Outsourcing contracts are usually managed and measured by adherence to SLAs – a provider agrees to perform services for a fee, and if the SLA targets aren’t met the provider agrees to pay a penalty. But we often forget that a person is at the heart of every SLA. It’s people who develop, people who test, people who monitor and people who manage. Training people to perform those functions involves a significant investment on the part of both the service provider and the client. When that investment walks out the door, it’s a lose-lose proposition.
Indeed, surveys have consistently shown that attrition is the single most important barrier to a center’s success.
As a former director for a major service provider’s near-shore center, I wanted my center to be the best place to work at the company and within the industry. And while we hit our financial numbers, were the fastest-growing center percentage-wise and even performed without interruption during the Swine Flu and through a major hurricane, I was most proud of the fact that, in a hot market with traditionally high employee turnover, we experienced the lowest attrition of any of our peers/competitors.
Clearly, encouragement and engagement are essential to keeping attrition rates low and generating nonobligatory effort among employees. One key to getting employees to go the extra mile is to ensure every member of the team is empowered to speak up, regardless of how long they’ve been with the company or where they stand in the organizational hierarchy.
That’s easier said than done – and it rarely happens simply upon request. Maybe you’ve been on one of those service provider visits to go and “meet the people” at a remote center. As soon as you enter work areas heads go down, except for the managers running the show and running to talk to you. In many cultures such deference is a fact of life and simply a characteristic of how things are. As a result junior people tend to be reticent and frightened to speak up. The problem is that people who are tight-lipped won’t be the ones to proactively step in and right the ship when they detect it is straying off course.
To actively address this, I intentionally put errors in some of my first presentations to the teams and pre-alerted some new joiners when to point those out. Their actions shocked the audience, but it gave me a platform to visibly commend those who spoke up. Through this exercise, I was able to reiterate that the people who openly voiced their concerns and opinions to leadership would be the ones who would be successful with our company and with our clients. The takeaway was that levels, titles and hierarchy didn’t matter. What was important was to learn to speak up and politely disagree if there was reason for it. When opinions turned out to be incorrect, people were still lauded for speaking up. This further encouraged people who would otherwise be too scared to make useful suggestions.
What’s your experience with employee engagement? Do you agree that empowering employees to speak up is essential to keeping them motivated and engaged?
