35: Managing Performance Issues with Simone Secci

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. This is episode thirty-five. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is managing performance, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Simone Secchi. So, Simone, the topic for this week is managing performance issues, and if you have any particular wisdom or excruciating or wonderful stories in this area, I'd be very pleased to hear them.

Simone Secci: 0:52

Absolutely, yeah. Um, so I'm manage for most of my career um uh outsource team or like uh remote teams in different locations. So the challenging I think with the managing the performance, it's even more complex because sometimes most of the time the conversation can be asynchronous. Sometimes I would have only two or three hours of overlapping with some of the people that were reporting to me, which made it made it uh you know hard to to really have a a system of of check and balances there and and and a lot of it had to rely on trust. Right. So I think this concept is very important in managing, especially remote. An outsourced team is trust. So you need to be able to hire the right people and and to buy and by no means get into anything remotely close to micromanaging, because that's just yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 1:46

You can't at a distance anyway, can you? You can't micromanage at a distance.

Simone Secci: 1:50

No, no.

Charlotte Ward: 1:51

When you talk about outsourced teams, you're talking about teams that are provided by other businesses. You're not talking about just offshoring, like you're not just talking about remote employees on the other side of the world, you're talking about teams that belong effectively to other organizations. And and um I I mean I I've been in that situation three times at least. And the the biggest challenge I've found with managing performance in outsourced teams is where the responsibility lies for the human resource part of that. That's always a little bit tricky. And indeed, you know, because particularly if they are, you know, located in a remote office somewhere, they have their own local uh line managers, right? And and effectively dotted line into you. So it's how much responsibility you take for the measurement and the communication of any performance issues and any fallout from that. So and I've had really mixed experiences with all of those things with outsource teams, and I have had underperforming, I mean drastically underperforming individuals on outsource teams, and I'm sure you have as well. I got to hear particularly how you deal with that with a BPO situation.

Simone Secci: 3:04

Right. Uh I mean, you know, I've been in the situation where I was managing two different teams for two different products at the same time. So then the time like you really have to be be drastic in the way that you decide what things are priority and whatnot. And that includes like having to to you know really do a lot of hand holding of people. I think you you have to have the right metrics to measure performance. If you don't, you might uh let the situation linger for longer than it should, and and it and it becomes like more of a problem with the people that you're providing a service to. Focus on the quality of the conversation that these people are having rather than focusing on some classic metrics like uh tickets solved, for example, right? That that really don't tell the whole story. You can have somebody that's like trying to fool the system, especially with this like a large team. Because cherry picking, yeah, yeah. Cherry picking, they only work in half the time that they're supposed to work, but they it looks like they're they're they're solved, you know, they're solving a lot of tickets. It's supposed to be a system of trust. And that usually happens when you're not directly involved with the hiring.

Charlotte Ward: 4:21

Yeah, I I agree. That's been my experience too. So, how do you how do you deal with that?

Simone Secci: 4:26

Well, you have to set the right expectation from the beginning, right? But like if you have somebody that is gonna be disingenuous, that doesn't matter. At the end of the day, that's not gonna necessarily save you from from an uncomfortable situation. If somebody measures your your trust, you have to really make them understand the gravity of it and you know try to correct that, but still make uh I think you have to make the situation uh official. So I I work directly with HR when things like that were happening. I will give people more trust and more freedom than and than a lot of uh the companies would. And so they were completely free to manage their time starting from the very beginning. This is for entry-level positions because I want people to immediately understand what responsibility means, you know. And and if you if if you instead create uh uh an environment where uh everything is very rigid, you're not really giving people a chance to uh be responsible for themselves and the and they should.

Charlotte Ward: 5:25

Yeah, you're not giving them that trust from the the get-go, right?

Simone Secci: 5:28

Exactly. So they need to get familiar with trust because that's the only way for them to evolve into the go go forward in the career and and become autonomous and also saves you time in the long run.

Charlotte Ward: 5:39

Yeah, you know performance issues are often maybe slightly simplistically boiled down to a mismatch of expectations. You expected one thing and they expected another. As you said, I mean there are always people who will try and play the game. If that's the case, then you shouldn't be employing them. And if you weren't involved in their hiring, then it's uh certainly time to help them consider their their place in the organization, right? But if we if we're talking just more a performance issue that can be coached away, part of the coaching exercise for me is re-establishing those expectations, then whether it's outsourced or not, remote or not, or you know, or formal or not, I think that's that's the answer. I think it's it's you're right, it's it's about expectations, and uh it's better to set those early. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash 35 for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.