Hiring and Retention Blues: When the Labor Market is Stacked Against You
One of the leading creators of bad customer service – or honestly, bad anything – is employee attrition.
In an IT setting, no amount of coaching up new hires can keep products on track, and promotions ahead of readiness set your people up for frustration and failure. Significant under-resourcing creates burnout, and the pattern repeats. You’re stuck in the Bad Customer Service/Bad for Everyone Loop.
What Attrition Is Actually Costing You - and Your Customers
The same goes for both front office and back office scenarios in contact centers.
There’s no way to hire and train fast enough to get a productive performer through the nesting process before almost everyone around departs for greener pastures somewhere else.
In a professional services setting, no amount of virtual happy hours can create the kind of good relationships and terrific thinking that helps teams generate creative, collaborative solutions - certainly not if they don’t have enough on-boarding and support to be successful.
According to Gartner, attrition is up 20% this year. This is a material impact for all organizations, especially technical ones and those with significant learning curves. This situation resonates with everyone right now. Our clients say, “I can’t retain people, and I can’t hire enough new people for the roles. How do I keep up? And how do I shake my entire organization free of the paralysis caused by our gaps in people and performance?”
Elizabeth and The 15% Staffing Gap
My client Elizabeth, an IT programs leader, has been in a difficult spot. A significant portion of her team quit their roles in her IT organization to take new roles, take a break, or just get out. Elizabeth was left with a 15% staffing gap in analysts, consultants, and people to lead critical business engagements.
The remaining staff was fretting about workloads and how to move forward with more longevity but also without many of their team members. Meanwhile, all the people coming through the revolving door of starting and leaving was making everyone feel worse about where they were.
Rob’s Rapidly Draining Office, In More Ways Than One
At the same time, our client Rob, a contact center leader with over 300 agents, has landed in a similar situation of simply not being able to hire enough people to maintain service levels in his front office or back office. So much resource time was being directed to recruiting and training that service levels and customer feedback became noticeably negative, and it was hard to see how to rescue morale.
Both Elizabeth and Rob’s situations have the same root cause, whether you indulge in calling it the Great Resignation, the Great Renegotiation, Quiet Quitting or just plain Attrition.
The ease of getting jobs in a market with 3.7% unemployment, the rise of remote and hybrid alternatives, and the bidding wars for talent mean people can leave at a moment’s notice. Leaders have to act quickly to stabilize employee experience and their operations in order to support their customer experiences without further erosion.
What Red Flags Give Warnings About Your Company Culture?
Elizabeth’s situation begged a cultural relook, and fast. The working level team understood why people were leaving; leadership did not. In addition to backfilling roles, the leadership team needed to look at what it would take to better meet the needs of the employees that did stay and how to stabilize workloads and performance.
The solution cut across all disciplines of the company – and importantly, across generations and generational expectations. Our Blue Orbit team focused on coaching the service teams so new employees received individualized attention and support for improving their work as quickly as possible. We also stepped into a mix of leadership and support roles in order to increase the resource pool to get the work done while coaching up team members.
This engagement stabilized the existing workforce in about 90 days – and identified some early warning signs of further changes. How the Greatest Generation and Gen X leads is not necessarily where Millennials and Gen Z want to follow.
At least now, with some notice provided by “red flag” awareness, leaders could determine how they would handle further resignations, start the appropriate recruiting processes, and begin re-imagining the work culture to create a new world going forward.
Rob’s “Turn of the Century” Solution: Everything Old is New Again
Rob’s situation is different. He raised pay from $14/hour to $18/hour. He invested in new technology to drive some automation for customers. He deployed new applications that lessened the amount of re-keying agents had to do. He let agents work from home. But nothing worked to slow the pace of turnover. He was still down over 40 people from his requirements.
We partnered with Rob to look at solutions that could positively impact his business quickly. Our solution: outsourcing. And more specifically, offshoring.
Rob is dealing with twin challenges of finding people to do the work in his environment and having limited resources to fund the amount of staff required for the work.
In his case, we jumped in to identify nearshore and offshore providers that could support his center and we analyzed which transactions could be peeled off relatively easily and sent to the lowest cost center.
Does it sound like the BPOs of 20 years ago? Maybe.
Is it in reality? Absolutely not. There is a huge difference today in the quality of the options, which are worth a serious relook in light of the tremendous cost of labor in the United States right now. As part of a larger solution that also considers how technology, effective routing, and effective tooling can deliver great human interactions, outsourcing is the “So Old It’s New Again” solution for some of the large-scale labor issues today.
What Do These Solutions Have in Common?
Rob’s solution does have a critical aspect in common with Elizabeth’s – the design of the solution had to consider the cultural fit and how the organization or organizations would work together going forward.
Paying attention to the common ground - what things must interact and what things can be independent, and how people will find satisfaction in what they are doing - is a key to setting up positive relationships.
In Elizabeth’s case, the people staying in the organization needed to have immediate rocks to hold onto along with a refocusing on the work of the organization that needed to get done. Rethinking the work processes moving forward, and how they would be staffed without creating burnout, will help ensure people are not fleeing unfair work cultures or the sense that they cannot succeed.
In Rob’s case, the cultural fit was defined by the organization’s ability to determine highest priority calls and the best use of the in-house, experienced agent skills. Rob’s organization also needed to come up with a way to segregate and outsource some of the simpler (but very time consuming!) calls that required less training and had lower risks of errors.
By selecting a smaller BPO partner, Rob could be a significant client and work closely with the new team to answer bigger sets of contacts right away. In working with Rob, we selected a provider within 45 days and an implementation set within 90 days.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Close Your Eyes and Hope for Improvement
It is too easy to pause and attempt to wait for things to improve. In both Elizabeth and Rob’s cases, the way leaders had traditionally pursued solutions were not working. In the current world, where economic forces are operating in unfamiliar ways, it takes courage to stare at your own organization and acknowledge that help is needed.
One of the proven ways out of the abyss is to start with what you have, get help for what you don’t, and certainly don’t stand still.
As you consider your own experiences with your organization, what communication and change challenges are you struggling with?
What have you tried to combat the black swamp of Attrition?
What did your colleagues, friends, or outside experts recommend?
I’d love to hear from you about your own situations. What made things better, or what made things possibly even worse?
Whether your team’s situation is basic, hard, or ridiculously complex, solutions are out there.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience. Get in touch>>
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.