Case study: Reality Based Scheduling; Improving customer satisfaction and agent job satisfaction.SITUATION: Employee absenteeism ab·sen·tee·ism n. 1. Habitual failure to appear, especially for work or other regular duty. 2. The rate of occurrence of habitual absence from work or duty. negatively impacted service levels Meeting service level agreements (answering calls within a specified amount of time) has always been paramount for Center Partners and their clients. Because unscheduled unscheduled Adjective not planned or intended Adj. 1. unscheduled - not scheduled or not on a regular schedule; "an unscheduled meeting"; "the plane made an unscheduled stop at Gander for refueling" absences make it difficult to answer calls as promised, Center Partners considered absenteeism a serious infraction Violation or infringement; breach of a statute, contract, or obligation. The term infraction is frequently used in reference to the violation of a particular statute for which the penalty is minor, such as a parking infraction. INFRACTION. . When company leaders learned, however, that over 7% of their labor force was on corrective action A corrective action is a change implemented to address a weakness identified in a management system. Normally corrective actions are instigated in response to a customer complaint, abnormal levels if internal nonconformity, nonconformities identified during an internal audit or for taking unscheduled leave, they decided that absenteeism was a systemic systemic /sys·tem·ic/ (sis-tem´ik) pertaining to or affecting the body as a whole. sys·tem·ic adj. 1. Of or relating to a system. 2. problem and not solely employee driven. Looking deeper, they found that managing corrective actions was time-consuming yet ineffective, and the company was losing good employees because of rigid scheduling parameters. RESOLUTION: Reality Based Scheduling Reality Based Scheduling (RBS RBS Royal Bank of Scotland RBS Role Based Security RBS Rollback Segment RBS Rare Book School (University of Virginia) RBS Rural Business Cooperative Service RBS Ribosome Binding Site (genetics) ) motivates employees to take personal responsibility for meeting schedule obligations and for planning in advance (at least 24 hours notice) for their time off. It is based on the assumption that employees do their best work when they have flexible scheduling options that recognize the realities of life, and give them some control over whether or not they are granted scheduled time In rallying, the Scheduled Time of any crew is the time, calculated at the beginning of the event, that they should arrive at any given control. It is different from Due Time in that Due Time is dynamic, ie it can change throughout the event as competitors drop time; whereas off. The key success factors of RBS are: * Hire an appropriate number of agents to cover anticipated scheduled and unscheduled absences [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] * Give all employees a bank of paid and non-paid time off each month * Make the process for scheduling time off realistic, flexible, and personal * Encourage managers to approve employee requests for scheduled time off whenever possible * Share the scheduling responsibility between employees and managers * Reward employees who call in when taking unscheduled time off by giving them the opportunity to earn back missed hours and to erase the "exception" OUTCOMES: fewer unscheduled absences, improved client service, and increased employee satisfaction Reality Based Scheduling--a total system change--has resulted in new thinking across all levels of the organization. Rather than referring to "absence" and "tardiness Tardiness Dagwood comic strip character; chronically late at the office. [Comics: “Blondie” in Horn, 118] ten o’clock scholar schoolboy who habitually arrives late. [Nurs. ," people think about "time away from work." The company tracks the unscheduled time away from work each employee uses, and all employees manage their own time away from work over a rolling 180-day period. As a result, unscheduled absences have decreased, service levels have increased, corrective actions have decreased, and instead of managing corrective cor·rec·tive adj. Counteracting or modifying what is malfunctioning, undesirable, or injurious. n. An agent that corrects. corrective, n actions--coaches can now focus more time on performance management. RELATED ARTICLE: Key Benefits of Reality Based Scheduling * Service levels in one program improved 10% * Corrective actions were reduced by 48% * Coaches gained eight hours per month for performance management * Productive schedule hours increased by 3% Martha Lanaghen is a member of the Center Partners Executive Team. She can be reached at marthal@centerpartners.com. BY Martha Lanaghen, Center Partners, Inc. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion