as “positive business”, “employee happiness”, “workplace happiness”, “employee wellbeing” and “employee engagement”.
Last month, the first Positive Business Conference took place at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. The gathering featured speakers from Procter & Gamble, Humana, and McKinsey, who discussed their experiences with the rollout of positive business strategies.
One of the first companies to measure – and engineer – the contributors to employee satisfaction was, of course, Google. In its attempts to create the world’s happiest workplace, the company staffed its HR department with sociologists. They experimented with employee interactions, offering workers free lunch to encourage them to stay on-site, and then organizing the cafeteria in such a way that employees stand in line just long enough to have an interaction with each other, but not long enough to get annoyed by the wait.
In addition to Google’s various lauded – and often lampooned – perks, which include everything from on-site massage therapists to a fleet of bikes for employees to use at will, the tech company routinely offers employees workshops in skills to boost their wellbeing and productivity, ranging from yoga to the popular “search inside yourself” class (now also a book), which teaches mindfulness.
A growing – and diverging – discipline
Google may have blazed the trail when it comes to employee satisfaction, but it has been joined by legions of tech companies in the last year, particularly in Silicon Valley and the UK, which currently find themselves in the middle of another dot-com style talent war.
“In tight labor markets like California, you really do have to be good at this to retain talent,” says Jane Dutton, PhD, professor of business administration and psychology at University of Michigan. “It was more trendy before and I think it’s now real economic imperatives, but there are multiple imperatives, it’s not just about retention and the attraction of talent.”
Within the positive organizational universe, the experts tend to divide into two camps: those who feel that employee happiness hinges largely on a sense of purpose, and those who feel that relationships are the secret sauce. Dutton falls into the latter camp. “Having positive relationships at work is seen as a major predictor of employee engagement, and that’s a major driver of customer engagement,” she says.
When it comes to cultivating health and well-being among workers, Dutton says that the most important consideration is community. “Meaning or purpose is part of it, but I would bet on positive relationships,” she explains. “Evidence on the almost instantaneous effect of positive human connections on people’s bodies convinces me that if I had to choose whether my workplace had purpose or positive connections, I’d bet on connections.”
However, Dutton notes, human connections and workplace purpose are interconnected. “If you have positive connections between employees, that means it’s also probably easier to cultivate meaning in the work they’re doing,” she explains. “And similarly if your employees feel they have a purpose, it’s easier for them to cultivate positive connections with each other.”
Leading the charge for Team Purpose is Aaron Hurst, CEO of consulting firm Imperative. Co-founded by board member Kyla Fullenwider and COO Arthur Woods, Hurst’s company has quickly become the go-to firm for startups wanting to move beyond perks and create happy workplaces where employees will want to stick around for a while. It has worked with Twitter, eLance, and Etsy in the last few year, and Hurst brings to the table his experience consulting with LinkedIn, where he helped to launch the website’s “board” and “pro-bono” functions.
“I’ve seen it over and over, what people want from their careers are things that help them boost purpose in their lives,” Hurst says.
While Imperative provides quantitative surveys and reports of employee happiness as part of its offering to employers, it also makes a point to include more qualitative elements. “Data only matters in context,” says Fullenwider. “The way I see it, the value of data is that it’s a language that can help you speak to the unconvinced to get that initial buy-in on why this stuff matters. After that, it’s a lot of good old-fashioned insight, talking to people, slowly moving the needle–really digging in and working on creating a healthy workplace.”
Imperative bases its quantitative work on the research of Dr. Martin Seligman, head of the positive psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania. Working for the US military, Seligman developed a measurement tool that tests emotional and psychological wellbeing. He and his staff recently simplified it to an 18-question survey called the PERMA scale (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, Accomplishment).
The quantified self, qualified
Matt Stinchcomb, vice president of Values and Impact at Etsy, says that the PERMA scores were really useful when he was first starting to work with Imperative. “I’m fortunate enough to work at a company where I don’t have to convince the CEO, but having it science-based makes it much more convincing to the data-driven folks in our company,” he says. “And being able to go into the board meeting and present numbers around this sends a signal that this is something we are taking seriously.”
This data clarified a large number of questions, such as which Etsy offices tended to be happier, and whether employees with male or female managers reported different happiness scores. And many of these lessons impacted the company’s policies. For example, Stinchcomb says, “We saw that people who were more active as volunteers had higher wellbeing scores, so we launched a program to give people 40 hours a year to volunteer, which they could either spread out over the year or take all in one week.”
Ultimately, Stinchcomb says, Etsy learned that one snapshot of how the company’s employees felt in a given week was not going to amount to meaningful change. “I realized we needed more of a continual read on employees, but without constantly pestering them with a survey, so we started to look at all the other signals that would indicate employee wellbeing: participation in things, for example, or something as simple as employee feedback,” he says.
“We needed to find the middle ground between heart and data,” Stinchcomb explains. “Maybe it’s enough that we’re looking into this at all, that we care enough about our employees’ wellbeing to want to improve it. Maybe it’s as simple as ‘hey, be nice and respect each other.’ Rather than worrying about what wellbeing is and how much wellbeing exactly, let’s just do the stuff we already know makes people feel good and then just measure stuff like retention rates that we already have.”
Even Sociometric Solutions’ Waber admits the limitations of quantifying everything. “Google is better at this than most companies, but the average tenure there is what, one year?” he says. “The tech industry just has some of the highest turnover rates of any industry. And when you look at the perks those companies are offering, they blow everyone else out of the water, but for these guys, I don’t know if worker satisfaction solves the retention problem. At the end of the day, someone working at a tech startup could feasibly go start their own thing and cash out with $10m dollars. They might like the foosball table and the free lunch, but no matter how great the perks are, Google can’t pay them $10m.”
From: The Guardian
