Tag Archives: Call centres

Top tips about how to use Job-crafting to personalise and advance employee engagement

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Involve as many of your people as we practically can.

Collaborative team job-crafting positively advances employee engagement and team performance

Compliance to best practice, and especially LEAN principles, demand tight control of work practices to secure efficiency. However, sometimes ‘best practice’ may lack specific contextual relevance. This may result in work lacking in meaning, organisations experiencing low employee engagement that adversely impacts performance.

 

However, researchers1 studying three call centres found that when supervisors support their teams to make informal adjustments to procedures and processes, known as ‘job-crafting’, this resulted in higher employee engagement and team performance. Job-crafting met team needs for control and helped make their work meaningful. Researchers also revealed that job-crafting built connections with other team members and aided collaboration between teams. So, how did job-crafting work in the 3 call centres studied?

The researchers received two surprises:

  • call centre teams – notoriously low in control – were capable of complying both with standardised LEAN approaches and job-crafting. For example, after a customer call, during ‘wrap up’ to complete actions and update records, job-crafting allowed individuals and teams to experiment and try new approaches
  • team supervisors actively supported individual and team job-crafting. They helped target and set boundaries around tasks and procedures that were available to be job-crafted.

The researchers recommended 5 things that firms should do:

1. Develop supervisor practices to foster team job-crafting

2. Encourage and support supervisors to foster team social and task cohesion

3. Create a climate that encourages experimentation and sharing of new working methods and document them

4. Provide boundaries and develop areas within which team job-crafting can take place and encourage it – talk about it- share it

5. Undertake team training to help teams to think widely about the kind of issues where job-crafting would be suitable.

Call centre supervisors and managers need to recognise the benefits from targeted team based job-crafting.

1 McClelland, G.P., Leach, D.J., Clegg, C.W., McGowan, I. (2014) Collaborative crafting in call centre teams, Journal of Occupational Psychology, 87, 464-486

Reach us at 07779 345 499, m.raymond@mwrconsulting.co.uk

Marjorie Raymond

Marjorie Raymond

T: 07779 345 499

E: m.raymond@mwrconsulting.co.uk

We have experience in developing senior managers and their team members – both on an individual and team level – so they can develop practical approaches that encourage positive, constructive behaviour. This, in turn, leads to the development of positive beliefs and values. We are ready work with you, to help you get the best out of your people.

Here are some examples of approaches that can be used and tailored to your individual needs:

  • Special projects, secondments and assignments
  • Mediation, to address workplace conflict
  • Personal development activities
  • Individual and group coaching…Coaching – a powerful way of developing people
  • Psychometric assessment, which can identify strengths as well as derailing behaviours and also include 360 degree feedback
  • Structured module for understanding the psychological contracts in your organisation, both at an individual or team level
  • Straight Talking: …Straight Talking create change through conversations

How to get people to behave the way you want in the workplace

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You can motivate people – in other words, reward work well done

You can motivate people – in other words, reward work well done

Coaching can help people chose alternative behaviours. But for managers to make good coaches for team members they need to ‘walk the talk’.

However, they need first need to understand the value of ‘walking the talk’, and this involves open communication and follow-through, and treating others as you would like to be treated yourself.

Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of workplace feedback – what works, and what really doesn’t:

  • You can motivate people – in other words, reward work well done
  • You can praise people. For example, if you have a lazy team member, you can require that tasks be completed in a certain time-frame and to a certain quality standard, and then provide positive feedback when the tasks are completed successfully
  • You could use negative reinforcement – constantly ask or tell a person to do something, and scold too
  • You could also punish the person. This is a firm favourite – it usually fails

To help get it right, use the table below. The ‘hot’ colours show what works best, the cool colours, featuring far too frequently used techniques, shows what really doesn’t work.

This table shows how to get people to behave the way you want in the workplace - use the 'hot' coloured behaviours

This table shows how to get people to behave the way you want in the workplace – use the ‘hot’ coloured behaviours

Reach us at 07779 345 499, m.raymond@mwrconsulting.co.uk

Marjorie Raymond

T: 07779 345 499

E: m.raymond@mwrconsulting.co.uk

We have experience in developing senior managers and their team members – both on an individual and team level – so they can develop practical approaches that encourage positive, constructive behaviour. This, in turn, leads to the development of positive beliefs and values. We are ready work with you, to help you get the best out of your people.

Here are some examples of approaches that can be used and tailored to your individual needs:

  • Mediation, to address workplace conflict
  • Individual and group coaching…Coaching – a powerful way of developing people
  • Personal development activities
  • Special projects, secondments and assignments
  • Psychometric assessment, which can identify strengths as well as derailing behaviours and also include 360 degree feedback
  • Structured module for understanding the psychological contracts in your organisation, both at an individual or team level
  • Straight Talking: …Straight Talking create change through conversations