Happy employees or peak performance: can businesses have both?

Today’s businesses must simultaneously keep their employees engaged while achieving maximal business performance. Fortunately, the two aren’t mutually exclusive: the more accurately leaders can map employees’ skills and aspirations to roles which provide that fulfilment, the happier their people and stronger their business results will be. For sectors where employee retention and engagement prove a constant challenge, a more rigorous mapping process could prove the key to unlocking higher, more sustainable performance and the full potential of every employee.

Most businesses today recognise the importance of employee engagement as part of delivering the best customer experience possible. And the more motivated your employees are, the higher a quality of service they ought to deliver: engaged contact centre employees, for example, are nearly 9 times more likely to stay than leave within a year, and 3 times more likely to feel empowered when resolving customer problems. At the same time, business leaders are under growing pressure to maximise the return on investment from their employees – maximising their contribution to top-line results, even if it comes at the cost of job satisfaction. How can leaders strike the right balance between employee engagement and business performance?

I suspect the answer lies in how we align people’s skills and motivations with the roles we have on offer. That’s particularly true for sectors where employee engagement has typically struggled, like contact centre services with their traditionally high rates of employee turnover and disengagement. If we can take more proactive, targeted steps to both understand what drives our people, and match those drivers with the right functions in the business, it’s more than possible to have the employee engagement cake and eat the fruits of higher performance too.

Know your people, please your customer

In any business with multiple business areas, you’ll quickly find that there are a range of performance levels: top-performers, mid-range employees, and low-performers. That’s a given, but we rarely ask the follow-up questions: why this variance in performance, and how can we even it out? If everyone gets the same training and resources for similar roles, as is the case in contact centre operations, the difference usually comes down to personal levels of employee engagement – namely, how motivated or encouraged a person is to complete the tasks set in front of them.

If we can better align each employee’s strengths to different business areas, we can start to better engage them even while generating more efficient, effective results for the business. Business leaders should consider reviewing their current workforce practices, taking clear steps to understand the skills and drivers of their existing employees through their KPIs, and even be so bold as to remap those personal drivers to different areas if they can find positions of better fit. That’s something we at Genesys have been endeavouring to do more and more with our customers’ contact centres, helping them personalise recruitment and onboarding processes to employees’ skills, needs, and aspirations.

There’s still no substitute for the human touch – and those human representative are much more likely to deliver top-notch customer care if they’re passionate, motivated, and empowered in the work they do.

Embracing constructive disruption

Customer service has undergone major disruption in the past few years, and new technologies like AI promise to keep that trend going well into the future. That said, there’s still no substitute for the human touch – and those human representative are much more likely to deliver top-notch customer care if they’re passionate, motivated, and empowered in the work they do. The more we know our people, the more effectively we can draw out their strengths – and also improve on their weaknesses – at all stages of the customer experience.

Remapping skill sets and redefining HR processes can get messy, though partnering with experts at customer service transformation can help iron out those issues faster. But this sort of disruption will go a long way towards connecting each customer to the employee who’s most able – and most willing – to fulfil their needs. That’s a win-win-win for customers, employees, and business performance that leaders would want to engage with as soon as possible.

Discover Genesys’ tried and true methods for boosting employee engagement in the contact centre with our free playbook.