By Colin Taylor
Halloween, the night of the dead, the end of all things, whatever you call it, this time of year with the harvest behind us and the ghouls and goblins; not to mention Squid Game characters who have now darkened our door; can be a frightening time. It is more frightening perhaps as we are all still dealing with the fallout of the pandemic.
While some areas of the economy are getting back to pre-Covid levels of activity and hiring is robust in many sectors, there are still some areas of concern on the horizon. We have all seen the pundits and experts wax poetic about the risk of a 4th wave, 5th wave, new mutations, and the likelihood that Covid-19 will shift from being a pandemic to being endemic and something we just learn to live with like the flu (or subtitles and bad dubbing on Netflix binge-worthy series). With these two twin challenges of Covid and Korean dramas addressed, let me move on to other less critical, but still important areas of concern…
First, why is it that corporate America, now that it has embraced the concept of remote contact center agents and hybrid work environments[1], is so slow in adjusting its management processes to support these new deployment models? We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that traditionally in the pre-pandemic world there was great resistance to remote contact centers, driven in part by technology concerns and by a management concern that “if we can’t watch them, how do we know that they are working and not watching Netflix”?
The early returns were very positive: productivity went up and absenteeism and sick days went down, to the surprise and delight of managers. Both of these changes were broadly seen as innate aspects of remote work and were taken as positive ”wins”. Both of these are emblematic of darker and more frightening (see how I brought this back to scary Halloween?) shifts that were occurring under the surface...READ MORE
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