At a current occasion, I spoke to a Chief Know-how Officer (CTO) about the way it was not untypical for him to have a day of 14 back-to-back half-hour conferences. He defined that this began through the early a part of the pandemic, and by 4 pm, he was completely exhausted and struggled to remain centered and concentrate. He added, nonetheless, that over time he bought used to such a heavy schedule and was in a position to handle his vitality and focus higher.
On listening to this story, I commented that whereas I typically hear tales like this from all kinds of executives at completely different companies, I’m typically left questioning how people find yourself doing any work if they’re in back-to-back conferences all day.
I requested barely tongue-in-cheek how we had gotten to his level, provided that I would by no means seen a job description that contained any goal that required an individual to attend as many conferences as bodily attainable.
This raised a couple of smiles and fairly a couple of nods.
Underneath stress.
While my remark was playful, it additionally contained a severe level and one which I’ve made to many executives about how they need to actively handle their time to create the house needed to essentially take into consideration and perceive the challenges they’re going through.
I used to be eager about that dialog once more the opposite day after I got here throughout some analysis from Microsoft in regards to the impression on our brains and emotional state when now we have back-to-back conferences.
Utilizing an electroencephalography [EEG] cap, the Microsoft analysis staff had been in a position to monitor {the electrical} exercise within the mind of back-to-back assembly contributors. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that back-to-back digital conferences are worrying, and a sequence of conferences can lower your capacity to focus and interact.
Nevertheless, the analysis additionally discovered that introducing brief breaks between conferences to permit folks to maneuver, stretch, collect their ideas or seize a glass of water will help scale back the cumulative buildup of stress throughout a sequence of conferences.
That is actually helpful perception, and I hope that extra executives and their groups embrace the introduction of those brief breaks between conferences to scale back stress, assist well-being and keep consideration ranges.
However I’ve additionally been eager about whether or not these analysis findings have a broader software.
Particularly, I have been eager about whether or not the calls taken by customer support brokers could possibly be analogous to a sequence of very brief, back-to-back conferences. If they’re, that has ramifications for the quantity of stress customer support representatives must cope with. That is introduced into sharp focus when you think about that the typical customer support consultant is usually anticipated to be always on calls at some stage in an 8-hour shift other than a 30-minute lunch break and two 15 min breaks, one within the morning and one within the afternoon.
So, is it any surprise that the contact heart trade faces perennial burnout and excessive ranges of employees churn?
Suppose we wish to construct a extra sustainable method to serving our clients, notably over stay channels just like the cellphone or video. If we do, we have to assume extra clearly and empathetically about our brokers and what they undergo.
Now, I do know that expertise is evolving to assist with this problem and that’s nice. However we should not cease there. Constructing a extra engaging and sustainable contact heart mannequin would require us to rethink each contact heart operations and their economics.