Best practice for Payroll/Attendance/Performance Pay etc

[krissovo]

Hi All

I am a Senior Manager in a 500+ seat call center based in Ireland. I am going to pressent to the board what I feel should be best practice for linking payroll, attendance and performance related pay. What I would like is to hear from other call center managers how their setup is.

At the moment there is a very labour intensive process in place to bridge pay and attendance so team managers tend to ignore it and not bother completing the forms. The result is that we are throwing money paying for agents who will take a "extra" day or two a month on the sick. The other side of the coin is agents are not getting over time when they work it.

My thoughts is to link the phone logon data to the payroll spreadsheet or even to put in place a "clocking on" system where to get paid you clock in and out etc. If anyone is interested I can provide further details on my thoughts.

Now will anyone else share what happens at their sites or what they feel is best practice?

Thanks
Chris

[NBosch]

Hi Chris,

First of all... welcome to the club. It is nice to see someone else from Ireland has found his way here.

Okay... my 5 cents on this topic.

Performance related shrinkage and compliance rewarding should be considered an absolute must in our industry (in my opinion off course). The issue you mention however is also related to something else and I will quote:

team managers tend to ignore it and not bother completing the forms.

This tends me to believe that you have a clear reporting issue, because otherwise would serious team managers do their jobs.

Now... first of all, I will describe the practice I had in place when I was responsible for a 100 seater in the Netherlands.

All my supervisors had access to daily/weekly/monthly and periodic statistics on all agents for the "normal" performance stats (average handling times (ATT+AHT+AWU), first time fix, workduration ((Total Log In Time - Total Idle - Total Wrap up) / Total Log In Time) and a compliance report. All these features are available in Aspect software.
The other thing I had in place was a simple but effective shrinkage report on the intranet. 3 clicks (select team -> select agent -> select shrinkage reason) per person and it automatically updated an individual calendar for the agent and again, my sups were able to pull a periodic report.
This assured that we could measure every performance related aspect of their positions quite effectively. Because of the accessibility, my supervisors had no excuse not to use the tools that were available.
The whole shell had been developed by the wizzkids from the IT department, using .net technology.

The other issue that you have at hand, as I allready mentioned, and I would like to come back to this, is the attitude of your team managers. Not "bothering" to complete the forms for something as important as a review, should not be tolerated and I advice you to take adequate measures.

If you would like I could make some time available to give you some more insight in my beliefs regarding this matter. You can contact me by mail: niek_bosch@yahoo.co.uk or give me a call on 045-900582.

I hope to have been of support....

Niek

[NBosch]

Hi Chris,

One more thing that I used to do as well, to assure that attrition was monitored and reviewed correctly.
When review time was due, I would check several of the completed forms with the available stats myself. Supervisors that had not put in or ignored the correct data, would then loose points on their own reviews.

In the end though, it comes down to some basic things:
- Rolemodels; how is lateness/absence among your team manager team? Do you monitor and review it?
- Discipline and accountability: what do you do to support the team managers to take actions against those that are regularly late? (and what do you do when it is one of the team managers)
- Explanation: do your team managers/agents actually understand what the annual cost of their actions is?

Have a nice day...

Niek