Motivating agents through every shift

How do we find the magical formula that delivers perfectly motivated staff to our workplace every day?  Should we shower them with incentives?  Pay them more?  Provide pizza every second day and an in-house masseuse every other day?  What can we do to get our staff motivated?

The very nature of call centre work presents a challenge for managers.  A call centre agent undertakes repetitive, sedentary, often boring work with their every movement closely monitored.  Abuse from customers and ambitious performance targets all compound the level of stress many agents experience. 

The trick to motivation on a daily basis is to create the ‘want’ factor.  Create an environment and workplace culture where people want to perform at their best.

Good managers know how to foster motivation in a subliminal and non-confrontational manner.  Their expectations are conveyed clearly but they manage to get buy-in from their staff without performance targets sounding like a threat. 

Respect is the foundation of healthy workplace relationships.  Managers who lead by example will set the tone for all other interactions between staff.  Considerate relationships and dialogue between colleagues can quickly grow to friendship.  Hey presto!  Another key motivator.

Recognition and support for commitment to a mundane task helps staff soldier-on through the rough patches.  Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  Agents maintaining professional composure through abusive calls need to be acknowledged.  It might be their job to cop it on the chin, but let them know they’ve done well.  Acknowledgement motivates agents to perform and diminishes the negative impact of abusive calls.

Make your staff comfortable.  Well equipped kitchens and rest areas allow staff to make the most of their breaks and interact socially.  In house radio lightens the atmosphere and helps reinforce corporate messages.   Staff can join in the fun by including their own messages and voice-overs.

Try and build an interest in the customer and a sense of value in the task.  Immediately after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, all aircraft around the world were grounded.  Stranded passengers around the world jammed the lines of every airline call centre. 

One Melbourne centre servicing the European and US markets briefed their staff on the crisis and threw all their resources into serving their customers. Staff members were commended for the empathy they showed for the fear, isolation and frustration customers were experiencing.  Management was incredulous at the overtime performed, the workload and stress the agents were under for an extended period and the total absence of complaints from staff.  They wanted to perform for the customer.

Offer variation of tasks to keep staff stimulated.  Multi skilling is an investment that delivers greater benefits to the customer and adds diversity to an agent’s daily tasks.  If possible, mix some back office functions within the day or week to create further career opportunities within the centre.

Work is where we need to be in order to earn a living.  By recognising the motivating social, environmental and human factors we can make it a place our staff wants to be.