As more physical workplaces reopen, it is clear that many workers have adapted so successfully to home working over the past 18 months, that there is far less appetite to return to a 5 day office week. In fact, according to Randstad research, 43% of employees in the UK are attracted by the possibility to work remotely, meaning that it is a clear driver for candidates when choosing to apply for new roles, or staying at their existing ones.
This is true of the financial services sector: employees have adapted and embraced home working, meaning that employers need to get on board with hybrid working practices quickly. Even though the sector is traditionally heavily regulated and reliant on big city office working, many organisations have successfully adapted to this new way of working. If you want to help your organisation do the same, here are some top tips on how to do so, whilst maintaining optimum productivity levels.
How to optimise productivity when hybrid working:
- Automation, automation, automation
- Make use of analytics
- Communicate with employees
- Encourage an open door policy
- Make use of assisted contact centre agent guidance
Automation, automation, automation.
Automation has been around and well used in the sector for many years now. However, it can really come into its own when being used to help with customer interaction. For example, it can be used to compensate for the lack of proximity of teams and supervisors when handling customer issues. For example, if queries are complex and are taking additional time to manage when employees can’t just turn around and ask their manager a question, it can be worth investing in AI to handle queries and complaints.
Not only does this help employees, but it can also boost customer satisfaction and increase the customer experience - if they get the answer they need quickly and efficiently, everyone is happy. This automation could be used for chat bots, virtual assistants, machine learning, document checking etc.
Make use of analytics.
Automation can do a lot, but there will always need to be some real life communications within financial services organisations, both internally and externally.
Analytics are crucial in monitoring all communication lines (social media, emails, calls, texts), and installing top notch analytics can allow you to easily monitor and protect your staff and customers. This can be very effective in financial services when staff work from home.
Communicate with employees.
It goes without saying that communicating well has been key throughout the pandemic. This can be trickier to do when not all employees are in the same place. It is crucial that organisations have the frameworks in place in order to support the demand for hybrid working - appraisals, feedback sessions and even your everyday team meetings will need to be carefully managed to fit in with people’s different needs.
As long as you communicate your expectations for employees when working from home and working in the office, not only will your teams be happier, but they will likely be more productive.
Encourage an open door policy.
When hybrid working, it can be easy to feel disconnected from your employees, and for them to feel the same about you. You may go for weeks without seeing everyone in person, and employees may feel less comfortable to give you a call or drop you an email to discuss an issue than they would if in the office. The same goes for the other way around - people working in an office may not feel confident in approaching you.
To help solve this, implementing an open door policy, virtually or physically, can go a long way. By letting team members and peers know that they can talk to management at any point, however they want to do so, employees are likely to be more productive.
Make use of assisted contact centre agent guidance.
Within the last 12 months, assisted contact centre agent guidance has been introduced, which is essentially software that boosts the performance of financial services contact centre agents by assisting them in real-time, during live customer interactions.
The fact that this can be used no matter where the agent or employee is physically located, can really help to boost performance.
We hope you find this guidance useful. If you have any questions or are looking to boost your workforce, please reach out to the Randstad Financial Services team.
chris rose
associate director, randstad financial services
