*On September 1, Relia, Inc. merged with KDDI Evolva, Inc. to form a new company: Altius Link, Inc.
With the prolonged pandemic, the numbers of staffs who are anxious of commuting and who find the unfamiliarity of WFH stressful are increasing. In the last blog, we have discuss the EX enhancement post COVID, this blog we will go into details of the actual case study of the mental healthcare our staffs in Japan in order to mitigate their stress.
Mental healthcare is essential
The contact center agent job is stressful compared to other types of work as suggested by higher attrition by reason of deteriorated mental health conditions comparing to other jobs.
Also, contact center quality and productivity is easily affected by the mental conditions of staff. These indexes dropped under stressful environment. With the pandemic, working environments have recently changed for agents with WFH operations, the number of staffs with unstable mental health are increasing. In these situations, staff mental healthcare become even more important.
Looking at mental healthcare through case studies
Agent mental health is difficult to grasp unless measures are actively taken. When changes noticed, the situation might have been already serious, leaving the team in the middle of a negative cycle of answer rate drop due to absenteeism and attrition, deterioration of the workplace, etc.. To prevent this, it is important to quickly identify agent mental condition deteriorations by visualizing agent mental health and immediately providing the necessary support and response. Here are examples of such activities at Relia.
Case Study 1: Visualize agent emotions with mental health management system
elia introduced a mental health management system across the company in order to grasp staff's health conditions. They can choose the feeling when working out of 3 levels of conditions.
"Good (Sunny),"
"Average (Cloudy),"
"Bad (Rainy),"
Staffs are able to communicate any emotions that were difficult to put into words. Supervisor then will be able to provide the follow up based on this information. For example, if a rainy mark is showed continuously, SV would set up a meeting promptly with staff to discuss. Given the opportunity to speak up and be heard, staffs feel more at ease, insecurities lifted while working.
Case Study 2: Provide security for new agents with the "Brother & Sister System"!
At a center where retention of new hire is a challenge, the "Brother & Sister System" is introduced.
Staff would pair up with one new hire. During the nesting period, new agents are likely to feel insecure about learning operation and fitting in with the new environment, the team, so a dedicated staff for each agent would conduct regular interviews. Also, the uniqueness of this system is that in addition to hearing out work-related concerns, active communication that includes casual talks such as hobbies or how they manage stress, etc. is promoted. Staff will keep the interviews and daily communications casual, avoid formalities. By providing agents someone they can talk to, we also provide the security in the workplace for new agents. With such efforts put in by the members, the new hire attrition rate of the center where this system was introduced is steadily decreasing.
Create a pleasant working environment and realize a positive cycle by agent mental healthcare
The measures introduced above are only a part of our mental healthcare measures. Since situations vary by each center, flexible support must be provided matching each center situation.
To create an environment by mitigating agent stress such as insecurities and feelings of loneliness, anxiousness leads to prevention of attrition and quality, productivity improvement.
In reality, the attrition rate at our center where we implemented the measures above have significantly improved. Furthermore, other positive outcomes are reported such as workplace communication was improved and staff is more active in speaking out constructive ideas regarding operation improvement.
(original article in Japanese Click)