Tips on Working Abroad
By Adrian Travis
In management consulting, there’s no deeper end of the pool than an international consulting assignment. At Trindent, we call this a complex business challenge, because of the various cultural nuances, language barrier, not to mention jet-lag and isolation it causes staff while on assignment. However, for the right person, and the right client, it can both be a valuable driver of business performance for a client. Working abroad can benefit a client that doesn’t normally have access to excellent consulting talent in their particular city or country and it will also be a gratifying learning experience for a consultant to explore new frontiers in business, and their personal lives.
As a consultant, I’ve had the pleasure to work for long periods of time in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong and Munich. It was a tremendously gratifying experience and I felt that I grew as both a consultant and a human being.
Opportunities Abroad
Asia Pacific is well-known to have a rather immature management consulting talent pool. Even the biggest and strongest management consulting firms have rather spotty track records in developing markets, particularly those in markets where educational systems minimize free-thinking and criticism of ideas. As businesses grow and the demand for consulting talents in Asia become necessary, management consultants will grow. For now, this market is still a frontier market for consulting services.
Working Abroad
The number one complaint from clients looking to perform a project in Asia is international travel expenses, followed closely by local linguistic expertise. The common questions that I ask international client executives are:
“Would you mind the additional travel expense to have an expert on your team?”
“Would you like the problem solved with the strongest possible team, or would you like us to trade that off for local language proficiency?”
Sometimes clients wish to minimize travel expenses by keeping their consultants on site 100% of the time. Like any good employee, isolation from friends and family is likely to lead to burnout and lack of engagement. It’s a good practice to keep your consultants engaged and operating at their peak performance. Rotations home to see loved ones are essential in achieving this. Sometimes the incremental results generated from a properly-run project with fully-engaged staff and consultants can easily outweigh any travel expense incurred. Forward-thinking client executives will typically understand this.
Trindent Consulting has had a strong track record of delivering results in Asia, and we’ve been able to open up this market to top-notch consulting expertise. It’s not without it’s challenges, but any project’s chance of success can be achieved by favoring the strongest possible consultant, regardless of geography, language proficiency, and ensuring they’re motivated to perform.
Agile Manifesto in Operational Improvement Projects
Traditionally Agile approach (and its components, such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP)) are associated with software development projects. Management Consulting projects typically follow a more traditional Waterfall methodology, based on PMBOK® guidelines. However, our clients today are operating in a more dynamic environment, that requires a higher degree of flexibility in delivering projects. Here are some elements of the Agile Manifesto that we, at Trindent, are using in our operational improvement engagements.
- Satisfy Customers Through Early & Continuous Delivery: One of the key focuses of our engagements is in identifying and delivering “quick wins” early in the engagement. This helps to motivate teams, build early buy-in from stakeholders, and start delivering value to the customer.
- Deliver Value Frequently: This becomes especially noticeable when we develop and install Management Operating system elements, like dashboards, performance trackers, etc. Trindent consultants work closely with client team members to deliver system tools on weekly basis through multiple iterations. This allows clients to test the tool, provide feedback, modify requirements or needed functionality. The result is a system tool that fully satisfies client needs, and the client takes ownership early in the process.
- Break the Silos of Your Project: All Trindent engagements span across multiple departments in the client organization. It becomes vitally important for the success of engagement for all these departments and stakeholders to work in a coherent and synchronized way, focusing on aligned goals
- Regularly Reflect and Adjust Your Way of Work to Boost Effectiveness: One of the key project governance elements of Trindent engagements is the weekly Engagement Status Report meeting. This highly structured event brings together all engagement participants to review engagement progress, schedule, and develop corrective actions as required.
These are just a few of the Agile Manifesto elements that we use on our engagements, that allow achieving planned results while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and adapting to changing business environments.
The author of this blog, Anas Dabbakh is a Senior Consultant at Trindent.
The Importance of Schedule Adherence
Schedule adherence is a call centers metric that tracks how well an agent follows a set schedule. The formula to get this key performance indicator (KPI) is to calculate “the amount of time an agent worked… [divided by] the time they were scheduled to work. This includes call time, after call wrap, and scheduled activities like meetings and training.”
In a call center, setting a schedule and not having staff adhere to it is like making a to-do list and then not following it. There is value in every activity on the list, but if we don’t follow it, we are wasting that value and our time.
There are a number of benefits to having a high rate of schedule adherence, including reducing shrinkage (time for which your agents are paid but cannot be on calls) and staying within service levels. Inversely, low schedule adherence has a cascading effect starting with an increase in average speed to answer, which impacts the customer experience with long wait times, and leads to an increase in persistent high occupancy rate for agents (little or no time between calls), which could result in staff burnout and turnover.
What’s Causing Low Schedule Adherence?
The first step to increasing schedule adherence is to figure out why it’s low in the first place. There are any number of reasons why agents may have low schedule adherence, and while process or system failures can certainly be the cause, the best place to start looking is at the behaviour of call center agents.
With proper observation, it’s easy to find out if your agents are:
- Arriving late for work or leaving before the end of their shift;
- Actively avoiding calls by showing an incorrect status setting;
- Taking longer breaks than they are allotted; or
- Spending too much time on personal activities while not on break;
What Can You Do?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” – Peter Drucker.
The most effective solution starts with
measurement.
Most financial industry call centers are
already equipped with services and platforms that can provide a wealth of data
if they’re configured and utilized properly. The first step to improving your call center’s
schedule adherence is to monitor what current adherence rates are in order to
get a baseline for how the organization is performing.
Once the data is translated into relevant
and consumable information, it should be made available to agents so they can
baseline themselves and keep track of where they rank. Next, targets for schedule adherence should be
set or refreshed; and managers should be given continuously updated information
about their team’s performance so they can apply a targeted approach to
coaching staff who need improvement.
When working with financial services clients, Trindent has found that pairing a robust KPI dashboard to measure and track performance with active management to keep staff performance on track is the best way to tackle low schedule adherence.
Click here to learn more about how we can help your organization develop the right systems to get the right information to the right people and make your call center operations efficient.
How To Drive Behavioral Change In An Organization
Behaviors can be classified into two groups: productive and unproductive, and they can respectively either increase or decrease performance within an organization. Furthermore, behaviors allow us to have insights into personal values and beliefs, culture, and individual performance. Behaviors can be changed if willed, and the Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence (ABC) model is a tool that can help identify some of the causes for those behaviours as well as the impact those behaviours result in by establishing a pattern.
Antecedent
Antecedents can be anything to prompt the resultant behavior. In the business world, examples of antecedents include job descriptions, training modules, KPIs, and performance coaching to name a few. To obtain a positive result, one may modify the antecedents in a scenario to drive certain behaviours. For instance, if an organization is looking for more of their sales team to achieve a certain conversion percentage to be eligible for a promotion, they may look at decreasing the conversion percentage to obtain their desired result.
Behavior
There are limits to the impact that training, processes, and procedures can influence one’s actions. What one says or does helps recognize a behavior. In other words, muscle movement is required for an action to be considered a behavior. One’s behavior can be influenced by either the antecedent or, more commonly, the consequence.
Consequence
It is important to recognize that there can be both positive and negative consequences. The outcome of events following a behavior help shape a person’s decision-making skills. Examples of positive consequences can include positive feedback, performance bonuses, and a converted sale. A positive consequence will likely lead to the repeatability of that behavior. A few instances of negative consequences can include a client hanging up, unconstructive feedback, and being ignored. In such cases, negative consequences will likely cease the continual engagement of the preceding behavior.
Prompting the right behavior by manipulating the antecedent or having an appropriate consequence for the behavior to either encourage or deter the behavior from occurring again can help shape positive behaviors. To recognize which course of action is best, it is important to first analyze whether effective performance evaluation and performance coaching has occurred.
Performance Evaluation and Coaching
Performance evaluation is a lagging indicator and has several objectives including retention, career progression, motivation, and competency development. Typically Performance evaluation occurs at a set frequency (i.e., 90-day, annual, etc.) and as a result, the consequences may be delayed. To help employees quickly improve their performance, performance coaching occurs at a higher frequency. Objectives of performance coaching include identifying performance obstacles, rapid skill development, and shaping desired behavior through appropriate reinforcement. Performance coaching has immediate and positive consequences if executed well. By incorporating all these elements, an organization can empower its employees so that they are the best version of themselves for years to come.
The author of this blog Glothen Sirisegaram is a Consultant at Trindent Consulting.