How to Create a Sense of Achievement Within Your Team

Creating a sense of achievement within your team can be a great employee engagement technique. Here are six ways to do it.

1. Track the Right Things

To develop a sense of achievement within the team, the contact centre needs to be able to track and celebrate key milestones that highlight progression.

This means that the contact centre should be tracking things like:

• Gains in metrics like customer satisfaction and quality scores
• Increases in good customer feedback
• Drops in complaint volumes
• Low rates of absence and high rates of adherence
• Top performing teams of the week

Encouraging team-based competition on a range of indicators like this not only encourages good practice but also ensures that you can recognize each individual team for something.

2. Catch People Doing Good Things

Quality monitoring is another key contact centre method for highlighting great practices that can be recognized and celebrated.

In quality monitoring, you should make a habit of spotting people doing good things. Maybe you can ask each team to nominate a “call of the week”. The “best call” wins a prize for the whole team.

Gamifying the contact centre like this is such a great way to ensure that good performance is being recognized and it helps to generate a sense of achievement.

Just make sure you stick to the following rules for gamification, as pinpointed by Koby Amedume of NICE inContact:

• Regular and dependable updates – You want advisors to be motivated by a goal all week long, not just on Friday afternoon when winners are announced.
• Fair competitions – Don’t let one bad apple bring the whole team down. That is demotivating. Set a wide range of achievements to reach, so you can recognize each team for something.
• Variable checks – Make sure everything that you recognize your team for is in their control. So, for example, don’t choose to reward advisors on handling times or occupancy rates, which mostly come down to luck.
• Focus on leading and lagging indicators – Don’t focus on just your lagging indicators, target your leading indicators as well, so teams are also motivated by future outcomes.
• Create social awareness – Make a lot of noise over your recognition programme. Post on your internal groups and make sure teams are celebrating their wins. If not, work with them to improve your gamification strategy.
• Reward properly – The reward needs to be worth the effort. Having team members choose the rewards, either by putting their own ideas forward or running a contact centre poll, will help with this.

To find more gamification ideas for the remote contact centre, read our article: The Best Motivational Games for Employees and Remote Workers

3. Involve the Team in Other Projects

A sense of achievement doesn’t have to come just from metrics and quality monitoring. Involving advisors in other projects can also do the trick.

Change-management projects are a great example of this.

Too often, in contact centres, managers create new work processes and procedures without consulting their teams first.

By doing so, these managers miss out on key insights, while the team are far less likely to buy into the change and adapt their behaviours as a consequence.

What does this have to do with creating a sense of achievement?

Get the team invested in new processes before roll-out…

Well, if you instead get the team invested in new processes before roll-out, highlighting to them how the change will benefit both them and the organization, you can all celebrate its future success.

By defining what success looks like beforehand and following up after roll-out, you can continually update the team on the initiative’s success, congratulate them for the results and generate a real sense of achievement.

Three more great practices that will help you to improve change management are:

• Sharing ideas in focus groups – Every point of view can give you an indication of what might happen after roll-out. These sessions can also help you to alleviate any potential concerns from the contact centre floor.
• Creating clear expectations – Changes create new routines. Walk your team through these new routines over the first couple of weeks, so they know what is expected of them.
• Setting intermediate goals – Monitor the change and set intermediate goals to track your progress. When the team meets these goals, praise the achievement and celebrate the team’s development.

4. Motivate Advisors With Customer Outcomes

Get advisors invested in customer outcomes. Not only will this improve their customer service, but when the team help customers to meet their intended outcomes, they will feel a greater sense of achievement.

There are a number of ways in which you can get the team invested in customer outcomes. These include:

• Creating a sense of purpose around the customer
• Incentivizing quality scores that are based on key customer outcomes
• Increasing advisor empathy levels (these training exercises may help)

Another particularly effective method can be to encourage advisors to look out for customer improvement opportunities.

“Advisors can add colour commentary to what your traditional market research is telling you,” says John Aves, Chief Executive at cp2experience.

“They will also bring suggestions for improvement and ideas on how to solve problems.”

So set up the right listening mechanisms within your teams, encourage them to come forward with solutions – not just problems – and act on their feedback.

When the team contribute to a positive customer service improvement, congratulate them in front of the wider contact centre. Give them a sense of achievement that will keep them coming back for more.

5. Provide Direct, Thoughtful and Specific Feedback

How you give your team feedback is a major factor in how proud they are of their achievements.

To give effective feedback that fosters a sense of achievement, make sure your feedback is:

• Direct – The focus for the feedback should be clearly stated
• Personal – Speak for yourself to maximize the authenticity of your feedback
• Specific – Make sure you are specific about the behaviour you are praising
• Thoughtful – Well-considered feedback appears more genuine than off-the-cuff remarks
• Timely – Ensure that feedback is timely and relevant for greatest impact

The goal is to give a mixture of positive feedback around what they are doing well and constructive feedback to push them further in the right direction.

John Aves recommends the 3:1 ratio of giving three bits of positive feedback to one piece of constructive feedback. This means that you are highlighting lots of key achievements, while setting up an area for potential improvement.

John Aves recommends the 3:1 ratio of giving three bits of positive feedback to one piece of constructive feedback.

When there is an improvement in this area, celebrate that to further create a sense of achievement.

On an individual level, when you highlight a topic for constructive feedback, you could also potentially pair up the advisor with a colleague who excels in this area.

If the advisor receiving the feedback then improves, you can praise both team members for their role in improving the performance and create a real sense of togetherness.

For more guidance on how to best give advisors feedback, read our article: How to Achieve Excellent Customer Service Through Coaching

6. Join Together Your Teams and Support Them

To create a system where you can be sure that teams feel motivated by a sense of achievement, it is best to ensure they are coordinated, joined-up and supported.

If they are not, what you will likely find is that you have two different teams within the contact centre working on the same goals and not sharing key learnings with one another.

It is much better to talk to team leaders and understand their key improvement goals. Then, ask them:

• What does success look like?
• How can success be measured?
• What are your intermediate goals?

This last question is particularly important, as you look to ensure that leaders are engaging their teams by making big improvements seem possible.

Highlight to them that they are on the pathway to success.

Also, try to congratulate the team on reaching these stepping stones and make sure that they know that they are on the pathway to success.

At the end of this process, the manager and all the leaders can sit down and share their new-found best practices. These can be shared around the contact centre to further improve performance.

Key Takeaways

The most important aspect in cultivating a sense of achievement within your team is to look for key opportunities to spot and recognize improved performance.

Changes in metrics scores are an obvious source for you to track these performance changes, but don’t stop there!

Teams can champion the customer, support their colleagues and make a real difference to customer experience in other ways too.

Your job is to catch them doing this and celebrate their hard work. This is how you can create a sense of achievement within your team.

For more motivational techniques that will improve team performance, read our articles:

• 50 Staff Engagement Ideas to Motivate Your Team
• Storytelling: The Modern Way to Increase Staff Motivation
• Contact Centre Motivation – How to Reward, Empower and Inspire Advisors