Engagement and Productivity
According to Gallup, “Engagement comes before performance, because it is foundational to consistent excellence.” Gallup’s 2024 report on the State of the Workplace Report says that 62% of the global workforce is not engaged. And it’s costing companies. 52% of employees are actively looking out for other opportunities.
“Not surprisingly managers play a central role when it comes to employee engagement. In fact 70% of variance in employee engagement is due to the manager.”
BPO efficiency strategies must look at improving how managers interact and lead their teams. This blog post explores how highly effective BPO managers use personalization to improve their agents’ engagement, and drive productivity.
The statistics are telling. As are the “quiet” trends. The latest to join the club is quiet vacationing. All the quietness seems to stem from a deep dissonance from work and its primary representatives – the manager.
Employee Experience, Engagement and Effective BPO Managers
Employee Experience encompasses how a person experiences all aspects of their workplace. It includes employee interactions within their workplace and how they feel about those interactions. These will be interactions that begin from hiring and continue through their entire time with the organization. Some interactions are spread across their time with various functions like HR and IT for instance. But some interactions are what form the majority of their time at work. Typically, this is their interactions with their own team members and their line manager/supervisors. That’s why it’s clear why managers play such a vital role in how an employee feels about their workplace and how they interact with it.
IBM and Workhuman’s joint study reports, “Organizations that score in the top 25% on employee experience see nearly 3x the return on assets and 2x the return on sales compared to organizations in the bottom quartile.”
What should BPO manager skills incorporate so they can improve their interactions with their teams and improve their team’s experience and engagement levels? We suggest personalization.
Personalized Coaching
An average 25-30 year-old employee experiences personalization everywhere – from footwear to digital experiences in gaming and dating. But at work they’re met with a one-size-fit-all experience – from training and tools, to feedback and guidance on their performance. Is it any wonder they are disengaged?
What does a personalized workplace experience look like? Is it even practical? Let’s look at three ways managers can bring personalized coaching into an agent’s daily work.
3 Strategies of Highly Effective BPO Managers
1. Understand Agent Behaviors
Behavior Science explains how people think, act and decide. It’s a useful tool for any person in any field of work – but most of all to those who lead teams and manage team members every day. Just as any engineer needs to understand the technology they operate, managers must learn how people function.
Your team, like all people, are prone to a range of biases. These biases are helpful to our decision-making but can sometimes lead to less than ideal choices that are affecting your team’s efficiency. For instance a common bias is called Status Quo Bias – the resistance of a person to change and a desire to hang on to the old way of doing things. Understanding this bias will help a manager understand agents’ reluctance to use a new tool however much you sell its advantages to them. They are hard-wired to resist change and so a manager will have to find creative ways to overcome that resistance. Behavior Science can offer solutions. [We’ve got a handy list of biases for leaders and how to overcome them – check it out here].
Behavior Science also helps managers recognize their agents have diverse ways of thinking. Some of these traits are crucial to understanding how agents view productivity and efficiency. For example, one framework to understand diversity in thinking is recognizing “clock time” people vs “event time” people. Behavior Researchers Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier found two distinct ways people scheduled their day. Clock time people tend to plan their day around the clock – putting activities into a time slot and moving on to the next task when the time is done. Whereas event-time people tend to work at a task until it is completed before moving on to another task. If efficiency is what drives clock timers, it’s effectiveness that drives event timers.
These are vastly different styles of working and both may be successful. But forcing one type to adopt the other style will be counter-productive. If boosting BPO performance is your goal, working alongside their natural inclination is the way to go. This brings us to the next important skill.
2. Personalize Feedback and Guidance
Learning to communicate effectively is an important part of BPO manager development. Communication is effective when it achieves its purpose. If your agents have improved their performance after your feedback, your communication was effective. If it didn’t make a difference, you might need to tweak what you say, how you say it and when you’re saying it.
Understanding how people think and what your agents default to will make you a much better communicator. Personalizing the communication to each agent will make the biggest impact.
Do you know when each of your agents are most receptive to feedback? When are they looking for guidance? When are they expecting you to give them a pat on their back? Timing your communication to these crucial needs of your team signals that you’re in tune with your team.
3. Transition from Supervising Activities to Coaching Behaviors
Managers of high-performing BPO teams focus on individual behaviors to help build productivity and effectiveness. This would mean their effort runs alongside their team, like a coach, rather than coming in at the end of the performance cycle, like a manager. Personalized Coaching should be a top priority while thinking through BPO efficiency strategies.
In It’s the manager: Moving from Boss to Coach, author Jim Clifton writes –
“While the world’s workplace has been going through historic change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for decades. The new workforce — especially younger generations…don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently and develop their strengths.”
What would coaching look like in practice? It would mean prioritizing high-performing behaviors. This could be building consistent habits around daily quality metrics or logins. Or using behavioral interventions like breaking up a large target into smaller goals. It could also be celebrating small wins. Or calling out an agent who is doing the right things, the right way – consistently. These efforts soon convert to results.
Sounds too hard to crack?
Could a manager employ the above three strategies in addition to all their existing workload? We believe the answer is yes! It’s possible with tools like AI.
Digital coaches can come alongside agents and coach their individual performance journey. Personalized tips, crafted in language that appeals to their profile and timed to when they are most likely to be influenced. It’s not a distant futuristic idea.
Real Life Case Study
worxogo Nudge Coach is one such tool that delivers personalized coaching to your BPO agents and managers. One of our customers was a British-American Professional Services firm. Their customer support team saw results within the first 3 months of experiencing the Nudge Coach. Over 3 months, agents received 6000 personalized coaching tips and 1000 feedback instances from their supervisors or managers. Within 12 weeks, the team saw Agent Utilization increased by 12%. The team achieved over 100% of their target for all the three months with an improvement of 6% MoM on collections of past dues.
Thousands of BPO agents use worxogo Nudge Coach and enjoy personalized coaching. We’ve seen engagement levels and productivity lifts of 10% year-on-year.
An engaged team does wonders for business. It increases productivity by 14-18%, profitability by 23%, reduces defects by 32% and reduces absenteeism by 78%. It does seem worth the effort, doesn’t it? Leadership in BPO companies need to recognize the importance of bringing their managers onboard and equipping them to build more engaged teams.
TL;DR - What do highly effective BPO Managers do?
As author Jim Clifton says, “Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Decades of global Gallup research reveal: It’s your managers. They are the ones who make or break your organization’s success.”
Highly effective managers at global BPO businesses realize and use these strategies to personalize their teams experience. They use Behavior Science to understand their team’s behavior and guide it to better outcomes. They use effective communication and coach their teams to be more productive and efficient in their daily work. Most importantly, they use technology like AI to personalize each interaction with their team, bringing individual insights to each team member that keeps them motivated and engaged.
If you’d like to know how you can use AI and behavior science to empower your managers to lead highly effective BPO teams, contact us for a demo. You can read more BPO management tips here.
