Team Effectiveness
Oct 18, 2021
It is hard to imagine that the majority of employees worked in offices just a few years ago. These days, with remote work and hybrid teams on the rise, many people are working from home. While WFH has some significant benefits (hello yoga pants, more flexibility, and less commuting!), building or sustaining a positive team culture with trust and transparency has also been challenging. We now see many workforce teams experiencing high employee turnover rates, low morale, and dismal engagement.
In August, 4.3 million American workers quit - marking the fifth straight month of record exits. Companies are struggling with hiring, onboarding, and keeping good employees. Of course, there are many complicated reasons why so many people are quitting their jobs at record numbers, but it begs the question: how are you building a culture where people want to work?
In the hybrid/remote world, many people experience one of two management extremes that create toxic environments: micromanaging and distrust, or the other extreme of receiving no clear direction at all. Many employees of today's ‘great resignation' say they were pushed to the breaking point by employers who responded to pandemic staffing shortages by increasing demands on remaining staff rather than reducing expectations.
The good news is that you can build a culture where people want to work - even during times of turmoil! This is critical for business success, especially for your customer-facing employees. They are setting your brand tone, and they directly impact sales, retention, customer lifetime value, and loyalty. It takes a long time to hire and train employees, and it’s important to create a culture where people want to work.
Karla L Miller of the Washington Post says, “the onus is on employers to show how they make their employees feel safe, appreciated and respected.”
So let’s dive into how empowering frontline employees and managers with realtime performance management metrics, AI-driven coaching, and communications tools can increase employee engagement and happiness and keep your management culture away from the two toxic extremes.
Table of Contents
Stop micromanaging
Hire good people, give them the tools they need to be successful, and trust them. It sounds simple, but it’s hard to do. We’re all human and have different strengths, different blindspots, and different areas where we need some help. And when teams are remote, it can be hard for managers to know which employees need different kinds of support.
But when managers have realtime performance data, they can confidently relax and validate their team’s output. Armed with easy-to-understand data intelligence, they know where to focus their coaching and can offer encouragement, praise, or helpful feedback at precisely the right moment. And when you give frontline workers realtime access to their goals and performance, they can better manage their own time and efforts. By giving everyone visibility into performance metrics, there is no need to micromanage. Employees are in the driver’s seat. They control their time and their output. They know what they need to do to be successful.
Be present and available
The other toxic extreme is having no management, where employees feel disconnected and have no idea what the real expectations are or how they are doing. This lack of engagement is detrimental to businesses and is driving resignations. The problem lies with managers. One of Gallup's biggest discoveries: the manager or team leader alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
Managers know they need to engage employees in a meaningful way but don’t have the tools to deliver. Transparency of individual goals and performance, impactful coaching, and creating an atmosphere of ‘trust and verify’ will create accountability and empower employees.
Echo AI gives you a command center to manage, coach, and lead like a pro. You can:
Easily align teams to the same set of goals & metrics
Track performance & coach with specifics in realtime (AI evens suggest coaching areas based on performance metrics)
Create Mini Goals or contests for teams
Centralize 1:1s agenda items, points of discussion, and your ongoing communications
Send messages with receipt acknowledgments
Measure QA by question, category, agent, and reviewer
And so much more...all of this makes managing people easier and more efficient.
85% of our managers and directors say that they are able to coach more frequently, and 95% say they have improved team satisfaction with Echo AI.
Good people management pays off: Gallup finds that it takes more than a 20% pay raise to lure most employees away from a manager who engages them, and next to nothing to poach most disengaged workers.
We’ll be at CCW Nashville this week! If you’re there, be sure to drop by our booth and don’t miss Ramon Icasiano, Echo AI's Chief Customer Officer, and Renee Dawkins, Alpha Foundation’s Director of Customer Care, discussing how to supercharge your team’s happiness and success, Thursday at 10:30 CT.
