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How Can You Create a Motivating, High-performance Culture?

The answer to this could fill hundreds of books, and still not completely hit the mark. But here are some key ideas, around the important issue of communication...

In some call centers, you can feel the energy as soon as you walk in the door. It takes many forms: pride of workmanship, enthusiasm, a feeling of community, commitment, and the willingness to make the "extra effort." The call center "clicks." Everybody knows what the mission is, everybody is pulling in the same direction. While there are a myriad of factors that go into creating this sort of environment, effective communication throughout the call center is essential.

Communication creates meaning and direction for people.
Organizations of all types depend on the existence of what Warren Bennis, noted organizational theorist, calls "shared meanings and interpretations of reality," which facilitate coordinated action. When good communication is lacking, the symptoms are predictable: conflicting objectives, unclear values, misunderstandings, lack of coordination, confusion, low morale and people doing the bare minimum required, to name a few.

So how do the best do it?
How do they communicate their mission and values in a way that gets buy-in and alignment from their people? Although call centers vary dramatically from organization to organization, there are four notable similarities among leading call centers.

First and foremost, they have a culture that supports effective communication.
(By culture, I am referring to the inveterate principles or values of the organization.) Culture tends to guide behavior, and can either support and further, or, as some have learned the hard way, ruin the best laid plans for organizational change.

Unfortunately, there's no guaranteed formula for creating a supporting culture. But many seasoned call center managers agree that shaping the culture of the organization is a primary leadership responsibility. They do not believe that culture should be left to fate. As a result, they spend an inordinate amount of time understanding the organization and the people who are part of it.

Richard Farson, author of the critically acclaimed book, Management of the Absurd (Simon and Schuster, 1996) asserts that "many programs in management training today are moving us in the wrong direction because they fail to appreciate the complexity and paradoxical nature of human organizations. Thinking loses out to how-to-do-it formulas and techniques, if not slogans and homilies, as the principle management guides."

Judging by their actions, the most effective call center managers seem to agree with Farson. They seem to be comfortably resigned to the fact that, as Farson puts it, "we can never quite master our relationships with each other." Consequently, they are okay with the realization that they will often be spending more of their time on "people issues" than on anything else.

Creating a high-performance culture in which effective communication thrives also means driving out fear. This was a theme the late W. Edward Deming spoke of passionately, especially in his later years, and is one of his famous "Fourteen Points." Sometimes, however, fear goes unrecognized by managers. For example, agents may be manipulating their statistics and "cheating the system." Essentially, they may be more afraid of reporting accurate statistics than of "fudging the numbers." That is a symptom of what Deming would have called fear.

Of course, there are those things that we should be fearful of, such as the consequences of being dishonest, or grossly irresponsible. But it's the wrong kind of fear, such as the fear of taking reasonable risks or the fear of constructive dissent, that effective call center managers work so diligently to abolish. Fear inhibits effective communication.

Second, leaders of high-performance call centers are predisposed to keeping their people in the know.
They actively share both good news...and bad. This minimizes the rumor mill, which hinders effective, accurate communication. It also contributes to an environment of trust.

Peter Senge, who popularized the notion of a learning organization in his widely read book, The Fifth Discipline (Doubleday, 1990) described a place "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together." Futurist Don Tapscott adds that "there is no sustainable competitive advantage today other than organizational learning." Shared information is the fundamental ingredient in organizational learning.

Leading call centers cultivate both formal and informal channels of communication. The communication formats can include newsletters, meetings, visual displays, electronic mail, voice mail, posters, intranets, and informal "hallway meetings." But the mission and values being communicated remain consistent. As Bennis puts it, "leadership...is based on predictability. The truth is that we trust people who are predictable, whose positions are known and who keep at it; leaders who are trusted make themselves known, make their positions clear."

One of the common formal means of communication between front-line workers and management is agent satisfaction surveys. The best call centers track results and monitor trends, to ensure continuous improvement. Survey results are communicated back to the agents, and teams are often formed to address specific problems that are identified in the surveys. The progress towards resolving the problem is then tracked and communicated to agents. In short, management does a lot of active listening.

Keeping people well informed also helps them prepare for and accept change. "Today's business world is and has been about change," notes Kathleen Peterson, a recognized communication skills expert. "The concept of change becomes personal and its meaning and level of acceptance are based clearly on how the change is communicated and what people believe it to mean."

Third, leading call centers have cultivated a systematic, collaborative approach to call center planning.
This process generally includes seven major steps:

1. Choose an appropriate service level objective
2. Collect necessary planning data
3. Forecast the calling load
4. Calculate the on-phone staff requirements
5. Calculate trunk requirements
6. Factor in roster staff factor or "shrink factor" (which reflects breaks, absenteeism, etc.)
7. Organize schedules

They have also created a flow chart that illustrates the process step by step and shows the logical sequence of events. The flow chart highlights any "disconnects" in the planing process, such as the marketing department running campaigns that the call center doesn't know about ahead of time.

Systematic planning contributes to effective communication in several ways. It creates a body of information that wouldn't otherwise be available ("here's our call load pattern and, therefore, why the schedules are structured as they are"). It also forces people to look into the future and see their work in the context of a larger framework. Perhaps most important, formal planning requires communication about values, on issues such as resource allocations, budgeting and workload priorities. In sum, as one call center manager put it, "formal planning goes far beyond getting the right number of butts in seats." If forces the kind of communication that an active call center desperately requires.

Finally, leaders of high-performance call centers recognize an interesting paradox: too much communicating inhibits effective communication.
Farson maintains that "there seems always to be an optimal level of communication beyond which further or expanded communication becomes dysfunctional. Communication has it's limits."

Too many meetings, memos, conferences, electronic mail messages and on-the-fly discussions may be symptoms of weaknesses in the process. With better tools, more focused training, and appropriate levels of empowerment, the need for excessive communicating can be avoided. I once heard someone draw an analogy to a crew on a sailboat. When one of the lines breaks, nobody waits for anyone else to act, and nobody needs to give orders or instructions. The members of the crew are acting in harmony and know what to do to address the problem.

Conclusion
Effective communication is inseparable from effective leadership. As Warren Bennis puts it, "Leaders are only as powerful as the ideas they can communicate." Effective communication results in a shared vision. And, when people are aligned behind a set of compelling values, enthusiasm and commitment -- that perceptible energy -- tends to follow.

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