Discretionary effort is the often untapped potential within your team, the extra mile they can choose to walk – or not – that often means the difference between good and great in the customer’s experience, your performance metrics and profitability. Let's explore what powers this invaluable asset and how you, as a contact center leader, can cultivate an environment that encourages it.
While this may make discretionary effort sound like magic, it is a real concept that you can encourage and cultivate in your team, though it will require some effort.
What is discretionary effort? How does it add up over time to equal success for your team? Most importantly, what can you do to encourage contact center staff or customer support employees to go that extra mile?
Discretionary effort is the term for the level of work or commitment that an employee could give that goes above and beyond the minimum level of effort necessary for their job function. It’s when employees are engaged with their work and willing to be engaged and committed enough to go beyond the bare minimum job requirements.
Employees with the highest amount of discretionary effort are often the most valuable resources in your organization.
Fostering a culture of discretionary effort is essential for cultivating a high-performing contact center team. When employees go above and beyond, they exhibit a range of behaviors beyond simply working harder or longer. Through conversations with C2Perform clients, we've discovered various ways teams demonstrate discretionary effort, including:
You may well be facing a situation today where some of your employees show up, do what’s expected of them and go home. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, you need those people to succeed.
But what if you could get more of your team to exhibit those discretionary efforts described earlier? What could that mean to your contact center?
Consider the impact of discretionary effort:
How can you transform your team members who currently lack discretionary effort into invaluable assets dedicated to propelling your organization's long-term success? The key lies in motivating them to consistently exceed expectations in every shift, interaction with customers, and meeting they participate in.
Here are a few ideas to help you get started:
If employees aren’t enthusiastic about their work, then it’s really unlikely that they’ll go the extra mile to drive results. Driving employee engagement is crucial for getting your team to exercise discretionary effort and to keep making that effort. So, what are some ideas to engage contact center employees?
Another great way to make coaching session more effective is to use a coaching platform make sure coaching aligns to the key performance outcomes. When coaching doesn’t align with key performance outcomes employees can feel as if it is a waste of their time and can feel unengaged.
These are just a few basic ideas to help improve employee engagement to encourage discretionary effort. For more engagement ideas, check out this blog.
A big part of getting employees to take initiative and do more is giving them a feeling of empowerment that their opinions matter. An easy way to do this is to actively ask for—and then act on—employee feedback about the workplace.
For example, say that, during a meeting, one of your team members says that a lot of the customers they talk to are expressing frustration with the automated voice system or bots the company uses to route incoming calls or try to resolve simple issues. You could use that feedback as the basis for making changes to that system that either eliminates redundant steps, improves the rate at which customers are connected to the right resource, or even change solutions entirely to improve functionality.
By acting on this kind of feedback, you can keep your team encouraged to provide such insight again in the future. They feel like they have a voice. Congratulate them on how the feedback helped improve the customer experience—encouraging others to provide more feedback as they identify similar issues.
How you collect employee feedback and the questions you ask are important as well. Many organizations don’t properly record their employee feedback so it can’t be acted on because they're dependent on manual processes and systems to collect feedback. Without a proper communications platform, aren’t in place so that feedback can be recorded. Make sure your organization has the proper tools to ensure that communicating with employees and collecting feedback is done right. Whether these are manual or automated, they’re critical.
Do your new hires know what the most important metrics in your contact center are? What about their job expectations, how the tools they’re supposed to use work, and the company’s mission? How about what they can expect in the way of support during the critical onboarding period.
Zippia published some great research (actually some of the best we've seen) about onboarding and its impact on a company. Highlights included:
How you are onboarding new employees directly affects retention and how motivated and engaged employees will be. It’s time to quit thinking about onboarding as forms to be completed and new hire training and nesting and look at it as a journey for your new employees. Every touchpoint should be mapped out, shared with the employee and everyone involved in the journey and measured to make sure each step of the journey happens. Think beyond the norm and include surveys, learning reinforcement, structured coaching, focused QA, recognition and skills development as part of the onboarding journey.
Being able to track and make sure all employees have gone through their training makes sure you will have well-qualified and more motivated call center employees. A learning management system can also organize and consolidate your training resources in one place so that important training content isn’t in the onboarding process. (Ours even lets you create those onboarding journeys, but you can do it manually as well if resources are an issue.) Either way, optimizing the onboarding process for contact center employees – and looking at it in a different light – will directly affect whether or not new hires will contribute discretionary effort. Even new hires with the highest potential can become unmotivated if onboarding is not executed correctly.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Okay, who are we kidding? Five years? How about two?
It’s a pretty standard interview question. One that asks the employee to consider their career path with your organization. However, it isn’t just the interviewers that ask the employees this question—eventually, the employee will start to ask where their career is going and where they want to be. So how are you creating an employee development plan and making sure your call center employees feel like they have a real career path with measurable objectives?
If an employee doesn’t see any opportunity for advancement, then they aren’t likely to put in the extra work needed to stand out.
Lack of career development opportunities in contact centers can lead to lowered morale and engagement among employees, who may feel undervalued and disconnected, resulting in decreased productivity. Naturally, discretionary effort is unlikely to happen too.
However, you introduce a new mentorship program—one where more experienced or higher-performing contact center agents start advising new hires with an eventual goal to raise someone to a permanent trainer position or to be a new team lead. On hearing about this opportunity, Steve starts working a bit harder to qualify for the program as a mentor—spending more time on each call and dedicating some time for learning new skills. His numbers improve and, when he starts mentoring a new hire, the new hire produces satisfactory results in a shorter timeframe than is typical for your organization before the program.
Implementing a career development program for potential call center supervisors can produce discretionary effort, better employee engagement and a reduction in turnover by offering a clear path to advance. This not only prepares an employee with essential leadership skills but also boosts team productivity and morale and shows a commitment to employee growth. (Not to be overlooked, it also lowers recruitment expenses.)
Building a team that goes the proverbial extra mile is hard work, but using some of the tips in this blog can get you started. If you’d like to chat with us about best practices we’ve seen in working with 100+ brands around the world, book a discovery call. We’d be glad to help, and there’s never any obligation.