A Guide to Flexible Scheduling for Banking Management

Omri Hayner

Many industries are implementing permanent work from home and flexible schedule policies, including allowing the customer service agents who serve as the face of the organization to self-select a portion of their shifts. However, this is difficult or impossible for many organizations, and leaders in banking are struggling to solidify how these new ways of working apply—or don’t—to their teams.

Across industries, flexible schedules have become a key tool for acquiring and retaining employees. In fact, a recent survey by Future Forum found that 95% of workers want flexible hours, and 78% of workers want location flexibility. Employees who are given ample flexibility are 4 times less likely to become a retention risk, according to a report by Quantum Workplace.

While financial firms have been among the white-collar employers most eager to bring workers back to their desks in 2022, the uncertainty associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has given way to a new openness to schedule flexibility. Even within the contact center—an area of the business that has historically relied on brick-and-mortar offices for agents and the supervisors charged with ensuring they meet customer-service KPIs—we are seeing increased interest in delivering the schedule flexibility and work-life balance that today’s employee increasingly demands. Here’s what you need to know.

Technology Is Evolving Scheduling Practices

AI-powered technologies available on the market today automate the process of offering flexible scheduling and ensure that the needs of the business are met. Intelligent automation is enabling banking leaders to improve net staffing through proactive, rules-based schedule adjustments and employee self-service.

Among the ways to give customer service agents greater control over their schedules while maintaining appropriate staffing levels are to:

• Incorporate agent preference: Giving agents a say in scheduling makes them more engaged with their positions, which in turn increases productivity and satisfaction, drives agents to provide better service and makes agents less likely to miss work. Consider allowing agents to set preferences related to days off, hours or days worked per week, lunch length and time, and stop and start times. Agents who are able to prioritize their preferences, for example having a longer lunch break in exchange for working over the weekend, can create a schedule that is aligned with their ideal working hours—while still enabling the contact center to deliver a quality customer experience day in and day out.
• Incentivize agents to set their availability to help you meet business needs: Consider assigning a unique numerical value to each interval of the day and setting rules for agent availability—for example, requiring a minimum amount of available time, a minimum number of points each week or a minimum number of hours each week. The agent is then required to provide their availability in line with your contact center’s rules, which drives them to make compromises with their availability. This helps you ensure that both business and agent needs are met and avoid the pitfalls of using agent preference in scheduling (for example, reduced efficiency when agent preferences are prioritized over optimal service). When agents understand the rules by which schedules are created and feel that their preferences are taken into account, they’re more productive at work and miss fewer shifts.
• Automate schedule change approvals: Intelligent automation allows you to automatically offer schedule changes that benefit net staffing. Automated approvals for shift bidding, time off, trade requests and more boost agent engagement along with schedule flexibility.
• Provide anytime, anywhere access: Contact centers can take flexibility to new heights by enabling agents to do things like trade shifts or set schedule preferences on the go. Give agents easy visibility into up-to-date personalized schedules, vacation balances and time off allotments for their group by date. When there are new schedule change opportunities, automatically alert agents about available shifts, swaps and time-off via a mobile app, desktop application, pop-ups, email or text message.

Scheduling Flexibility Is Delivering Real-World Results

Banking leaders who aren’t yet sold on the concept—and viability—of schedule flexibility need look no further than one large bank in North America, which found that increasingly flexibility in its scheduling practices increased employee satisfaction while simultaneously reducing costs. The bank’s scheduling solution allows employees to view and interact with their schedules through a mobile app and get automatic confirmation of pre-approved vacation time, schedule changes, overtime, shift trades, sick days and more. The bank also proactively alerts employees about overtime and time-off opportunities through multiple channels and automatically notifies frontline managers of activities affecting the efficiency of the business.

The bank’s agents report high satisfaction with the flexibility and quick approval of scheduling requests, with 100% of employees saying they would recommend the scheduling solution to their colleagues and 80% saying it improved their work/life balance. The initiative also resulted in a 70% reduction in manual scheduling activities and significant savings in reduced administrative and intraday management activities, increased scheduling efficiencies and improved staffing coverage.

The demands we place on our customer service agents are only increasing as customer demands evolve and more interactions move to digital channels, and agents are best prepared to meet these new demands in a flexible workforce environment. Whether you’re bringing agents back to work in person in the contact center, allowing them to continue working remotely or embracing a hybrid approach, scheduling flexibility will enable you to optimize net staffing while keeping these key frontline workers happy and engaged.