Over the last year, contact centres have dramatically transformed. Gone are the days when hundreds of employees are based in a buzzy, lively call centre. Instead, across the country these workers have been split from their teams and had to quickly adapt to working from home in silos. While the overall customer experience hasn’t been impacted, the shift to remote working as a result of the pandemic has had a permanent effect on the industry, with 89% of contact centre leaders saying that they believe the industry has changed forever (Talkdesk, 2020).
Remote working has also had a significant effect on employee wellbeing, as many employees have struggled to balance the new way of working alongside other pressures, like managing care responsibilities, juggling home schooling, sharing a small workspace with flatmates, or being isolated from colleagues, friends and family. In fact, 66% of leaders have highlighted mental wellness as a significant issue in the contact centre industry (Talkdesk, 2020).
At Brook Street, we work closely with the contact centre industry and we take these wellbeing concerns very seriously. That’s why we invited business leaders from across the industry to discuss the challenges they’ve encountered over the past year, how they’ve addressed them, the improvements they plan to make in the future, and how they’ll evolve these solutions and working practices. Here are some key learnings from this last year and details about how we’re championing the importance of wellbeing at work.
Fostering employee wellbeing isn’t just about doing what’s right for your workforce, it also makes good business sense. When you promote wellbeing within your organisation, you can increase resilience levels, create a positive working environment and boost employee engagement. And as happy employees are more productive, that ultimately leads to greater profits. The CIPD Growing the health and wellbeing agenda report shows that healthy workplaces help people to flourish and reach their potential, so organisations should create these healthy environments to benefit both employees and the company.
Contact centres are now checking in on employees’ mental wellbeing, along with broader trends across the industry, the initiatives that contact centre leaders have implemented in their organisations to improve wellbeing, as well as advice on creating new working processes for permanent remote working, to ensure that people feel supported wherever they work.
To find out more and learn how to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, download the Mental Wellness in the Contact Centre industry: Building a better normal whitepaper.
This article was originally published in the 12th Edition of the Human Age newspaper – get your copy here.
