Attendance Policies

[Patrick Goldberg]

Does anyone have experience working with a Call Center with no attendance or individual performance guidelines? Looking at going to this with a staff of 400 employees. Any suggestions or experiences would be appreciated.

[Mark Tabak]

I don't recommend going to no attendance policy, especially for a call center with 400 seats. I've been there, and it was chaos. Employee turnover increased greatly, and it made it very difficult for managers and supervisors to control their staffs. Productivity was also affected-it went down due to absences and latenesses increasing. In my call centers now, I have a very simple attendance policy that makes it very easy to manage and understand by all. Our attendance has improved 65% in the past year.

[Patrick Goldberg]

Can you share the basics of the policy you are using?

[Jimmy Childs]

Your call center performance will suffer without an attendance policy. We are very willing to lose top performers who are repeatedly late/absent. If we can't depend on them we don't want them. If our center is not staffed, it cannot perform.
With that many agents, I believe you should have a Quality Assurance team. That team should be scoring all monitored calls for technical and customer service expertise. I recommend using an Excel spreadsheet for scoring with averaging and % columns for each topic scored. The average columns can be linked to a Totals spreadsheet which also has an averaging and % column. This not only tells you how an agent is performing compared to the rest of the call center, the Totals sheet tells you how your agents are performing in regards to each item scored. The lowest averaging topics are training/retraining issues that must be focused on. Saving each sheet at the end of the quarter and/or year let's you compare call center performance from year to year. Look for improvements and declines.

[Mark Tabak]

The first thing we did was get our CRA's (Customer Relationship Associate) opinions on what they felt was fair regarding number of latenesses per month, because that was a big issue. The majority said 3 per month.

When I wrote the policy, after the introduction, I place a section on rewards for excellent attendance. We pay any CRA $125.00 per quarter if they are late 3 times or less and absent 1 day or less.

We have a progressive discipline program which begins when a CRA is late for the third time in a month, and/or if they are tracking for 36 or more latenesses in a rolling 12-month period, or 5 or more absences in a rolling 12-month period.

While the policy is somewhat strict, it has its rewards, its easy to understand by all, and its very easy to administer.

[Patrick Goldberg]

In addition to 36 Tardies and 5 absences, do you have a sick policy or personal time policy, or are those considered absences? Are these absences based on specific days or periods of absence? Thank you very much for your input on this, it is very helpful.

[Mark Tabak]

Sicks are considered absences. Personal time, if applied for in advance, is generally not considered an absence. In this case, the employee may request the time to be taken as vacation, or they can make the time up.

[Patrick Goldberg]

If a rep were absent for an entire week for whatever reason, would that be 1 absence or all 5?

[Mark Tabak]

This would be 1 absence or 1 occurrence.

[GinaG]

I have in my experience been involved in call centers with no attendance polices as well as centers with strict attendance polices.

I have learned that human nature itself warrants guidelines or "rules". Human beings just simply need them.

The centers with no attendance policies mananged nothing more than chaos. It was impossible to meet KPI's and caused a significant amount of pain for the Operations Managers and Account Managers. It did not lend in any way to client satisfaction.

I prefer a liberal but strict attendance policy. By that I mean a policy that will allow for employees to have lives outside of the center as well as allow for unplanned circumstances. Once that policy, whatever it is (I say that because I think that the attendance policy for a site should be somewhat contigent upon the demographic of the area and type of employee that you have), the attendance policy MUST then be enforced without fail. Letting adherance to your attendance policy slide will only eventually create the aforementioned chaos.