Workplace-related stress and the resultant burnout are significant issues in America. In its 2023 Work in America Survey, the American Psychological Association (APA) found that 77% of respondents had experienced work-related stress in the previous month, and 57% reported forms of stress that are associated with workplace burnout. Those figures apply to the nation as a whole, but some industries are notorious for burnout and turnover. One of those, unfortunately, is the collections industry.
Turnover within the industry is an ongoing drag on profits, due to the direct costs of hiring and training new personnel, as well as indirect costs, including impacts on day-to-day operations and stable relationships with debtors. Improving agency culture can help stem those losses by boosting staff morale, resulting in reduced burnout and improvements in both retention and productivity.
These 10 suggestions offer a starting point for discussions and planning around how your own agency can improve its internal culture.
1. Network With Peers in Other Markets to Learn Best Practices
Fellow professionals who compete directly with your firm in a given market segment or geographic area may not be especially collegial, but it’s constructive to seek out opportunities to exchange ideas and best practices with your peers. Industry publications can often help you identify collections firms that have successfully improved their staff retention rates or recast their company culture in a staff-friendly fashion.
Reaching out to key personnel within those organizations, through LinkedIn or emailing them directly, can help you find mentors or construct a personal network of mutually supportive colleagues. Industry events and conferences can also be leveraged for similar learning opportunities.
2. Respect Your Employees’ Downtime
A feeling of never being truly off-duty, and that their employer expects them to always be available, is among the most common stressors reported by respondents to the APA survey and OSHA’s own guidance on workplace stress. Examples may include (but are not limited to) after-hours calls and emails, unplanned extensions of shifts, or unscheduled requests for staff to work on their days off.
This lack of reliable, predictable time off is burdensome for any workforce, and can have an especially grave impact in what’s already a stressful position. Staffing shortages are common enough within the industry that just one or two absentees can be problematic. Although the temptation to call in extra staff or supervisors to fill in those gaps can be significant, your team members will regard it (rightly) as an imposition and a betrayal.
3. Address Any Shortcomings in Your Onboarding Process
In a competitive hiring environment, it’s intensely frustrating to hire and train new staff only to lose them within the first few weeks or months. Failures in the onboarding process are often an underlying cause of this problem, though they may or may not be explicitly cited by departing staff.
Inadequate training and the resultant indecision and ineffectuality are stressful for new employees. Reviewing your onboarding process and soliciting feedback from new hires after a few weeks on the job (ask questions like, “How well did we prepare you for the issues you’d face on a daily basis?”) can help identify potential pain points.
4. Find Creative Ways to Reduce Workloads
As with sales organizations, the collections industry, by its nature, is productivity-oriented. The fundamental necessity of resolving debts at volume, in order to generate adequate revenues for your firm to survive and thrive, means that frontline staff will always face challenging production goals.
Yet, heavy workloads are a fundamental driver of burnout according to the APA and OSHA. Reducing workloads, then, is best addressed by identifying ways to maximize returns per hour worked. This might include segmenting debtors to prioritize those with the largest debts or the highest likelihood of recovery, or by minimizing the number of non-revenue-generating activities burdening your team members.
5. Use Automation Judiciously to Lighten the Load on Team Members
There’s tremendous scope for automation within the collections industry, from record-keeping and call logging to interactive chatbots and account self-management options on consumer-facing websites. New tools drawing on the power of AI can be especially useful in this context. Implementing changes like these within your software stack requires up-front investment, but the reduction in staff workloads (and a longer-term reduction in staffing requirements) can generate significant ROI.
Team members will benefit from reduced workloads, in turn improving morale while management benefits from lower labor costs and greater flexibility for debtors.
6. Provide Recognition and Positive Reinforcement
Positive feedback is a fundamental tenet of management, especially in high-stress occupations. Be generous with both verbal praise and recognition, and with tangible rewards for meeting production targets or one-off examples of exceptional performance.
While verbal praise is seldom inappropriate, tangible rewards require thought in the context of a reset or “reboot” of company culture. The criteria for any reward or bonus should be aligned with the direction you wish to take your culture, because it’s a strong indicator to your employees of what the company truly values.
7. Don’t Tolerate (or Protect) Toxic Staff
One very specific source of stress that’s called out in the APA’s survey we mentioned at the top of this article is the presence of toxic coworkers or managers. These individuals make life at work miserable for those around them, or under their supervision, through varying avenues including (but not limited to) micromanagement, harsh and unwarranted criticism, and sometimes outright harassment.
Problematic staff are often savvy enough to conceal their behavior from superiors, or to maintain “plausible deniability” about their behavior. Providing a mechanism for anonymous feedback from front-line staff, and regularly checking sites like Glassdoor for negative comments, are straightforward steps to managing this potential problem. Exit interviews for departing staff are another option, since individuals leaving your company have more freedom to be blunt without fear of reprisal.
8. De-emphasize Phone Calls as a Contact Method
There has come to be a significant body of research to demonstrate that debtors are more responsive when approached through their preferred communications channel, and that channel is seldom phone calls. Electronic alternatives, including text messages, emails, social media messaging, and self-service options through apps or websites, are all strong options. Younger debtors have an especially strong preference for those channels.
This is pertinent to staff stress as well because verbal abuse from the public is known to be a significant stressor within the services sector. Scaling back your phone outreach in favor of electronic communications reduces that source of stress.
9. Consider an Empathy-led Collections Model
Many leading firms in the collections field have found success by adopting a more customer-centric, empathy-oriented approach to collections, positioning themselves as a partner in helping restore debtors to solvency and rebuilding their credit.
Aside from the demonstrable benefits as measured in improved recovery rates (and a lower likelihood of compliance issues), there are tangible benefits for staff morale as well. Few employees take naturally to playing the role of “the bad guy,” so a culture built around the adversarial collections model is innately stressful. Positioning your agents as empathetic helpers can reduce that source of stress.
10. Ask Your Team How You Can Improve
Arguably the single most powerful tool you can leverage to improve company culture is your own employees’ lived experience. Soliciting feedback from the team can help you identify which specific contributors to burnout they struggle with, as well as suggestions to ameliorate the problem. This exercise in itself can make a positive contribution to staff morale if done well, given that surveys frequently identify a lack of agency or control as a significant factor in stress and burnout.
“Done well” is a key qualification. Team feedback will only be candid if anonymity is guaranteed and employees trust they won’t face retaliation or defensiveness from management. A willingness among managers or owners to accept responsibility where it is due, and more importantly, to change as a result, is a significant factor in efforts to revitalize and change company culture. In its absence, even well-planned and well-intentioned changes may be perceived as superficial and insincere.
Genuine Change Is a Journey, Not a Destination
The most important thing to remember about improving company culture is that it’s a continuing journey, not a one-and-done checklist. As the collections industry continues to evolve and change, new forms of stress are an inevitability. Establishing and maintaining an ethos of continuous improvement is, in itself, a core function of a genuinely strong company culture.
A willingness to embrace improved technology, where appropriate, is a powerful contributor to establishing ongoing improvement. Many of the suggestions on this list revolve around the judicious use of technology, such as tools to automate non-revenue-generating activities or provide self-service options for debtors.
Similarly, a powerful open-source intelligence tool like Spokeo for Business can help reduce burnout. Its powerful search capabilities – especially in the area of social media – can provide hard-to-find alternative contact methods for debtors, inform empathy-driven negotiations, and save your team time and effort with its easy-to-use interface and reporting options. To learn more about how Spokeo can reduce stress and improve working conditions at your agency, or to arrange a demonstration or no-cost trial of the product, reach out to our business team through the contact information on our Collections and Skip Tracing page.
Sources
American Psychological Association: 2023 Work in America Survey
TEC Services Group: The True Cost of Employee Turnover in Debt Collections
Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA): Workplace Stress
EnformHR: Why is Giving Positive Feedback in the Workplace So Important in This Review Season?
McKinsey Company: The Consumer Mandate to Digitize Collections Strategies