It’s not home working, it’s remote working now – it seems that our business world has moved on from the initial panic of the COVID pandemic to get everyone home and safe and still working, to now managing a business in multiple locations – people’s homes as well as offices. An article in The Times this week noted “Bosses seek new executive breed to run army of remote workers” and that there is a big recruitment drive now for “Head of Remote”.
With this seemingly permanent shift to remote working there is also an increased risk for staff attrition on the horizon for businesses, especially for us in the contact centre industry where some companies were already looking at home working as an employment strategy before the COVID pandemic.
Attrition is already acknowledged as too high in our industry. In research* we recently had conducted amongst business leaders of contact centres they told us:
“Staff turnover is too high; knowledge retention is the biggest [challenge] that hits CX”
“Challenges are consistency of service and cost of retention and recruitment”
“Attrition is a reason why our CSat is not high”
“On-boarding and recruitment is a negative impact on the business”
“Turnover of agents is too high”
Why would an employee stay with you if there is a better remote working job for them 200 miles away? This opens the whole of the UK to their search area for a job, not just their local area.
Employers are going to need to look very carefully at why their staff want to leave and what they need to do to ensure they keep their best employees.
We commissioned research with *Davies Hickman in August 2020 to interview agents on these issues and will be presenting the findings in a webinar with The Forum.