Customer Service Initiative

Self Management - a step toward work at home….

24th June, 2009 - Posted by Pam -

You can’t go home without it.  Self Mangement that is - it’s vital to a successful work at home model.  Some companies choose to use working at home as an incentive for its top talent.  This is a great method for existing call centers that want to benefit from a work at home model.  Some choose to create a work at home team and combine it with their inhouse team.

In either case, self management is the key.   And like anything else, it needs to be supported at all levels of the organization.  You know which of your agents self manage and which ones don’t.  The tricky part is figuring out which line supervisors and first line managers are comfortable with the self management approach.

Working with different clients, it’s become pretty easy for me to predict which front line management members are going to help drive self management and which ones will detract from it.   The advice I give  is - “sometimes you have to let them fall down and skin their knee”.

Don’t hover and try to correct each action.  Use recurring coaching sessions to point out patterns that are keeping agents from performing as self-managers.  If you hover and try to change each action you think is incorrect they will never grow.

It’s been a lot of fun watching and working with this part of migration to work at home.