In Gartner’s recent report “Future of Work Trends: Work Is Distributed,” analyst Helen Poitevin outlines how distributed work implies “significant degrees of flexibility in how work is organized — who is involved in what work activities; and when, where and how it is getting done.” Flexibility is so significant in this new world of distributed work, 64% of respondents to the 2021 Gartner Digital Worker Experience Survey said they’d only consider a new position or job that allows them to work flexible hours.

As a contact center manager, these facts probably don’t surprise you. In fact, they may even annoy you. That’s because the question is not IF distributed work is happening — the question is, how can you as a manager support, enable and nurture the new kind of massive flexibility that distributed work requires while still hitting your service level agreements (SLAs) and running efficient operations?

Poitevin suggests putting in place specific guardrails, practices, tools and data to optimize distributed work patterns — how employees and managers organize and track work — and help you meet your operational goals in this new world.

But in our minds, the key factor in her equation that stands between you and success is the data.

It’s data that’s at the very heart of agent understanding and wellbeing management in hybrid work. It’s data that empowers you to proactively improve the employee experience and your agents’ wellbeing. It’s data that enables you to identify — then eliminate — any friction that exists in distributed work patterns. It’s data that lets you establish and measure progress against the key metrics you have related to employee performance, engagement and productivity. And it’s only with data that impact can be measured and informed improvements can be made.

That’s why we continue to develop and release new capabilities that enable richer, more data-driven actions and insights for Calabrio ONE customers. Our Voice-of-the-Employee (VoE) analytics trend mapping and sentiment analytics, for instance, helps contact center managers monitor and understand how agents really feel about their work. And this, in addition, with our new Calabrio Performance Coaching module allows you to focus on helping agent becoming more engaged by using data to:

• monitor agent interactions for potential skill and behavior gaps that affect the customer experience and adds to agent stress
• automatically schedule the most appropriate training for each agent based upon their individual agent metrics or skill gaps;
• help identify the best coaches in any contact-center organization, highlighting which coaches excel in each specific performance area and the areas where they need coaching themselves; and
• identify which training tools perform best (and which ones may need updating).

Distributed work might make it harder to track how employees feel. And it definitely makes it harder to truly understand how agents experience their new, distributed way of working.

But it can be done. And data is the key.

Read the full Gartner “Future of Work Trends: Work Is Distributed” report.