By Ray Birch
EUGENE, Ore.—Driven by call center staff who were “stressed” and quitting regularly, one credit union has gone to a four-day work week—a pilot that’s been so successful in one department the CU no longer views the move as temporary and plans to spread the work policy across the organization.
As CUToday.info reported in March, Oregon Community Credit Union began testing the benefits/risks of a reduced workweek with its inbound call center team.
The $3.5-billion OCCU pilot consists of four eight-hour shifts, with team members being compensated at a rate equivalent to what they would have been paid for five eight-hour shifts, OCCU said.
The credit union explained the change means an additional day off each week, “allowing for additional time with family, to attend to appointments and generally decompress from a traditionally stressful role.”
The benefits of the move go well beyond greater retention of call center employees, whose workload has steadily increased since COVID arrived in 2020, according to Oregon Community. OCCU said it is seeing improvements in employee attitude and performance as well as in the service members are receiving from the credit union.
“We looked closely at our contact center and realized that for quite a while it has been a high stress area to work in,” said COO Tracey Keffer. “Taking calls back to back to back can be mentally challenging. And doing that for eight hours a day, five days a week…”
Another Challenge
The credit union also was experiencing another problematic issue.
“The call center had a much higher absenteeism rate than other areas of our organization,” Keffer said. “Plus, there has been more turnover there, as well. We began to think hard about how we could solve for those things and did a lot of research, and we kept hearing about the 32-hour workweek. So, we decided to give it a try.”
Improving conditions in the call center was much more than a move to improve employee morale and performance, it was the right decision for the bottom line, according to Keffer.
“If we could have less turnover, less recruiting, less hiring, less training, less people calling in sick, that would be a big boost to the credit union bottom line, and it has been,” Keffer explained.
The credit union never had any concerns over moving to the abbreviated workweek, and the initial results support that outlook, Keffer emphasized.
“We were always excited to try it it—try something innovative and outside the box,” she said. “I think there is a lot of opportunity for a 32-hour workweek, and there have been a lot of studies on it with companies in Europe and Asia that have tried it and have been wildly successful and productive.”
Results After 30 Days
One month into the new arrangement and employee and member experience metrics, along with productivity, are all rising, she said.
“Some of it is about speed to answer the call,” Keffer said. “When people are calling in, how long does it take us to answer their calls? How many calls are being abandoned? Our abandonment rate was high before, because if you are constantly having turnover and you're constantly having absenteeism you don't have enough people on the phones to answer all those calls. We're measuring that and those are the big ones that we're looking at, and they are all improving.”
Prior to the change, Keffer said call center turnover led to OCCU onboarding at least three to seven people per month.
“Sometimes the total was a lot more,” said Keffer, who mentioned that some of the loss of call center staff was due to employees moving to other CU areas. “But it had become a constant churn, trying to keep people trained and hired, and the pandemic just exasperated that with the call volume spiking, and never going back down. I think due to the stress of the call center volume, people would just wake up and say, ‘I need to take a mental health day.’ Now, they know they have that built in.”
Expansion Plans
The 60-plus-person staff in the inbound call center, who work remotely, are satisfied with the shorter workweek. Based on the results from this pilot OCCU plans to roll out the new schedule through many more areas of the 600-staff organization.
“I think we could roll this out to other areas,” said Keffer. “And what's interesting about this pilot is we really made it transparent with the whole organization that we were testing this out and testing our hypothesis, and then measuring. We're sharing that publicly so the whole credit union can look at that and see where we're at. I believe we can increase productivity in almost every job in this organization this way.”