The Benefits and Perils of Team Scheduling

Over the last ten years, more and more organizations have moved toward self-directed work teams. The result has been better productivity, increased employee motivation, reduced bureaucracy, and continuous improvement in the work product being delivered. According to the book, Self-Directed Work Teams: The New American Challenge, numerous companies like Xerox, Proctor and Gamble, and BlueCross/BlueShield have realized the enormous power of fully trained, fully committed, fully autonomous teams that are responsible for turning out a final product or service to the customer.
Although these self-directed work teams are most often implemented in manufacturing environments to turn out a better quality product more efficiently, many customer service organizations have also embraced this concept. But while some of the concepts of work teams have resulted in delivery of better, more efficient service to the customer, other components of the team concept have created service problems. This article will examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of this practice in today’s telephone call center.
A self-directed work team is a group of employees fully responsible for a product or service. Every member of the team shares responsibility for the finished product, but the concept goes beyond just demonstrating teamwork. The members may possess a wide range of cross-functional skills within the team, and have much greater decision-making capability. The team plans, sets priorities, solves problems, schedules and assigns work, and handles personnel issues like hiring, training, evaluation, and disciplinary action. The definition of a team varies by organization. While an “average” team size is ten, some companies operate with four-person teams while others have teams made up of 18-20 members.
A big issue for the team concept in the call center lies in the schedule of team members. While some companies have teams where all members start, take breaks, and leave together, others may have teams where the members’ schedules many have varying start times and breaks, and may even work different shifts.

The Economies of Teams
While the notion of “eat, sleep, and breathe together” may indeed foster a sense of group spirit, teamwork, and better individual productivity in some areas of the company, a company may not be able to afford to assign team schedules to the staff in the call center.
Organizations must keep in mind that telephone call workload is not like any other work in the company. The call center is at the mercy of the incoming call workload, which arrives randomly within each hour. Unlike the sequential tasks associated with paperwork or manufacturing, the random arrival of the call workload results in schedule requirements that can vary widely from hour to hour. Inefficient schedules can result in overstaffing and excessive costs in some hours and understaffing and poor service in others.
So why is team scheduling probably not as applicable in the call center as in other areas of the company? Scheduling in blocks of ten people is just inherently less efficient than scheduling for the exact number of bodies in chairs needed each half-hour. The schedule requirement may call for 6 people to be on the phones at 7:00am, 8 at 7:30, and 10 at 8:00. Scheduling all ten people to start at the same time to support the team concept overschedules for the first two half-hours of the day, resulting in overstaffing for this slot, which probably leads to understaffing later in the day.
Let’s look at the effect of team scheduling versus a traditional scheduling approach for a small (20,000 calls/month), medium (60,000 calls/month), and large (300,000 calls/month) call center. All scenarios assume a 24 x 7 operation, an average handle time of 180 seconds per call, and a service level goal of 80% in 20 seconds. The full-time equivalent (FTE) staff members represent total weekly staff hours needed divided by 40 hours per week. The required FTE is the absolute number required to handle calls at the desired level of service. Scheduled FTE numbers represent the number of staff that must be scheduled in order to provide enough schedule coverage for the desired level of service.

	Small	Medium	Large
Required FTEs	22	38	119
Scheduled FTE (traditional schedules)	25	45	141
Scheduled FTE (team approach)	70	96	192
Overstaffing by Team Approach	180%	113%	36%

As shown in the table, team scheduling in a call center does not make sense from a pure cost standpoint. Particularly for a small center, any advantages gained by team scheduling are greatly outweighed by staffing inefficiencies, resulting in either excessive cost to hire unnecessary staff, or more than likely, poor service to the caller as a result of not having the right number of staff in place at the right time to handle the call. And, although the results of team scheduling do improve as the size of the center grows, even in a large center with more than 100 staff, team scheduling is not an efficient practice.
Team scheduling fares better when the work is made up of something other than all incoming phone calls. A large Midwestern bank for example, previously handled calls by a group of frontline representatives who would handle some percentage of calls and pass on the remainder to a second tier group of problem-solvers to research and follow up. Reorganizing both groups of representatives into self-directed work teams with cross- trained representatives to handle all types of calls resulted in a more equitable distribution of work and a greater sense of control and ownership among the staff. In this case, the teams follow the same schedules and work identical shifts. Although this type of scheduling results in overstaffing with respect to members needed for handling the incoming phone workload, there is a near equal amount of paperwork to accomplish each day and during idle telephone times, the staff can research and process paperwork. This is one case in which an organization managed to reap the benefits of work teams and still maintain an efficient call center operation and scheduling process.
Conclusion
Certainly, the practice of self-directed work teams has many advantages, including less supervisory or management time, happier and more highly motivated employees, along with better quality and efficiency. However, as you consider the team concept in your call center, it is important to keep in mind that an incoming call center is a very different environment than it’s administrative or manufacturing counterpart. While many of the team concepts work well in the call center, be careful of team scheduling that could easily wipe out any efficiency gained by teaming in the first place. Each organization must evaluate each component of the team concept carefully and decide what makes sense based on a fully informed cost and service perspective.
About the Author....
Penny Reynolds is a Founding Partner of The Call Center School, a Nashville, Tennessee based consulting and education company. The company provides a wide range of educational offerings for call center professionals, including traditional classroom courses, web-based seminars, and self-paced e-learning programs. For more information, see www.callcenterschool.com or call 615-812-8400