Tagged with Performance Management …

Mar 07 2012
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Business, Employee Engagement, Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources, Management, Technology

Gamification: The Key to Reducing Burnout in Call Centers

Gamification is one of those areas I am very interested in and I posted a cool infographic earlier on this blog. Very recently, I was contacted by Lauren Carlson from Software Advice about gamification of the call center. She writes about various topics related to CRM software, with particular interest in sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service. She has written a great article on how we could gamify the call center and prevent agent burnout. Lauren was kind to write up a quick summary of her ideas for the readers of this blog. I am sure you would enjoy the idea and do share your comments about it.

Within the enterprise, gamification – the process of adding gaming elements to a non-gaming activity to encourage action and participation – has gone from being a faux pas to an accepted growing trend. Currently, many software vendors are experimenting by adding gaming elements to their software. I decided to do some experimenting of my own, focusing on help desk software.

The support team environment is a rigorous and demanding one where there is high turnover due to support agents getting burned out. But what if you added gaming elements to help desk software in such a way that helped boost employee retention by providing agents with a greater sense of accomplishment? If they felt like they were “winning,” perhaps agents would be more motivated in their daily activities.

Going off this premise, I focused on a few of the main activities support agents engage in each day (ticket resolutions, customer relations, training) and added some gaming element to it. I made some sketches of what the UI’s of a “gamified” help desk system might look like. Check them out below.

1. Accomplishment metrics

Three of the most important metrics to support agents are number of ticket resolutions, number of “quick” ticket resolutions and positive customer feedback. In this UI, you can see that those three metrics are tracked visibly across the top of the agent’s dashboard. The numbers increase as the day goes on, allowing the agent to see their progress and accomplishments in real time. Additionally, these metrics are variable, depending on the organization. For example, a “quick” resolution could be one that happens in 30 minutes or less.

2. Leaderboards

Based on those metrics, you could create leaderboards, allowing agents to see how they are measuring up again their peers. You will notice the added “Score” column. Again, this is a variable metric, depending on how your organization weights the three individual metrics.

You could do the same with a team leaderboard, comparing parallel support teams within your organization.

3. Training:

One of the biggest issues support team managers have is onboarding new agents in a timely manner. By gamifying the training process, you could ensure a quick onboarding process, while making it fun for the new agent.

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Sep 23 2011
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Business, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Transformative HR: Book Review

As many of you know, I love to read! While I have an appetite for all kinds of books, news & blogs, I just love great content on HR. And often, that’s the hardest to come by. One of my favourite authors on HR is John Boudreau. I became an instant fan when I read and reviewed his book Retooling HR. I felt that the frameworks, approaches and tools he talked about can not only help HR professionals to up their game, but can also help in talking coherently, logically and meaningfully with the business. The application of usual business analysis tools such as portfolio management, segmentation, conjoint analysis etc. to HR issues was extremely appealing.

So, when I got a copy of the book Transformative HR, I was thrilled. Transformative HR has been written by John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan. Ravin is a senior colleague of mine and is the Global Practice Leader for Talent Management at Towers Watson. I hungrily read the book and I think it is one of the best I have read so far. The key takeaway is that HR professionals and leaders need to make informed human capital decisions to keep their organisations competitive. ‘Informed’ is a key word here and the book outlines an evidence-based approach to human capital decisions. They outline 5 basic principles of evidence-based change:

1) Logic-driven Analytics: How often do we HR professionals have an overload of information and metrics? Do we just have numbers or can we tell a powerful story? In a transformative HR future state, the authors share how we can use frameworks & mental models to go behind the metrics, understand the real picture and produce insights which are in high demand by other organisational stakeholders. After all, getting the numbers right is just the beginning. The real value-add comes from using a multi-dimensional approach by synthesizing business strategies, business metrics and talent metrics to produce real insights that help in achieving those business objectives.

2) Segmentation: Conceptually, most of us agree that one size doesn’t fit all and we need to segment our workforce. But, how? John and Ravin propose 3 fundamental questions:

  • What are our vital talent segments?
  • Which employment elements induce the desired responses at optimum cost (supply-side talent segmentation)?
  • What do we need employees to do (demand-side talent segmentation)?

I think this is a powerful way to think through key talent investment decisions, as it helps to understand how to customize the employment deal to create the highest payoff in terms of business outcomes, at the optimum costs.

3) Risk Leverage: I feel that Human Capital Risks are often under-reported and worst, not well-understood. Now, all organisations face HR-related risks, but instead of just mitigating risks, the focus should be on optimizing risks. The book presents a number of systematic approaches to optimize risks and develop sustainable advantages. Again, the approaches are rooted in management tools that business leaders are used to – tolerance analysis, portfolio theory, stochastic simulations, probability matrices etc. In two words: cutting-edge and powerful!

4) Integration & Synergy: Often, HR processes operate in silos which prevents us from getting the “1+1=3″ effect. This principle talks about how to integrate various HR sub-functions as well as integrating HR with other organisational units. The live example about the Talent Management Game at Shanda (one of China’s largest online gaming company) is just fascinating!

5) Optimization: The principle of optimization follows from segmentation. It is all about identifying where & how the payoff of certain HR investments will lead to exponential returns. It is all about identifying the mix of investments that will have the most desired business outcomes. So, instead of spreading HR investments across the board equally, the focus should be on understanding & positioning ‘fairness’ to mean strategically differentiated treatment.

The book is full of great examples and brilliant case-studies from leading global organisations such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Telekom, Ameriprise, Royal Bank of Canada, Khazanah Nasional Berhad etc. Overall, it’s a compelling read. It is for anyone who wants to bring rigorous thinking, informed decision-making and sustainable impactful change in their organisation. Did I say that you just can’t miss this book!

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Aug 24 2011
3 Comments
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

How Can HR Use Engagement Surveys to Drive Business Performance?

Several companies invest thousands of dollars in running Employee Engagement surveys. Typically, they use the survey results to benchmark workplace experiences with other organizations,  determine enterprise-level priorities, drive key HR programs, set engagement-related KPIs, involve managers in the action planning process etc. But one of the key elements missing is how do we use these insights from the survey, fortify them and use them to really drive business performance. I often find that we miss connecting those critical dots. If HR has to ‘get a seat at the table’, then all it’s initiatives should link back to business performance, including employee engagement.

I could think of one potential approach, and it may be suitable to larger size organizations with a decent number of “units of analysis” i.e. bank branches, retail stores, production sites etc. If we have sufficient number of units to study, the first step would be to start linking the employee engagement survey data to business metrics. Think sales, profitability, productivity, employee attrition, customer survey scores, safety incidents, customer waiting time etc. Then you would need some analytical wizardry to examine how these metrics link to employee survey data. Do highly engaged bank branches have higher loan growth and higher net interest margin? Or do low engagement manufacturing plants showlow productivity as well? Or worse, the linkage is not meaningful or not strong enough (in which case you really need to go back to the drawing board to design a good survey). Such linkages help to establish the validity of your employee research frameworks and help create buy-in among the senior leadership team.

The next step is really to take it a notch further up. Based on the above linkage analysis, you would have identified your high / average / low performing units. Now, the way HR can really add value and improve business performance is by replicating the high performing units. How do you do that? Well, you try to examine what differentiates these high performing units from others. You could look at a range of variables for employees in these groups – age, tenure, experience, competencies, managerial practices – anything that can hypothetically differentiate performance. And yes, you could also connect it all back to the employee survey and see what issues are these “high engagement – high performance” units particularly satisfied on as compared to other units. Again, we are just looking for factors which can differentiate or even predict engagement and performance

Only when you have insights of this depth, then you could work out a plan for replicating such high-performance. Such insights can provide inputs into recruitment plans, talent management, rewards, training & development, career progression etc.  And all this will potentially have much more credibility since you have validated these against business outcomes.

What do you think? How are you using employee survey data to improve business performance? Drop in a line if you would like to discuss this in details.

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Aug 13 2011
1 Comment
Business, Employee Engagement, Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources, Management, Social Media, Technology

Gamification of the Enterprise

One of the blogs I love reading is The Future Of Work blog by Socialcast. It has great content about things I am passionate about – social media, organization development, employee engagement, collaboration tools etc. They also put up great infographics every now and then. I just couldn’t resist posting their infographic titled “Adding Play Into the Enterprise”. It does a crisp summary of employee engagement trends, the explosion of gaming and how they can be married together. My favorite bit is when they compare the ‘Gaming World’ with the ‘Job World’. So, your job title is the “level”, salary is “score”, promotions are “level up” and performance reviews are the “stat summary”. That’s a cool way to think about it!

Enjoy the infographic! And do share your best ideas on gamification.

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Jul 06 2011
8 Comments
Blogging, Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Carnival of HR – The Talent Race

Alright people! I bring to you the latest Carnival of HR. Themed as “The Talent Race”, this edition contains interesting posts about how could organizations effectively Attract, Engage and Retain their employees and what are the latest practices in Talent Management. Additionally, I wanted to have some Asian flavours by getting posts by people writing about the Asian context. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many posts about talent management practices from Asia. And that means that one, we need more professionals in Asia to blog on the subject and two, I need to expand my Asian network even more!

  • Jon Ingham is one of my favourite bloggers. He feels that there is a need for a differentiated unique proposition for people management. Sticking to the theme of “talent race”, he shares how Haier (a consumer electronics MNC that started off in China) established race tracks for a unique way of managing their talent base.
  • Laura Schroeder wonders where has all the talent gone. She analyzes reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit and Bersin & Associates to come up with strategies to bridge the talent gap.
  • Tanmay Vora writes at the QAspire blog and shares with us some Core Lessons in Leading & Managing People. He says that “working with people, guiding a team and helping them in their quest for peak potential is one of the noblest things we can do as leaders. It is an opportunity and an obligation as well.
  • As HR professionals, we are often heard advising employees to “take charge of your own development”. But do most employees really know how to do this? In this post, Dan McCarthy, from Great Leadership, offers a free step-by-step self-study guide to developing leadership skills. Best of all, it’s free to use and/or share, as a way to engage and retain valuable employees who are willing to learn on their own but need a little structure”.
  • Heard about the “HR Hairball”? Find out in this excellent post by Mark Stelzner.
  • It might be important to hire employees for their skills, but hiring for culture-fit is really important as well. Wally Bock shares his views on Hiring Well. One of my favourite lines from the blog post – “Performance and growth are often situational”.
  • Amy Wilson writes about transforming existing performance models into one that is more work-centric and embedded in the natural flow of business to get the best work done.
  • A strong learning & development platform is critical for organization looking at managing their talent base effectively and driving sustained business performance. Linda Fisher Thornton from Leading in Context shares 11 Learning & Development Reports. Informative!
  • Anita Lettink feels that “best practices” may not always work for you because you have your own unique context. Instead, she shares some guidelines for winning the Talent Race.
I would like to thank all the contributors for sharing their ideas. Also, thanks to Shauna Moerke for the giving me the opportunity to host the Carnival of HR.
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