Flexible Success - enabling a better work/life balance

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How workforce management systems are enabling a better work / life balance through greater flexibility and the benefits that this is creating for employees, customers and the business alike.

When HBOS introduced a package of flexible working, including both work times and time off, it helped them to reduce sickness by 5% and absenteeism by 15%. But the change to a more flexible way of working wasn’t just about improving work / life balance for staff and the human resource return on investment. It was also about what the business and customer needed and the new way of working also saw the number of days within service level increase from 3% to 96% because the contracted hours of agents more accurately matched when customers wanted to call. Flexible working even for large enterprises like HBOS with 6000 + agents is now a reality because advanced workforce management systems allow micro management without a prohibitive administrative overhead benefiting their business, their customers and their employees alike.

The twain shall meet

Offering more flexibility around the way staff work is one of those rare occasions where all of the stakeholders; agents, customers and the business can benefit at the same time and workforce management systems have become the arbiter that makes sure the needs of the three parties are realised.

Diagram1 - Aligning the needs of stakeholders with respect to flexible working

The ability for businesses to be more flexible is being afforded because workforce management systems can do the massive amount of computation needed to create every individual’s work schedule so that enough people with the right skills at the right time are available to service every type of contact. Workforce management systems accomplish this task taking into account a vast array of constraints including holiday entitlement, work time preferences, employment contracts and even rewards such as allowing individuals different freedoms to choose based on previous performance etc. Finally the system will also give visibility and control to everyone from agents who can see / trade schedules and book holidays, to planners who know what their service level will be to payroll who have exact data on who should be paid what to remove the potential for dispute.

Getting your work contracts right

Work contracts that align with the hours that your customers want to contact you are the cornerstones of good resource management. If your work contracts say 9-5 and your customers contact you 8-6 you are going to pay overtime, even if your workforce management system can make tea.

It’s easy to find out what the mathematical optimum is for work times within contracts using your workforce management system. But, will it be attractive to new recruits or will existing workers want to change their contracts? This is a question for your human resources department but if you work with a union they are also a good place to start as they will help you get together a focus group so that they, as well you, can understand what’s important for their members. The appraisal does not have to be limited to just a discussion on working hours but can encompass a broad range of ideas like duvet days, where agents can elect to take days off without notice. This has proved to be very successful at reducing absenteeism by stopping ‘the sicky’ and is popular with employees who want it to be easier to take occasional days. During one focus group for a customer we also discovered that one of the most important factors to consider, from the employees point of view, was maintaining social networks. Agents simply wanted to remain with people they knew in their teams. If you are asking employees to change contracts you will want to make these as attractive as possible and the advanced features of workforce management systems make it easy to be flexible in other areas that can add value to your new contracts without incurring any administrative overhead.

Having established how your employees would like to work, the way to gauge what impact this will have on the number of resources you need and the service level you will offer your customers is your workforce management system. You can run many scenarios and make changes to work patterns to come up with a compromise between the two and test these in your focus groups to see how attractive the contracts are in comparison to what you have existing as well as to each other. One of our financial services clients approached this alignment by building life style packages around their employees’ needs. Typical examples of this are ‘family packages’ - for those who prefer term time working because they have children and ‘student packages’ - for those who want supplementary income through evening and weekend work only. For the financial services company concerned the packages that they designed were so well received that 70% of staff had elected to move to these more flexible contracts from fixed contracts within a period of 6 months.

Being able to design lifestyle packages is becoming increasingly important for contact centres and has long been recognised within retail shop environments that rely heavily on part-time workers in particularly. One large contact centre that we work with in Belfast is in an area with a comparatively small labour pool where unemployment was running at just 4%. The large size of the centre, and the large demand for labour it created, meant that it was increasingly difficult to find workers who wanted fixed contracts that contained specific unsociable hours such as weekend working and late nights. Previously part-time work was found to be too difficult to do, as with 2 - 4 times as many workers to accomplish the same amount of work the administration was more than double. With workforce management the centre’s administration costs became negligible and this allowed them to offer part-time jobs that were attractive to the labour market, tapping into a huge pool of workers who were more than willing to trade their high skills for more flexibility from their employer.

Adding flexibility

Although workforce management is crucial to helping define and manage work contracts this is only the beginning of how these systems can afford real flexibility for your business. The next level of flexibility is about creating and managing a market for shifts and schedules so that individuals can trade their work times with others. Essentially, as long as two employees can accomplish the same type of work (i.e. they can handle the same contact types) there is no reason why they should not be allowed to swap the hours they work. Notwithstanding rules such as working time regulations and minimum work hours etc.

Previously the administrative barrier to shift swapping was considerable as monitoring a skill pool to make sure that service level would not suffer for each and every contact type (even more complex if multi-skilling is involved), that payroll was correct and that work rules were not being contravened was cost prohibitive. Using a workforce management system, agents can post their shift or schedule and trade it with others, creating a labour market place within an organisation. This degree of flexibility is something that is very attractive to both new recruits and existing employees and is something that your business should consider very carefully if you are looking to promote new contracts.

A work market can even function across geographical boundaries if you have a virtualised contact centre and is very useful for staffing public holidays or times around cultural events that are specific to one geographic area. One contact centre we work with Ireland also has a centre in England and the day after St Patrick’s Day is a very popular trade.

Another form of flexibility that workforce management can easily afford is time banking and shift slides. Within a day recalculation of the number of resources necessary to achieve service level can be carried out quickly and it’s easy to alter an individual’s schedule so that they can slide the start time of their shift along a few hours if their car won’t start in the morning for example. It’s also easy to simply allow people to go home, or not to come in at all, if the forecast demand within a day is lower than expected, the agent can then just opt to work a different day instead.

With a competitive labour market and increasing demands for a better work/life balance from employees flexibility will become more and more important within the UK over the next couple of years and workforce management systems are crucial to being able to plan and offer this flexibility. Getting better alignment between what your employees want, what your business needs and what your customers demand is a complex process. But, the rewards are considerable resulting in less overtime, better resource usage, higher service levels and much happier employees with lower attrition and absenteeism.

Martin Blacher is Director of Marketing for QPC who provide resource planning consulting and the IEX TotalView workforce management system.

Our thanks to the Professional Planning Forum, the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, for their kind permission to reproduce information from their HBOS case study.

HBOS were a finalist in the Contact Centre Innovation of the Year Award 2005 run by the Professional Planning Forum. For more information on this and other case studies…please visit their website on www.planningforum.co.uk

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