The ABC's of Building Leadership in a Virtual/Work-At-Home Environment

I recently was in an executive round table when I asked the question, “How many of you have some experience with work-at-home contact center environments?” Everyone in the group raised their hand. My next question to the group of executives was “How many of you have experience developing leadership programs for your first-, second-, and third-level leaders in the virtual/work-at-home organization?” No one raised their hand. My third question was “How many of you have experience building a leadership bench inside your virtual/work-at-home environment?” Again, no one raised their hand.

So how do companies develop new leadership styles and skillsets for current contact center leaders at the Team Leader, Supervisor, and Contact Center Manager level, and how do current leaders help new managers build leadership skills so that companies can scale for holiday, product ramps, and long-term growth?

The best way to build leadership skills that can help engage employees in a work-at-home environment is to teach those skills at the agent level before someone is promoted. This model allows top-performing agentsan opportunity to practice leadership skills within their current team. There are many ways to accomplish this, but here are a few suggestions:

A.    Have one of your top-performing agents look at the performance of one KPI over the last three months for the agents on their team. Have that agent identify one positive trend for each agent. For example, over the last three months, there were two times where top CSATs were consistent for more than three weeks in a row.  Another example could be that one of the agents went up eight percentage points in their CSAT score in the last six weeks. This experience teaches the pseudo leader how to look at the trends, identify the positive points, and communicate that within the team chat. Have them communicate the positive trend in a team chat so that everyone can congratulate each team member for their accomplishment. This will ignite engagement within your teams as well as teach leadership skills to that top-performing agent.

B.    Additionally, you can have one of your top-performing agents lead a team meeting. Have them send out a questionnaire to the team to see what they want to talk about and then pick the theme. Ask them to develop a few talking points and a few discussion points.  Next, meet with them, and have them walk you through each point. After the team meeting, ask them how they thought it went, what went well, where they lost control of the room, and where they thought they could use some help. This will help in two ways.  First, the agent will learn that presenting in a virtual meeting takes different skills. Second, they know where their manager can help them the next time they lead a team meeting. And third, it puts them in their manager’s placeholder so they are a better “participant” in the next meeting. 

C.     Launch a pilot program in your team. In your coaching sessions, ask each agent where they are struggling and who they would want to help them in that area. Then have them ask that person to assist them. Start with four participants—two that need help and the two that are doing the “helping.” Next, ask each pair for a goal, for example, raise my CSAT by 5% points in two weeks, get one more upsell a day, or tighten up my word choices to isolate the issue the customer needs help with. After that, have them each make a commitment to work together to make the goal happen and report back to the team in chat or email how things are going. This engages the entire team, helps the pseudo coach learn new skills, and helps the individual that is struggling. It creates more engagement in the team because helping these two individuals becomes a team effort. There is a lot of encouragement within the team, and everyone is engaged in the outcome.

Real on-the-job training with agents and real-life team scenarios will help agents get a birds-eye view of what leaders do. Utilizing these techniques over and over will cement leadership skills in your agent base as well as build professional maturity before they get a promotion. This sets them up for success.

Having a game plan to build leaders in your organization takes time, but you spend time either way—on the front end being deliberate, having a game plan, and taking the time to build real leadership skill sets and professional maturity in agents or on the back end when you promote someone that isn’t ready or, worse, is the wrong person. When someone isn’t ready or when you promote the wrong person, you will spend a lot of time trying to coach and performance manage those individuals. You will spend the time either way, but being deliberate with your strategy will reap huge rewards for yourself as a leader, your team, the company, and the customer. Utilizing new leadership skills in a virtual/work-at-home environment is needed. Build smart for the future.