Managing People By Output - Not Hours - Can Be An Exciting Approach For Both Our Clients And Our Team
In Europe, minimum wages generally range from €12 to €13 per hour, but this time-based model often doesn't reflect actual productivity. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has shown the benefits of output-based management. Platforms like yoummday pay talents based on completed tasks rather than hours worked, promoting efficiency and potentially higher earnings.
Minimum wage levels vary across Europe, but Germany is fairly typical at €12.41 per hour. It’s €11.65 in France and £11.44 in the UK. These rates can vary slightly as they are sometimes measured by monthly salary, rather than hourly rate, and some countries have discounts for workers under 21, but broadly the minimum wage in Europe is about €12 to €13.
Minimum wage rules have helped to protect workers from rogue employers, but they are also focused on the idea that work should always be paid for by the time spent on the job, rather than paying for what is actually delivered.
Since the Covid pandemic, many more people have started working from home without any direct manager supervision. This has led more and more managers to better understand the idea of managing by output rather than time. If managers can’t see people at their desk then they need to focus more on what is being delivered, rather than how much time is spent at work.
It is a simple concept. Think of a freelance journalist as one example. They are usually paid for each article they write. The journal they are writing for doesn’t ask if the article took 20 minutes or 20 hours to write. There is just a fee for the completed article.
This is similar to the concept used on the yoummday platform.
When our talents help a customer, they get paid. There is no payment if they are idle, so there is an incentive for them to move from one customer to the next so they can add up the individual payments for each customer that is assisted.
Now contrast this to a typical contact center operation. They will be paying the agents minimum wage, or very close to the minimum. Then they will add all their costs onto the hourly rate, to pay for the contact center building and the office equipment. It might be typical to suggest that service can be supplied from the contact center for €30 per hour … blending all the costs together.
But this rate applies at all hours of the day - busy or not. If the contact centre is not busy then there is no discount and it is likely that top performers will be expecting a bonus or other incentives on top. Each individual agent in a contact centre may be costing you several hundred euros a day, regardless of their output.
Our team also has our modular AI Assist functionality that ensures every single team member has a personal digital assistant. The assistant can handle many of the manual tasks that contact centers ask agents to perform, such as writing up call notes or categorizing calls, and it can even suggest the next best action during a call. If a document is needed for the customer then it’s almost certainly there and being offered to the human agent by the digital assistant - no need to place the customer on hold.
This use of AI dramatically drives up productivity. Our focus is on ensuring that customers are helped as quickly and accurately as possible. Our AI system also watches over all calls and customer interactions to advise what is working best - like an individual coach giving tips on what customers are responding to.
When the yoummday approach is applied there are two outcomes. The client only ever needs to pay when a customer is serviced. They are never paying for idle time. In addition, the talent that is helping the customer earns for every customer they help. They can generally earn far more in one hour than the national minimum wage levels. So this approach works for both the talents and the client.
Listen to this podcast where Chris Hague explains what this means - most of the talents work fewer hours than a traditional full-time week because they can earn enough with less time on the job.
Paying for output, rather than time, seems unusual when almost all minimum wages are based on time, but it can be an interesting model to explore for our clients because it drives up productivity. It also helps the talents to focus their attention on when they are needed, rather than being available, but idle.
If we don’t perform, the client doesn’t need to pay.
