One-size Approach to Measuring Engagement Won't Yield Desired Results
McDaniel Partners has partnered with callcentres.net to launch its new Employee Engagement measurement program. The most important tenet of this program is the notion that a "one-size fits all" approach to employee engagement is unlikely to yield the desired results.
This program recognizes that engagement levels and drivers vary depending on the industry, organization, the person and the job.Our interview with Dr. Catriona Wallace is focused on the Employee Engagement measurement program that has been designed specifically for the contact centre industry. Here is the interview we conducted:
Established in 1998 callcentres.net is a research, analyst and online publishing business dedicated to the contact centre and outsourcing industries. The head office is based in Sydney Australia with a regional office in Singapore. We are regarded as the leading Contact Centre Analyst organization for the Asia-Pacific region. Our core services are large country-wide industry benchmarking studies of China, India, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam and Indonesia; Customer Engagement research, Employee Engagement Research, Outsourcing industry research, and customized, tailored research for individual clients. callcentres.net is also web information portal for the contact centre industry, publishing newsletters, podcasts, magazines and email broadcasts to our large subscriber base.
callcentres.net has been doing a great deal of work in the Employee Engagement space. Can you please explain what you refer to as the Employee Engagement Index (EEI)?We have been measuring Employee Satisfaction of call centre agents (employees) for many years as well as tracking the very high levels of employee turnover in contact centres across the region. In the last few years we determined that the measured of employee satisfaction as the surrogate measure for the employee experience was inadequate and did not alone strongly predict employee loyalty or performance. Contact centre work is considerably different to other types of service work in nature, it involves high levels of 'emotional labour' by frontline workers and as such the measure of satisfaction which is a cognitive assessment of expectations versus experience does not pick up the emotional aspects of a contact centre agent's job. Subsequently we developed the Contact Centre Employee Engagement Index which assesses both an individual's cognitive and emotional connectedness to a job. The tool is specifically designed for the contact centre work environment.
The powerful aspect of this tool is that through our partnership with Insight Now, who are experts at measuring agent performance, we can link an employee's performance as measured by the customer (and also their supervisor) to levels of engagement and loyalty.How did you test and validate the Contact Centre EEI (CCEEI)?
The CCEEI has been tested in numerous large contact centres in the UK, South Africa and Australia. We have used data gathered across these diverse countries to test the model's predictive power, generalisability and to see which attributes consistently were statistically significant as drivers of employee loyalty and performance. As we are academically trained researchers the rigour and science behind the model is of utmost importance to us.What are the key components of the Index and how did you select them?
The Contact Centre Employee Engagement Index is a measure 25 aspects of a contact centre job (11 categories) and the employee's resulting psychological and emotional connectedness to their work. We then measure three loyalty indicators which we tie back to the 11 engagement categories. The particular items or attributes measured have been selected based on many years of assessing contact centre work and employee satisfaction and loyalty. As academically trained statisticians we have run many, many statistical tests to determine reliability of questions and scales (Cronbach alpha), internal, external, content and expert validity tests and multiple regression analysis to select only those attribute or questions that can predict employee loyalty and performance.Is there really a difference between the engagement factors that you would measure in a call centre versus the rest of the business? If so, what are they?
Have you ever seen an employee with a low engagement score that still performs his/her duties well? If so, what percentage of employees does this represent?
Yes, we have measured employees who have very low engagement but high customer performance scores, but this is a small percentage. Although we do find that there is a statistically significantly positive relationship between engagement, loyalty and performance there are still those employees who are not engaged and not loyal who will perform well. However how prediction with these employees is that this will be a very short term situation.Where is the EEI currently being tested? What do the results show to date?
The CCEEI has been tested in the UK, South Africa and Australia. The results thus far show varied levels of engagement, the lowest being 44/100 and the average level of engagement being about 65/100. We are yet to measure a centre in any country that has highly engaged employees.
For more information please contact us directly.
