Adopt a Counterintuitive Strategy to Address This Common Staffing Problem
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
The healthcare industry has long suffered from labor shortages, which contributes to burnout. This forces otherwise competent staff into exiting the industry.
Though we won’t solve this labor shortage dilemma, we can seek to minimize burnout. This includes burnout of our essential healthcare call center agents.
Here are some tips to reduce agent burnout:
Not Compensation
Though it’s important to provide a competitive compensation package, increased pay is not a solution to burnout. Rather, it’s a strategy to reduce turnover.
Offering to pay burnt-out agents more to keep them on the job will only serve to prolong their agony and damage your call center. They’ll continue to work for the paycheck even though they can no longer do their best and may not even care.
Once you’ve ensured that you’re providing the appropriate level of compensation, then turn your attention elsewhere to combat agent burnout.
Adjust Your Paradigms
When call centers are understaffed or receive more calls than projected, the default managerial response is to ask agents to do more. This includes having them stay late, work a double shift, and come in on their days off.
Though this is sometimes needed, it shouldn’t be a prolonged scheduling strategy. Continually asking agents to do more will only push them into burnout faster.
Instead, you may need to at times take a debatable action. Let the calls pile up in queue instead of asking already tired agents to work more.
Yes, having calls in queue will produce stress for the agents working and won’t give callers the best level of service, but overall it will help protect your staff from burnout and therefore reduce turnover. It may be the best long-term solution.
Yes, you sometimes need to put your staff first over patients and callers.
Promote a Team Vision
We live in a society that celebrates the individual. Yet individualism is a lonely place to be. Recent polls, studies, and surveys confirm this.
What’s better is community. Most people long to be part of something bigger than themselves. Your call center can serve in this capacity.
Deemphasize individual agent stats and metrics. Instead, focus on overall call center outcomes.
Celebrate Call Center Results
In a time when many criticize the results of the healthcare industry, celebrate the ways in which your staff helps patients better navigate healthcare. This can range from getting a better appointment time all the way up to saving a life. Yes, it does occur.
Help each agent see how they can be part of making these things happen. Earning a paycheck—though necessary—is ancillary. Helping to improve people’s lives matters more.
Acknowledge individual performance only when it contributes to the overall team success and achieves desirable outcomes.
Reduce Agent Burnout
Though it may not be possible to eliminate agent burnout, insightful call center managers can take steps to reduce its occurrence. Having appropriate compensation is a basic requirement.
Then follow three keys that should serve to reduce agent burnout. They are to adjust your paradigms, promote a team vision, and celebrate call center results.
Do these and you’ll have happier agents who are less prone to burnout. They’ll benefit. You’ll benefit. And your patients will benefit.
Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.
