Preference-Based Scheduling with Ashley Snow

Join Dave Hoekstra as he discusses the benefits of preference-based scheduling with Ashley Snow, the Resource Management Consultant at Alliant Energy.

Show Notes

Ashley is a major reason that Alliant Energy has paved the way in the US using preference-based scheduling with Calabrio WFM. Listen to hear about their implementation process, agent feedback and challenges they have overcome to ultimately decrease attrition and maintain agent wellbeing!

What is Working Smarter: Presented by Calabrio?

In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.

Dave Hoekstra:

Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center, industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success, stories, and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.

My name is Dave Hoekstra, product evangelist for Calabrio and my guest today is Ashley Snow. Ashley is the resource management consultant at Alliant Energy, and we are very fortunate to have her with us today because Alliant has done some pretty impressive things with their scheduling process. And as you know, we here at Calabrio, we loved a good scheduling story.

And so, we brought Ashley along to talk about. The way that Alliant is focusing on employee-based preference scheduling as opposed to kind of the traditional way. So, Ashley, it is wonderful to have you thank you so much for joining us today. And I think I'd like to start out with maybe just a little bit of a background.

How did you guys arrive at the decision to kind of involve the employee and kind of pull in their preferences? When we're talking about the contact center scheduling part.

Ashley Snow:

Well, we just looked at kind of some feedback we'd received from employees as far as, you know, kind of being stuck in the same schedules for long periods of times.

We were fixed based, so there wasn't a lot of change. So just from their feedback and then also with the experiences we had with finding some gaps where you know, maybe we'd had people transition to other departments or leave the company that was kind of creating some gaps in our staffing levels.

So, when we looked at this, it was just a great benefit for us from staffing needs and for our employees, for their work life balance.

Dave Hoekstra:

So, let's you know, you mentioned getting feedback from them. What kind of feedback were you getting kind of you know, pre-preference-based scheduling? What kind of feedback were you getting from them about how they felt about the way things were going?

Ashley Snow:

Well, we were just on pretty much like an annual shift bid. So, they were stuck in the same shift, essentially the entire time for that year. So, if they had a shift that maybe they didn't really desire, or maybe things had changed in their life that, you know, that shift, wasn't a good, they were then stuck still with that shift for a longer period.

So, we just got a lot of feedback of you know, the lack of flexibility. You know, that, that unhappiness, if they, you know, had changes or with their life, that it just, their shift no longer worked with. So just taking some of that and yeah, a lot of just negative is kind of where we started out with looking for some new solutions.

Dave Hoekstra:

Was this part of maybe an annual employee survey or were you just kind of pulling this in like very anecdotally? Was it very formalized? One of the things that we strive to talk about with our customers a lot is how important these kinds of repetitive surveys are. Is that something you did very frequently with them or was it really just more of like you heard some grumbling in the break room?

Ashley Snow:

Well, we had several. I guess, negative on our surveys that we've done. And then also with our team leads, doing coaching sessions with their employees, I think that more direct one-on-one contact is where more of the feedback started coming up was just letting know, you know, their team lead know that they were looking for other options.

So, I think that was our biggest bet, but yeah, we've done the surveys and definitely heard where we were lacking.

Dave Hoekstra:

To start off with, and, you know, from past experience, I know that. This is a pretty big change. It's not something that you probably just rolled out overnight. What, how did you go about kind of working through the change management of, well, you know what, first of all let's ask this question.

Tell me about the process that the agents go through. Let's start there and then we'll talk about the change management.

Ashley Snow:

The associates currently, they get to select their shifts. Two weeks in advance and we've set up some parameters for them that they have to fall within.

But as long as they're meeting those parameters and entering their 40 hours, two weeks in advance, they get to select what their schedule would be for that upcoming. Week. So, they're going in and selecting, oh, I know, you know, I have something on this date in the morning, so I'm going to come in later in the day, or maybe I need to, you know, be gone part of the day with a split shift.

That's something that they can do now. We are currently based solely as a work from home agents. So split shifts, we had tried those in the past. It wasn't anything anybody ever cared to come and go from the office from, but now we have a lot of employees doing that. So, I think it's great work life balance for them.

So yeah, they're going in and entering that for them. Every couple weeks, every week they enter it for two weeks in advance.

Dave Hoekstra:

It is kind of funny. We, I think you and I talked about this, how the split shift used to be the worst possible solution, right? Because we always, we as contact centers always needed fewer people kind of between maybe one to three o'clock in the afternoon.

Ashley Snow:

Exactly.

Dave Hoekstra:

But then we expect to come back, and nobody wanted to go sit in their car for two hours and read a book. Right. I've had a few days like that myself, but with work from home, Split shifts are actually kind of fantastic because I can run and go grab some lunch. I can maybe, you know, I can, you know, make sure the kids are okay.

I can, you know, do some of the household things. And so, it's actually pretty great. So, I love this whole idea of kind of two weeks before you they get to pick their schedule. Now. One of the questions is kind of, do you have some idea of what percentage of my preferences actually get fulfilled?

So how often are you as the scheduler master changing what their preferences are to kind of match up with what's happening with your volumes?

Ashley Snow:

We are probably at a 98% that, of what they request is what they get. And some of that. is a lot of depending also on how flexible the employee is.

So, if they say they're available to work the entire day, of course, we're not going to have them working the entire day, we're going to assign them a shift within like the start and stop time that they selected. So that's where we get a little, you know, maybe it's not their desire, but at the same time they said, “hey, I could work any time this day”.

So otherwise, what they're requesting is what they're getting.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. And so, the other question I would maybe have is how consistent are their schedules? Because based on my past experience, which. I'll be honest, all based in office. So, I, you know, the work from home thing, I don't have a ton of background working from that.

But how consistent is their schedule from week to week, maybe, you know, every couple weeks, are they changing their schedules a lot from these, or do they kind of staying about the same.

Ashley Snow:

There we have some that it's kind of a split, some that are really changing week to week some that we have them on a two-week rotation where we require them to enter time for every other Saturday.
That was another issue that employees had is they said, Hey. I don't like having to work every single
Saturday.

So, with this group of people they're working every other. And so, they're entering that time. I think that kind of changes up their weeks a little bit, because one week they're having to enter time on Saturday as one of our requirements one week they're not happening to. So, I think that's where they we see a little bit of change week to week as well.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. That's great. And so, Let's talk about how the agents feel about this. All of the above. So, our agents absolutely love it. I that's the feedback we've received. We've done surveys kind of when we piloted this again, just recently we did a survey on, you know, what their thoughts were.

Ashley Snow:

A direct quote from one of them was flexibility to work around life events. So that's what we hear all the time is the flexibility to. to do what they need to do and have a good work life balance. So, their flexibility has been a major. That's been the key player. We did the pilot when we first started this off and we had very few of our employees leave the pilot when it started, we bring on employees, seasonally.

Then we do have a transition period where some of them would then decide to stay on full time. And when we've done that last year, all our seasonal employees had been on this flexible scheduling. And when we went to offering them full-time positions, we said, hey, you can continue this, or you could go to a fixed shift, and we only had one employee say I'd like a fixed shift.

So, everybody else said, Nope I'm staying with this. Our last group of employees that we brought said, “Hey, this is a reason that I chose to come work here is because of this type of scheduling”.

Dave Hoekstra:

I love it but in reality, I mean, I could probably come pretty close to having a fixed shift. Even using this, right. Like I can be consistent in my fixed shift. So, in reality, you're kind of giving them the best of both worlds in a lot of ways.

Ashley Snow:

Exactly. Yes. We've set up some parameters, like I've said that They have to kind of meet and check the boxes, you know, our busiest days of the week. We're not allowing them all to schedule that day off.
You know, we've kind of set some of those parameters, but yeah, it's giving them that they can, to an extent, do some fixed scheduling and also have that flexible.

Dave Hoekstra:

Well now in your in your particular day to day, how much time do you spend managing. This back and forth. Cause I do hear feedback from people that, you know, a preference-based schedule does require more work than, as say your typical, just, you know, create the schedule and be done with it.
Do you feel like you're spending an inordinate amount of time managing this?

Ashley Snow:

Not really. I, with the payoff that we've received. It's definitely seeing the employee wellbeing and their like for it. It's definitely worth it. So, I may be scheduling an hour a day if that spent kind of going through this of course at the beginning it took me longer.

And, but as time goes on it's really simple and quick process to approve or deny and make their changes and so forth.

Dave Hoekstra:

So, you mentioned some of the benefits and you touched on that a little bit, but I'm interested to know from a kind of organizational perspective, you know, are you seeing decreased attrition?
Are you seeing increased productivity? Are you are you seeing measurable benefits from going to a preference based schedule?

Ashley Snow:

We are. I mean, we've seen attrition definitely has decreased. One, like I said, we do the seasonal Onboarding. And then some of them are offered and or choose to stay on and transition to full time.
What we've seen is that sometimes our seasonal needs maybe had them in a shift.

And then when we looked at needing them off season, it was looking as if their shift needed to change. And some of them didn't like that change and that's where we would lose folks. And they'd be like, you know, I don't want to work every weekend or I, you know, don't want to be here later.

I don't want to be here early. So, this has just allowed them to continue with that. Great flexibility. So, we're seeing the less attrition from it. We're also seeing just the employee wellbeing being higher. And then the big benefit is when we, you know, schedule these folks, we're really filling in the gaps of where we need people.

We're doing the two weeks in advance, but by that time, most people have had any of their time off requests already entered and so forth. And so, it just helping to fill those gaps where maybe our forecast is showing that we're a little understaffed. So, it helps fill that in.

Dave Hoekstra:

And I imagine that it’s kind of just gets easier and easier as you go beyond it. If you look back to the beginning, when everybody was adjusting to the new, you know, paradigm, you know, but now do you see other agents like helping teach newer agents? Hey, this is how it works, and this is how the pieces fit together.

Ashley Snow:

Yeah. Yeah. Most definitely. Yeah. Letting them know kind of how to.Some of it at first, it is, it's a big, it's a big mind shift. If you've been on fixed scheduling to have some of that flexibility. I mean, I'm the amount of options to reach 40 hours in a week. When you're looking at having the option to schedule it over six days is it's so high, you've got endless options of what your shift could be.

That's a big mind shift for folks. You know, what they, what the possibilities are going from a fixed. So yeah, some of them are definitely helping each other saying, hey, oh, you need Tuesday off or you need Tuesday night off or whatever, you can change that. And, you know, make your flexibility with the schedules, work for you to have that.

Dave Hoekstra:

That's really awesome. I mean, just from someone who is. Not only administered, but also been a participant in many shift bids and knowing how kind of inflexible those are. And, you know, we have a lot of customers that do shift bids and sometimes they are the best way to get things.
But knowing that the agent can just not have. Tense stress of oh, what am I going to do about my schedule? Or just to remember the impending doom of the next shift bid, like coming up. And has that helped your mental health at all? Not having to do those shift bids

Ashley Snow:

Yeah. Most definitely.

Yeah. Everybody. Seems to like this, so well that what we had for our last shift bid, because we still have folks that are on fixed shifts that we've got them, you know, they're allowing them to do shift bids and so forth, but that has decreased so much from the amount of people we have bidding to since so many are now on the flexible scheduling, we're currently at about a 60% fixed 40% flex ratio.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. Do you happen to see any peer pressure from people like yeah, man, you should totally get on the flexible stuff, man. It's awesome.

Ashley Snow:

Well, we've definitely seen some folks that have done it and then. You'll hear of other agents. Oh, I talked to so and so and they said, I should give this a try.

Dave Hoekstra:

Yeah, that's good.

Ashley Snow:

And they, the word of mouth of, you know, folks are a little hesitant to change. Right, right. So, the word of mouth of this is a good thing has definitely been spread.

Dave Hoekstra:

So great. And so, I feel like now we can kind of circle back to the pilot part of this.
Right. You mentioned that you did a little bit of pilot, and it was very well received. How did you. That part, because you know, again, like you said, you can't just flip a switch and then boom, every, it would be chaos.

You kind of have to build into it. So, walk me through a little bit of what you did to kind of get the program off the ground. And then how did you bring people in gradually?

Ashley Snow:

Yeah, so we started off just asking for some volunteers. We've got this option who would like to do it with us, who wants to try it? And, you know, we had about a dozen associates at first say, yes, you know, let me try. And we started out with kind of less options than what we have now, just because we didn't want to get carried away at the beginning.

So, starting off just kind of a slow start. Had a trial run. We initially tried before we switched to this, we tried the options again for split shifts, still not hugely received. So then when we worked to, you know, to this option We did a trial period for three, four months and then gave them the option to either continue on or to leave.

And we didn't have, I think, like one or two left and then we've just had people come on kind of gradually since then. And then our parameters, our options for them have kind of grown as we've. Learned the workings and you know, what our employees like and so forth. So beforehand, we said, hey, you can't do any more than two shifts a day, and you're going to work, you know, four hours to 10 hours.
And we're down now that you can work up to five shifts a day, if you would so desire and you can break those up anywhere between two- and 10-hour increments.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. So, so I could take four lunches if I wanted to. You sure could. That's awesome. But yeah, for I, think you know, 22-year-old Dave would've loved that option, but that I'm a little older. I don't know. I think one lunch a day is good enough for me, but that's great.

I mean, see, and that's, what's so cool about it is do you have people that kind of can't wrap their head around it for a little bit? Like what you're going to, let me do kind of what I want to, are you kidding me?

Ashley Snow:

Yeah. Yeah. Which most definitely it's a big mind shift and we do have those people are like, you know, I can do this.

Dave Hoekstra:

Yes. You can. We're allowing you to do it. I'm not, you're not going to get in trouble. Well, I would be the one that giving you in trouble. So no, it. You're not going to get in trouble. Yeah, and that's what I imagine it's just such a different paradigm than what they're used to dealing with. Especially if you have new employees coming in that have previous contact center experience, I'm sure that just fuses the hemispheres of their brain together and they can't shake it for a little while there.

Ashley Snow:

Right. So, yeah, I, when I do my presentation to our new employees, I always say, this is a big mind shift. like it, you have to open your mind. And I think at first, some people are like a little hesitant, just because it's so different.

Dave Hoekstra:

Yeah. Are you trying to trick me? You're trying to trick me here. Yeah, I can totally imagine.

Ashley Snow:

And then they're quick to jump on board though. Now do you, so you've mentioned 40 hours. Do you require them to kind. Build all the way up to 40, or do you allow a little bit of flexibility going? And so just really quick for those that might be listening outside the us and the us, a typical schedule is built for a 40-hour work week.

Dave Hoekstra:

And so, my question is do you force them to all the way, build up to 40, or do you allow a little bit of flexibility in there where you might not need them to go down a couple of hours here or there?

Ashley Snow:

We do have them set at 40 hours.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay.

Ashley Snow:

So, they can enter in. More hours than that. I mean, they could enter in 50 or 60 hours of time depending on how much flexibility they have, if they don't have a lot of preferences that week, they can definitely widen it.

But yes, they have to have a minimum of 40 hours is what we require them to do so that they're all staying at full-time staff.

Dave Hoekstra:

And you schedule them to 40? If I put in 55 hours of you still only schedule them for 40.

Ashley Snow:

Yep. We only schedule them for 40.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. All right. And what if, so, what if I do need fewer than 40? Does that start getting into the PTO realm?

Ashley Snow:

Yep.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. It does. I'm interested to know if, how this has helped the operation. Kind of, have you noticed you know, your service levels have improved? Have you noticed your average speed of answers have dropped, you know, occupancy? That kind of thing because that's always the challenge, right?
It's always balancing the, you know, how many you're going to get versus how many you have and making sure those lines match as closely as possible. Have you noticed those lines matching closer based on the flexibility?

Ashley Snow:

They have yes. And definitely seen more of that payoff of just the coverage of when we need it.
I think another thing that we've seen is we've seen, if we notice gaps, this is really quick turnaround to make any coverage changes. So, we had their hours a little, it wasn't within our entire open hours, we had kind of limited them and said, okay, we, you know, we don't want you to start before this time.

You know, we don't want you to end before this time and kind of set those parameters. And then we said, hey, we've got a gap in the morning hours where we don't have quite enough coverage. And so, we just opened it up further and it was really quick turnaround of, Hey, now we've got these folks that are willing to come in early and we've kind of solved our staffing level issues really quickly.

Dave Hoekstra:

Do you have people saying Hey, can you open them up a little bit earlier? You know, agents who kind of understand the back-and-forth process, do you have them kind of lobbying for, you know, Hey, can you open it up at this time or that kind of thing?

Ashley Snow:

Yeah. We've had some of that along the way.
And, now outside of. We're twenty-four seven call centers. So, our core business hours though, is what they are able to work anytime within those, our overnight staffing and so forth is on fixed schedules because you know, I don't want to be, oh, do I have enough people that have chosen this week to sign up for that?

Dave Hoekstra:

Bless, bless those overnight. I just had to staff a 24/7 contact center before, and those people that just show up night after night and just chew through that graveyard shift. You got to love them they're amazing.

Ashley Snow:

Yeah!

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay. So. We've talked about a lot of positives. Everything's been really positive.
Let me ask you this. Has there been any drawbacks, have there been things that you maybe would say, because when people hear this they're going to go, oh, it's all great, but oh, it was just so wonderful. I have there been any, anything that you would say might not be the most optimal outcome of this preference-based scheduling process?

Ashley Snow:

Not really. My advice would be to kind of take it as the approach that we did kind of slowly learn how, you know, kind of what your agents are going to be wanting, and then also kind of where you need them. And. You know, us starting at, you know, the four to 10 hours for shifts. I think that was a good place to start.

I don't know that I would've been as positive about it. Had we had jumped off and said, hey, you can do two hour increments and you can have to five of those a day. So, I think just kind of the slow start is, was actually the good way to go.

Dave Hoekstra:

Keep it simple. And then expand as you receive more feedback and grow into the program a little bit.
Okay. Yeah, because I, you know, I know that a lot of people. do not think that this is possible, especially in the US. Right. And that was why it was so unique when you and I started talking about this. I was like, okay, we have to make sure people are aware that this can work.

And I'm sure a lot of people are like, oh, she's probably only open eight to five Monday through Friday, no, you threw it in there. You're 24 7. And I would say maybe the other good advice is that you don't force them to go to the preferences.

Ashley Snow:

Right.

Dave Hoekstra:

You do want to keep the option for people to stay unfixed and your preference based. Do you offer any kind of financial incentive to be preference based versus not?

Ashley Snow:

We do not.
And honestly, that's the first time that anybody's even mentioned that to me.

Dave Hoekstra:

Okay.

Ashley Snow:

So, we'll exclude them from hearing this and giving that I, that idea that they would want to ask for that as a request,

Dave Hoekstra:

Well, I mean, it's interesting because you know, and some people would say you should pay them more.
But other people would say no. That's a fringe benefit. That's something that, I mean, if you have the ability to say, oh my gosh, I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday afternoon. I don't have to put in PTO. I can just make up my hours that's worth that. I mean that's in a lot of people's minds.

So. You know, I, I somewhat argue that it would need to go the other direction, you know, for the fix shift. So, you know, definitely we, we don't want to put any ideas in anyone's head, but you know, the idea that you know, it's been a long time in contact centers where the scheduler has been fairly inflexible because they just, oh, this is what the business needs, and this is what we have to do.

And you are proving that it's the exact opposite. The business can be extremely well taken care of while still paying attention to the agents. And their work life balance and their mental health and flexibility and things like that. And that's what I, that's where I'm really interested in is kind of the, you know, what are those anecdotal quotes that you could throw at me to where someone would say this has been fantastic.

Ashley Snow:

Huh? I don't know if I have a great quote, but it has been, I mean, the flexibility. Has been well received the employee stress or burnout, I think with having that option for split shifts, if that's, you know, what they need to work their life and work and life balance to be good, then that's where we want it to be, I mean, overall, that's what we're here for. We want to re retain them and we want them to be retained, you know? Right. They, we want them to be here as well.

Dave Hoekstra:

Well, I couldn't have asked for a better way to close out this particular episode. That's such a fantastic approach. What Alliant is doing with.

Their scheduling with their employee balance. You know, it’s really great to hear and see that the tide is turning right. And the tide has been turning for the last five, six years. But now it's really starting to really focus on that employee engagement side of things, the agent wellbeing, right?

A lot of the things. Calabrio has been preaching for a, you know, long time. Now it's really great to hear that it's actually being put into practice. So, what you guys are doing there, love it. Fantastic. And Ashley, I cannot thank you enough for spending some time with us and joining me on the podcast today.
Thank you again for joining me. It's been really great to have you.

Ashley Snow:

Thanks for having me. I very much appreciate it.

Dave Hoekstra:

Absolutely. And for those of you listening, thanks always for giving us some time of your day. We appreciate you listening to Working Smarter presented by Calabrio my name is Dave Hoekstra again, thank you to our guest, Ashley Snow from Alliant Energy.

She's been wonderful and fantastic. And we'd always love to hear feedback. So, if you want to hear more, please reach out to us at @info.Calabrio.com and let us know otherwise, Ashley again, thank you. And to those you're listening. Thank you, guys. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you on the next episode of working smarter.
Thanks everybody.