One of the key problems faced by BPOs across the country today is ‘dearth of trained Managerial Talent’. Professionals with 2-3 years of experience are required to manage a team with one very clear objective of “Coaching” the agents on the floor. The key deliverable of these young managers is to “Coach” their team for maintaining, high productivity, high conversions & high quality standards.
With stringent customer requirements on the above parameters, the young managers are constantly under pressure to show results.
To top it all these young managers are too new in the area of people management. The first time managers & coaches then easily fall in the trap of ‘policing’ rather than ‘Influencing’. The situation gets more complex when team members who need to be coached are more or less the same age and experience and would have been peers just a month ago!
This was exactly the situation when People Factor came into partnership with NIIT Smart Serve. As a result, THE SMART COACH PROGRAM was conceptualized. In this, all the coaches and first time team leaders were needed to go through a two- day workshop.
The purpose of organizing these workshops was to enable the supervisors and coaches to acquire the skills & attitude of coaching for sustained peak performance. We covered about 120 participants in a span of six months.
Our Workshop Model- People Factor Co-creation Model
At the heart of our workshops lies the Co-creation paradigm
The model stems from the belief that if the participant is the Creator of the learning content, then it will Stay with the Participant as his/her own. The participant will then further share the learnings amongst his peers & subordinates thereby accelerating his/her personal growth.
Ownership enables an honest portrayal of current reality and facilitates the first step of the model: Articulate Current Self
Ruthless openness to self-criticism, during the workshop, is necessary to initiate the second step of the model: Define Highest Self
Gap Analysis and staying with the powerful questions that come up during this analysis initiates the third step of the model: Confront Barriers
Goal Synchronization process initiates the fourth step of the model: Raise Performance Bar
Constant Feedback and Course Correction enable the fifth step of the model: Deliver Peak Performance
The Program Flow
The program flow was on the basic premise ‘It’s all in the attitude’. On the first day, participants delved into their attitude towards work & their colleagues and experimented with new thoughts. They got open to a new approach towards managing performance. The second day was essentially focused on honing the skills of coaching.
The Impact
The impact study was done after about three months from the start of the intervention. The idea was not just to see the participant’s satisfaction levels. We needed to see if the skills learnt actually gave visible results. Hence the question posed to the participants was, ‘How useful did they find each session’; and not ‘How satisfied they were.’
The scale used was from 1-5, where 1 was the lowest and 5 was the highest. The average and the mode for the usefulness of each session have been depicted in the graphs below.
Another key input from participants was on ‘visible impact’. From the 60 respondents 69% have said that this program helped them significantly improve their relationship with their team. About 54% of them also believed that their team became more synergistic. About 31% also credited higher productivity among their team members to this course.
Instances of visible positive impact:
- Fewer Errors in calls, Higher productivity and low attrition
- Teams are more receptive to feedback, more understanding
- Improved energy level, more confident and enthusiastic
- Improved relationship among team members, more trust
- Positive attitude towards work
Instances where Coaching Skills did not come handy:
- Explaining the consequences of non fatal error (Grammar, soft skills etc.)
- Resolving conflicts among team members
- Building rapport with team members so that they can share their problems
What can be added to make the program more effective?
- Such programs should be more frequent and duration should be increased
- Can be made more practical through training done on floor (place of work), to understand the situation better
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