Performance Management & How it Can Hurt Your Agents

Performance metrics and annual reviews are a thing of the past—the future of employee management is all about communication, cooperation, and teamwork.

An essential part of management is reviewing employee performance. This is usually done in some type of annual performance review where the manager drags an employee into their office and laundry-lists their shortcomings with numerical scores, performance benchmarks, and the occasional compliment thrown in.

This process often makes employees sweat—and rightfully so. It’s a system that causes your agents to focus less on actual improvement and more on staying out of the company crosshairs.

A good performance management strategy should be simple and involve the very same principles that guide your customer service.

Don’t focus on the numbers; focus on making a connection.
Don’t tell them what they want to hear, tell them something that will provide them value.
Don’t assume that you know what’s best for them — involve them in the conversation and work together to meet your goals.

Tips for Creating a Performance Management Strategy

Research by Deloitte was recently conducted on the effectiveness of performance management. The results were shocking—only 8 percent of companies reported that their performance management process increased value for their business. Clearly, something is wrong with the way employees are being evaluated.

To be one of the few businesses ahead of the curve, keep these principles in mind as you design a strategy for employee performance evaluation:

Spend time productively: Don’t waste your valuable time crunching numbers that will do little more than demotivate your team; focus instead on productive, one-on-one coaching sessions to address each employee’s specific needs.
Lose your outcome-oriented mindset: Did you already ditch the numbers? Good. Instead of KPIs, pay more attention to the specific behaviours your agents exhibit and use this information to give them actionable ideas for improvement.
Provide real-time feedback: Don’t wait until their next annual evaluation to address your agent’s problems. If it’s important enough to be brought up, it’s important enough to address immediately.

Ditch the Numbers

What better way is there to track performance than using the concrete numbers that KPIs provide?

As it turns out, numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to employee performance. When faced with a pass/fail scoring system, employees who under-perform tend to focus their efforts on reaching the acceptable benchmark by any means necessary. On the other hand, employees who score well might assume that their performance is acceptable and will lack adequate motivation to improve.

While their objective and comparable nature may seem like they’re the perfect way to grade your employee performance, metrics have their drawbacks:

Focusing too heavily on statistics can cause employees to lose sight of their bigger customer service goals. For example, an employee who was recently reviewed poorly on their Average Handle Time (AHT) might try to rush their next few calls to bring their scores up to the “acceptable” level.
Competing metrics, like AHT and First Call Resolution (FCR) can be hard to balance effectively.
The use of score-based metrics can cause agents to overlook more specific and actionable feedback in favour of reaching pre-established benchmarks.

Metrics have their place, but that place isn’t as the centrepiece of employee evaluation. The first step of your new employee management strategy is to ditch the numbers.

Building a Partnership

But even with a better system of coaching and feedback, contact centre performance management should move past the paradigm of managers policing agents with micromanagement and over-analysis to make sure performance is up to snuff. Instead, managers should build a culture focused on partnerships with their agents.

A partnership-based approach to employee management will focus on:

Agent evaluation of their own performance
Coaching centred on behaviour adjustment rather than meeting numerical scores
Agents working together to set goals and metrics for improvement
Open communication between agents and managers about call centre procedures and benchmarks

Much like your customer service efforts, making your agents feel heard and involved in the problem-solving process builds a culture of trust and respect in your contact centre.

Developing Talent

The outdated system of outcome-based performance management may have worked in an earlier age, but things work differently these days.

Performance in the contact centre can’t be accurately measured with a simple score. The skills required by contact centre agents (customer empathy, ability to form connections, creativity) must be built piece-by-piece, guided by an informed performance management strategy that focuses on coaching and the development of skills rather than short-sighted numerical rankings.

Curious about more ways to boost your contact centre performance with better employee evaluation? Download our free white paper!