Face it, employers. No matter how many pizza parties you throw, inspirational speeches you give, and flexible work schedules you offer, a good share of your employees still aren’t feeling it.
Consider these figures:
What these employees don’t feel is genuine passion for the work they do. This can be especially true in challenging fields like customer care.
It’s your job, as an employer, to spark that feeling.
About Our Own Passion Project
My company, Harte Hanks, is a global and award-winning marketing agency specializing in marketing, customer care, fulfillment, and logistics from purchase to delivery and everything in between.
Our business customers are supported by a team of 2,000 customer care agents, working mostly remote and hybrid (75% fully remote and 25% hybrid/fully onsite). Approximately half are located in the U.S. with the other half global.
Recently, we formed an international Employee Journey and Culture team to brighten the hire-to-retire life cycle of employees (with a special focus on our customer care agents) in part by cultivating a consistent, positive culture.
This team is guided by a program rooted in the psychology of passion, which is built on the following four feeling-based pillars.
Pillar 1. I Feel Like I Belong
It’s not a great feeling to be new or struggling to fit in. Here’s how we ensure a sense of belonging from day one in these two areas.
A. Attention-to-Detail Onboarding
Yes, our orientation covers tools, systems, and company culture. But the little things can make a bigger difference:
- We introduce our new hires to Human Resources (HR) and Payroll contacts while still in training, as these departments answer the most common new-hire questions.
- Because new employees network with each other first, we use team building and icebreaker activities to foster connections when they move on to separate departments. We have adapted our activities and games to work well in a remote environment, i.e., with “Jeopardy!”-style knowledge checks.
- To comfortably transition employees from their trainers to their new point-of-contacts, we incorporate supervisors in the training process, for a “soft” hand off.
Cameras are mandatory during training. This allows trainers to assess how new hires are managing, but also creates a deeper connection between remote employees.
Supervisors join training classes, whether in-person or remotely, to connect and engage with new hires. Once introduced, the trainer gradually encourages them to reach out to supervisors for answers regarding product training. This “breaks the ice” and creates a supportive relationship with the trainer as backup.
... a good share of your employees still aren’t feeling it...It’s your job, as an employer, to spark that feeling.
Most of our teams are managed within the same geography. However, some of our trainers may teach a class in a different country, and we do have a small number of accounts with supervisors and teams from different countries. We have found our corporate culture spans locations and, aside from certain labor policies, our processes are consistent.
B. Making the Honeymoon Last
Once employees have their feet under them, we’ve prepared intentional moments and communication tools that help them bond with fellow workers:
- We host regular activities and competitions with prizes that rally team members behind common goals (and spice up the everyday).
- Our engagement activities are geared towards all employees. Our Employee Journey and Culture team creates events with hosts that are livestreamed for audiences everywhere. This also allows us to record the events for agents who aren’t able to see them in real time. For onsite employees, we’ll host watch parties with food, decorations, and socializing.
- Our leaders communicate how each employee’s role connects with the overall mission. Our CEO leads the way, delivering monthly newsletters that detail his plans for the company, organizational changes, and new accounts.
Pillar 2. I Feel Supported
Employees tend to go the extra yard when they know someone has their backs. We build support in these four essential areas.
A. Top-Down Strength
Our supervisors are accountable for ensuring all customer care agents have the guidance and tools to accomplish their roles. We prepare our supervisors for this support through monthly cohort sessions.
- At these virtual voluntary sessions, supervisors gather from around the globe to share knowledge, develop soft skills (such as coaching, conflict resolution, recognition) and encourage networking. On average, 70% of our supervisors attend.
- Most of the conversations transcend geographies but occasionally, we’ll host region-specific sessions to cover hard skills related to processes driven by labor law, such as terminations or performance improvement plans.
- To ensure these meetings are productive, supervisors share challenges and develop solutions that improve team dynamics and problem-solving skills.
B. Health and Wellbeing
We host year-round wellbeing programs that center on physical, emotional, and financial health, such as:
- Programs that include 20-minute yoga breaks and 30-day challenges for mindfulness and heart health. Before the holidays, we offer a financial wellness series, with bonus payouts.
- We utilize Zoom and Teams. We find that our chats are very active and drive a lot of engagement. Our hosts are specifically trained and geared to engage people in a remote environment.
- Our HR organization conducts wellbeing assessments with our operations departments to detect signs of stress and attrition and deploy action plans. These programs have reduced absenteeism by 20% and attrition by more than half.
Employees tend to go the extra yard when they know someone has their backs.
C. Disaster Recovery
Harte Hanks supports all employees affected by natural disasters through a formalized process:
- We implement phone trees to personally confirm the safety and needs of each employee, as well as their ability to work.
- We offer paid time off and alternative work arrangements. For those who can report to the office, we can provide sleeping quarters and meals. If our agents have been evacuated or cannot work due to widespread power outages, we take that into consideration.
D. Teaching and Learning from Employees
Customer service can be challenging, so our supervisors perform weekly coaching and check-in conversations.
These discussions shed light. When our agents said they were stressed from a rise in dissatisfied customers, we activated a rapid feedback loop with our training team, which presented guidelines on managing irate customers.
Pillar 3. I Feel Valued
When people see good behavior recognized, they’re motivated to duplicate it. We’ve structured a three-pronged approach to acknowledging each team member’s value.
A. A Focus on Meaningful Recognition
Some forms of recognition matter more than others, depending on the individual. To ensure our people feel valued we cover the following:
- We provide supervisors with the resources to offer a range of rewards so they can recognize employees in ways that are personally relevant.
- We train our supervisors to detect the types of recognition that mean most to individual team members.
- We’ve implemented a platform called ShoutOut through which peers, supervisors, and leaders recognize achievements and bestow points that can be redeemed for gift cards. In 2024, we issued nearly three million award points.
When people see good behavior recognized, they’re motivated to duplicate it.
B. Defining Their Role in the Purpose
A person’s sense of importance is defined by how they fit into the bigger picture. We see purpose and value as top-down achievements in which:
- Individual agents are encouraged to view every interaction as an opportunity to advocate for the customer.
- The stronger the customer support, the stronger the team. We motivate our agents to raise the service bar through competitions, recognition, and regular group updates.
- One act affects many. Our customers trust us with their customers, so we make clear how each call an agent takes should deliver on our promise: and we celebrate business wins.
C. Listening, Asking Questions, and Answering
People feel valued when they are heard. Among the ways we show employees that their voices matter:
- In addition to seeking feedback through surveys and supervisors, we encourage employees to add comments to our virtual suggestion box. The form allows them to submit feedback anonymously or provide their names. We evaluate and look for opportunities to incorporate feedback into our business process. When a name is provided, we respond directly.
- Our leaders also conduct organized and random focus groups with customer care agents to learn what we do well and where we can do better.
Pillar 4. I Feel I Can Thrive
Employees who see a clear path for advancement are prone to learn new skills within the company and leave positive fingerprints on the culture. We stimulate this motivation in two ways:
A. In-House Prioritization
Our internal team gets first dibs on all promotion opportunities, with one in 10 benefiting. In 2024, 100% of our operations promotions were filled internally.
B. Supervisor Evolution
To prepare our supervisors for career growth, we operate a rotation program that exposes them to new ways of working. After at least two years of supervising, every leader on our customer care team experiences more than one account.
Passion Bears Fruit
Thanks to our engagement strategy, our new-hire attrition rate has declined by 15% since 2022. And nine in 10 of our customer care employees are confident in their ability to meet their work challenges.
Confidence fuels passion, which requires not just psychology, but culture. That’s just good business.