In my last blog I wrote about attrition and different ways to analyse this in order to get a better understanding of why people are leaving. It's also important to work with your HR team to get some overall feedback on what people have been saying their reasons for leaving are in their exit interviews. This can help you understand if attrition is related to scheduling in any way. Communication between Workforce Planning and HR is therefore essential.

As a Workforce Planner part of your role should be to advise HR on the type of shift required so that new hires are recruited when and where the business actually needs them. It's also a good idea to provide HR with information around the benefits of different shift options so they can provide this information to candidates. When candidates go through the interview phase it is important that they understand the type of shift they will be working, the annual leave policies (they may need to work on public holidays) and what breaks, training, coaching etc they will typically have in their schedule before accepting the position.

During the induction training, someone from Workforce Planning should conduct a session on Workforce Planning explaining what it is and the processes for applying for leave, swapping shifts, adhering to schedules etc. They should also conduct a Power of One activity to help make this easier for new hires to understand. Make sure you provide your agents with some documentation around your scheduling guidelines and frequently asked questions so that they can also refer to this later if necessary.

Approximately one month after being on the phones it's a good idea to schedule a feedback session with the new hires and key members of the leadership team, including HR. In this meeting, feedback can be gathered on their experience to date, including the recruitment process, training, and integration to the phones. Any further scheduling related questions or concerns can also be answered at this time and you can use the information gathered in this session to improve many of your processes and hopefully help to reduce attrition in the future.

Chris Griffiths was back in town from the Philippines last week so I was able to catch up with him for a coffee. Chris is the Director of the Operations Support Centre for Australia and New Zealand for TeleTech and has been spending quite a lot of time working in Manila over the last few months. TeleTech is one of the largest global business process outsourcing (BPO) companies with over 20,000 agents based in the Philippines alone. They have more than 60 people working in the Workforce Planning department for Australia and New Zealand customers and more than 200 covering all regions. With 16% of inhouse contact centres in Australia and New Zealand currently outsourcing at least some functionality (onshore and offshore), I thought it would be interesting to find out a little more about how this works from a workforce management perspective.

In general, workforce planning for outsourcers is completely dependent on what the client wants, so flexibility is very important. For some clients, Teletech will create historical patterns and forecast for them from the ground up, for others the client will give them the forecast and they will schedule to meet that requirement. Regardless of which method used, Teletech will still track the patterns separately for each client.

From a scheduling perspective, Teletech is predominantly using template based schedules but they are moving more towards preference based schedules where the agents can have more flexibility in the type of shift they work.

Teletech's workforce planning team is typically recruited internally. There are 3 levels of career progression in this area

1. Real Time Analysts -responsible for real time agent and queue management, exception entry and on the day re-forecasting
2. Forecasting and Scheduling- responsible for short term planning (1-4 weeks)  Business Analysts- responsible for the longer term
3. staff business planning (4-16 weeks)

For Teletech off shoring has been a very positive experience. Chris's recommendation if you are going to off shore is to

1. Make sure you have all your processes clearly mapped out so that everyone understands exactly what they should be doing.
2. Have clear escalation paths so that everyone knows when to escalate and who to escalate to.
3. Be sure to leave at least 6-12 weeks for cultural emersion.

Manila is a great place to spend time and Chris's favourite place to hang out is The People's Palace in the Greenbelt, apparently a great Thai restaurant...