There are plenty of motivational call center tips out there that sound great on the surface but don’t actually do anything for your team.
It’s like putting up a cheesy (and completely ignorable) poster in your office that says, “Take the next step. Build your legacy. Change lives today. What are you waiting for? Your future starts now!”
Still, even the most popular tricks like spot bonuses, employee-of-the-month honors, and other workplace incentives can lose their appeal after a while—and generic call center advice like “Use better tools” doesn’t really provide anything concrete to help you move the needle.
The truth is, there’s only one thing that matters if you want a motivated team: winning.
In other words, a winning team is a motivated team—and vice versa.
Why a Winning Team Is All the Motivation Your Call Center Needs
There’s nothing more motivating for call center agents than being on a team that works together, hits positive milestones on a regular basis, and makes everyone feel like their work is truly accomplishing something.
Alright, fine, maybe a massive salary increase would be more motivating—but assuming agent compensation is fair and commensurate enough to render money a nonfactor in this equation, being on a team that consistently provides a sense of purpose and accomplishment is probably the strongest driver of workplace productivity.
In other words, people like to feel that they’re contributing to meeting goals, that they’re learning something every day, and that they’re working towards a better future.
Thus, if you’re able to create this sense of winning in your team, that’s when the day-to-day tasks stop feeling like work all of the time and instead start to feel like a journey everyone is on together.
Tricks to Create a Winning Environment in a Call Center
Have a Scoreboard
Having clear goals is key, but having these goals displayed in a way that makes it easy to know when you’ve hit them is what really gets a team to rally. Make sure that your goals are displayed in a place where everybody in the call center can see them easily (whether digitally or physically), and make sure you include your current progress alongside them.
You can get as fancy as you want with this, but a simple spreadsheet or a whiteboard can also work just fine. Start by listing the goals for each period, and then update your current statuses as they get completed throughout the day, week, month, or quarter.
We recommend limiting the period of your scoreboards to a maximum of a quarter-year because it’s hard for humans to keep longer durations in sight—and your team might get overwhelmed by looking at a whole year.
As you approach your goals over time, people will see a chain of success start to form and they’ll want to keep it going. Even in tough times for certain individuals, this tangible proof of team success can help them feel like winners. It also creates a more positive atmosphere throughout your call center, giving people something to lean on when they encounter a challenging situation.
Make Sure Agents Can See Other Agents Winning
Putting your overall team goals on display is important, but it’s not the only thing you ought to do. It’s also a good idea to highlight individual performances across the team.
Similar to an employee-of-the-month honor, this kind of recognition can encourage people to do their best without shaming them if they don’t. The key here is to avoid showing the entire list of individual performances—because nobody wants to be known as the worst performer among their peers.
At the same time, congratulating high performers will also give the rest of the team a sense of what the overall expectations are for individuals. Sometimes people underperform not out of incompetence or malice, but because they simply don’t know the level at which the rest of the team is performing.
That said, putting the team’s best individual work on display can also help communicate what’s possible. Before you know it, team members will stop asking, “How is that even possible?” and start asking, “How can I do that, too?”
Lastly, this can also open the doors for learning opportunities via peer-to-peer mentoring. Simply put, if it’s clear who the rest of the team can or should be learning from, then the transfer of knowledge and training can be much smoother and more straightforward.
Implement Change Incrementally
If your workplace is constantly updating its goals, priorities, and objectives, nobody will be able to build any momentum. Instead, they’ll have to spend all their time guessing what they’re supposed to be doing—or recovering from operational whiplash.
There are also a number of cognitive costs that come with too much change, including the cost of task-switching—which is often the most destructive. Human brains simply aren’t wired to jump from one thing to the next (and the next, and the next), so there’s always a drop in productivity when someone has to switch between tasks.
Therefore, instead of making people feel like they have to run back and forth between multiple blazing fires (that recover in size each time they’re left unattended), it’s better to introduce changes at a reliable cadence so that these fires can be put out one at a time.
Generally speaking, introducing big changes on a monthly or quarterly basis tends to work the best. This way, people will know when changes are coming and have adequate time not only to prepare for the upcoming shifts, but also to wrap up their current projects or objectives without being disrupted or slowed down.
One more thing to keep in mind about conducting your operations this way is that you may even find it much easier to track and hit the aforementioned team goals you put on the whiteboard or spreadsheet. Conversely, if the goalposts are always changing, your board will develop a habit of becoming outdated before your team has a chance to hit any targets.
When Someone Suggests an Idea, Try It
As you start getting into your new program and people start feeling engaged and motivated, they’ll naturally bring up some new ideas. You need to listen to these ideas.
Sometimes, there’s nothing that can turn an engaged employee into a bored, disconnected employee faster than having their ideas ignored.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you have to implement every bad idea that you listen to—but you should at least be open to testing as many as you can, insofar as they won’t hurt the team if you humor them for a bit. At the end of the day, you still have to be discerning about what ideas are a good fit and what ideas need to be left on the drawing board.
We recommend setting a few critical boundaries to protect your overall business strategy and key priorities, so make sure you communicate whatever non-negotiable guardrails you have to the team. Then, once everyone knows how far they can take things without infringing upon those core elements, go ahead and let people experiment with some things they think will make their roles better. Even if you think some ideas are a waste of time, it’s better to give people the freedom to fail than to forbid them from trying.
Naturally, some of these experiments will result in productivity dips, but consider them a small price to pay for preserving a better workplace environment and a motivated team. Meanwhile, if any one of these ideas turns out to be a stroke of genius, you’ll be glad you left enough room to explore the upsides—and the employee who thought of it will feel fantastic.