WFM Unfiltered

Metrics Mayhem: Adherence vs. Conformance - Frank Berlanga

July 09, 2024 • Frank Berlanga • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Join us for our outrageous pilot episode of WFM Unfiltered, as we sit down with Frank Berlanga, a seasoned expert in workforce management. 

With nearly a decade of experience in the field, Frank brings a wealth of knowledge and a touch of humour to our discussion. From his beginnings as an intraday analyst to his current role as Senior Manager of Global WFM at Deliveroo, Frank has navigated the complexities of resource planning across various industries.

In this episode, Frank and I delve into the often misunderstood concepts of adherence and conformance. You'll hear about the real challenges WFM professionals face, the common pitfalls of manipulating metrics, and the true impact of adherence on business operations. Frank's candid insights and provocative opinions are sure to spark a lively discussion among our listeners.

We'll explore the differences between adherence and conformance, the importance of accurate data, and why manipulating metrics can do more harm than good. Frank also shares his thoughts on how tolerance can play a crucial role in workforce management, offering practical advice for both WFM professionals and business leaders.

Don't miss this chance to learn from one of the best in the field. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated on future episodes and join the conversation.

Watch the full episode and discover the surprising truths behind workforce metrics. To stay updated, subscribe to our channel at https://www.youtube.com/@wfmunfiltered?sub_confirmation=1

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Irina:

Hello WFM out there and all friends of WFM I'm your host iida Eva and finally welcome to WFM on Filtered a podcast made available by RightWFM. Now for today we're traveling All the way to Crawley in the UK I'm really hoping I didn't manage to savage the name of the city but I'm going to be told off in probably the upcoming one minute. But the important thing is that the guest I have for you today is a great professional has a great banter and he has chosen a topic that's more on the educational side but with a tiny pinch of shadiness to it. So I'm sure it will be great But before we kick off I need to speak a little bit about my sponsors who made that podcast available for all of you So this episode is brought to you by Community WFM a tool that is created from planners to planners And actually I'm going to be very honest with everyone here when I went to them and when I asked them whether they want to sponsor this show I had absolutely nothing than passion and idea. The idea that Very often in WFM we feel voiceless we feel unheard we feel ignored we feel that we need to rant but there is no one there for us. So I really wanted to create a community that shows the WFM behind the scenes. So when they heard about that they were instantly in And what I can tell you honestly about them is that they put the same amount of passion in there too and that really shows. So if you're on the lookout for a WFM solution I strongly suggest you reach out to them and get in touch get that demo get introduced to a partner who would absolutely truly care about your success And if not if you don't look for a solution at the moment I Please do me a favor and tag them under that episode with the heart emoji because every person who truly cares about WFM and every vendor who does that need our support back And with that on to the show!! Hello Frank how have you been

Frank Berlanga:

I'm not bad. How are you?

Irina:

I'm happy that we finally made it And you have chosen specifically the theme of adherence versus conformance. But before we kick off with terminology Why don't you go ahead and share a little bit more about yourself.

Frank Berlanga:

Okay, first off, you called me a professional earlier, and that was very appreciated. I really enjoyed that arena. Thank you very much. And Crawley, pronounced it perfectly as well. So that was absolutely fine. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say that. So yeah, I've been in the sort of resource planning sphere or WFM sphere. I know the name changes as we go along since what? 2015 or so, when I started as an intraday analyst, which is now called real time analyst, although I've seen a live ops analyst as well now, so that's iterating as well. And I work my way up through a variety of different fields and a variety of different remote working during COVID and multi site and everything like that. and I now work as a senior WFM global manager. which is what I'm doing at the moment. and myself personally, I've got two daughters, who are the apple of the eye, the most frustrating and the most lovely thing in my life, a beautiful wife, and, as you said, I live in Crawley, which today is looking very sunny and lovely. I've got the curtains shut cause I don't want to ruin my, my complexion, as it were. But that's, me. That's me.

Irina:

What an amazing introduction especially I like the part about the beautiful daughters and the beautiful wife, so congratulations for this one.

Frank Berlanga:

I

Irina:

And thank you so much You deserve it. Absolutely Okay so let's get to it Let's start our run. So we are going to be talking about terminology and what I would need from you to first tell me the definition of ghosting

Frank Berlanga:

that's when someone, I know exactly where you're going with this arena. I, that's when someone cold emails you out of nowhere and you decide to maybe not notice the email at some point. That's how I define ghosting.

Irina:

Ghosting is when I work for a vendor and Frank works as a customer on the customer side and I'm trying to do a perfectly good job and I continue reaching out for support and I get basically a virtual middle finger and ghosted, because I don't hear at all from him So thank you for that Frank thank you so much You've been very kind to me. Fortunately I have learned throughout my life that there's other channels that you can stalk people so email is not the only

Frank Berlanga:

Don't feel like it was ghosting. I feel like I didn't want to, just play you along and, and string you along and make it seem we weren't in the market. I honestly, I know when you messaged me on LinkedIn about that, I was like, I don't remember receiving these emails.

Irina:

I'm sure you didn't Yes absolutely

Frank Berlanga:

Sure, yeah, yeah, we'll say that I just never received them. It was your emails that didn't come through, it wasn't me ignoring them.

Irina:

Okay I might pass on to that feedback that something was definitely wrong with my email box But we're finally here because at least LinkedIn works so that's a success on its own and now that we have established our first terminology how about we talk a little bit about the famous adherence So what do we mean by that

Frank Berlanga:

Adherence, it's just adhering to a schedule, right? A schedule is published, and then whoever has that schedule, has to then adhere to that schedule and the data that comes from that can be then fed back into a loop into WFM planning managers or analysts to see how well people adhere to the schedule. So for me, that is adherence.

Irina:

Yeah I see where you're going with that maybe you're right However my experience shows adherence to schedules means that we're creating activities throughout the day which a person needs to follow right? To secure the best coverage possible for our clients. However the actual goal of adherence is to make sure you tweak it and fake it so you can reach out your bonus at the end of the month. So I really love that concept because throughout my entire career I have been forced and put in a lot of situations where I had to tweak the adherence every single minute to make sure that the person reaches their bonus the team lead reaches their bonus because their team is reaching the bonus and so on So how about we rant about this one for a second

Frank Berlanga:

First off, I'm going to say just for all the WFM viewers who are listening to this, I'm a huge fan of adherence as a metric to measure. I actually am. As long as it's actually the output hasn't been manipulated so that we are basically faking our data. And that's the one part of adherence that I don't enjoy. When it becomes, I'm going to use the word weaponized. I feel like we used weaponized adherence way too much. So we have this situation at times where, as you rightly said yourself there, we are just manipulating it. a team leader, we've all been there."Oh, can you just move this person's lunch by 10 minutes?""This person's in a meeting. Can we move by 10 minutes?" And to weaponize adherence like this is, it's, it makes it pointless. It's, you may as well go back. An example I always use with this is you may as well go back into the data for your FCR. So your first course and just delete all the ones which don't hit targets. You might as well just do the same thing. That's exactly the same thing for me. It actually is. So adherence, I'm a huge fan of the way that we have measured it and the way we, and the way we target adherence is in my opinion, where the absolute everything falls down when it comes to it. But the reason that I hate the fact that. the, that occurs is that adherence when it's unmanipulated and left alone can be such a useful number and such useful tool to help forecasters, planning managers, schedulers, RTAs, all of those people to actually use it here for what it's supposed to be used to, to continuous improvement, to make things better and better. But no. What we decide to do is we say, as you said yourself, Oh, let's give a hundred pound bonus if everyone hits their adherence. So then everyone spends literally half of their day not adhering to schedule, that they can correct their schedule to make it, to make their adherence better. You know what? It just, it annoys me. It actually, frustrates me. But yeah, and, of course, I'm not stopping here. I'm just going to carry on here. And of course, the problem is, that you have analysts all over the world in WFM spending 50 percent of their time just listening to Slack messages or Teams messages saying, can we move this? When they could be doing much better things. they may as well be napping as opposed to actually, changing people's schedules. I think I'm done there.

Irina:

Let me correct you here I am very happy where you're taking this from and I'm happy that I'm seeing such a energy for ranting about adherence and I'm absolutely with you on everything that you have mentioned but just one thing that it doesn't sit well with me is that you're assuming that somebody is paying real time analyst a salary They work for free why wouldn't we lose their time to correct adherence on a daily basis I mean it's so cost efficient and it's not like they should be analyzing the data and make suggestions and feed those suggestions back to the scheduling and the forecasting team We only need them to correct stuff that are basically used for the bonus That's all That's my favorite part

Frank Berlanga:

Yeah, wouldn't that just be crazy? RTA analysts actually continuously improving an operation as opposed to, I'm being sarcastic, of course, I hope that's clear from my tone, but just, yeah,

Irina:

Let's not go wild here

Frank Berlanga:

I just honestly, I, but then of course, it's not just RTA analysts, it's not just WFM. It's team leaders around the world. It's operations managers around the world who have exactly the same thing. And I just feel like the adherence metric, like I said, is, really useful when it's unmanipulated. So I think it's a fantastic tool. And, but then of course I do, my mind does start disagreeing with itself where I think to myself, But, then we do need to target it. we need to have some level of targeting, cause if not people would then not do it. But then of course, we would move, in my mind, into more conformance elements. But, I do agree it needs to be targeted, but it should never, ever be financially targeted in any way whatsoever. that's, Just pointless, actually is, in my opinion, cause this is a podcast, obviously, I don't want to say that I'm speaking for everyone.

Irina:

Now the concept of this podcast is that we're giving the platform for every W professional to speak their truth and their opinion And there isn't necessarily a wrong or right kind of way And it's important that you say how you feel how you experience things So I really enjoy your point of view I agree with it And if we have to go on a little bit the serious note it is an amazing metric It is exactly what we need to be following However at the moment even if we're talking about service level occupancy whatever type of metric the moment when we start tweaking it and faking it For other purposes it becomes absolutely pointless However one of the things that I'm often confronted with yeah but it's not the fault of the agent and they've been stuck on a call and that's why we need to shift their lunch and this is why we need to shift all of their activities This is correct And I have a suggestion for everyone I have discovered Hold on a mythical creature a mythical concept that nobody speaks about and it's called tolerance You know if only we apply the tolerance in our percentage we would be able to account for all of the inevitable moments when something will happen so we don't get to punish and tweak the adherence of the people Of course if there is something major like someone's laptop or computer or system has died for the entire day I agree We need to basically make that as an exception and don't account it in the overall percentage However if someone is consistently out of adherence for one or two minutes because they were on a call there is a way to account for that in our percentage Am I right or am I right

Frank Berlanga:

You are 100 percent right. for some reason we, we include shrinkage when it comes to FTE requirements, but we don't include it in adherence. It's exactly the same philosophy. Unplanned sickness, last minute holiday, all of those things we take into account when it comes to our FTE requirements. For some reason, we assume adherence is going to be X percentage. so yeah, I completely agree, and I just, I, like I said, adherence is such a, as you said yourself, and as we both said, it's such an important metric. But, Also, what I don't like with the manipulation, as I alluded to before, what I really hate is the idea is that this metric can be so important, not just for what happened, but how we're going to plan our future when it comes to how we're going to schedule. And sure, someone's laptop dying for the day. We could anonymize that data. We could just, Remove it completely if we wanted to, but someone's laptop is going to die in the future again as well. So it is important not to completely destroy that data. It's important to keep it running and to make sure we have a view. The amount of times I've, worked not in my current role because we're more vendor led, but in previous roles. The amount of times I've, I've seen adherence levels of 97 percent and I'm like, look, obviously not. And so it's, it's, so I'm looking at it like, this is a pointless number now. It doesn't mean anything anymore. And then when you dig down into it and you do a test and learn maybe for a week and you find it 65%, when you look at that 65%, you can really see the areas and it's not, and this isn't about smacking an agent in the back of the head, me. Metaphorically saying, do better, actually, isn't it? It's about planners doing better, forecasters doing better. Sometimes I think of the WFM professionals, I think I've been guilty of it before, we instantly blame the front line for things when we should have taken those into account. And I think adherence levels is one of those things where we can really use it to test how we're doing. But of course we don't genuinely complain that much because it makes us look amazing as let's face it, a 95 percent adherence rating makes WFM look really good as well. It's not just the frontline staff that look good as WFM. And I feel like that's a, that is a very controversial thing. I've just said there actually. So I'm going to have pitchforks at my, back with that. I really am. But it does make us look much better if we have good adherence because, Oh, Look how amazing your schedule was, look how well everyone adhered to it. But if we actually want the customer, which, and by customer frontline staff as well as the customers on the other end of the phone or the chat, to have a better experience, we need to be looking at adherence properly and not just sweeping it under the carpet. That was a good rant.

Irina:

it's an interesting point because this is what happens when you're looking at different metrics in isolation because sure we're going to be tweaking all of our adherence to look amazing but by shifting all of the activities it will have an impact on your other targets like service level for example We can pat ourselves on the back and say Oh my God look how we made them work We were right there and we were whipping everyone to be at the desk and do exactly what they were supposed to be doing the coverage sucked but who cares The adherence was amazing So yeah it's one of these topics that honestly you can go into the rabbit hole It is so important but again it's one that It's not even really well explained to agents The only thing that's brought to them that's your schedule you need to adhere to it and if you do you're going to get a bonus okay so obviously the first thought in everyone's head would be like I'm going to make sure that this percentage is correct and I'm going to come with all sorts of explanation excuses and so on to make it happen So that's where as we mentioned everything goes wrong But enough for the adherence Let's jump on the other one and I don't know if you're going to agree with me on this one But I have seen that in the industry and in our environment often there is a misunderstanding about adherence versus conformance They're used interchangeably and overall that leads to also Different understanding in different companies when you're speaking with different stakeholders you end up not being on the same page So let's set the record straight We already spoke that adherence to schedule is basically how well you are keeping your activities or adhering to your activities throughout the day What's conformance

Frank Berlanga:

you didn't put me on the spot there, aren't you? for me, and I fully agree with you, that conformance is one of those ones which people outside of the WFM sphere use instead of adherence, even though they mean adherence. I think it's one of those. Conformance, for me, is the output from the tasks you were put on your schedule. sure, you did, you know what I mean? Adherence is, I look, I adhere to my schedule. Conformance is more the case of, did you actually complete all the tasks that were on your schedule? That's how I see conformance.

Irina:

Okay And the way that I'm looking at it for just to put everything in perspective is Say for example we're paying you to be working eight hours this day right And throughout these eight hours you're starting from 9 to 5 30 you're doing email then you're doing the break then you're doing voice then you're doing what have you until the end of the day So every deviation from these activities when you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing is going to be impacting your adherence However If you're late let's say 30 minutes but you decide to stay and work 30 minutes in additional technically you're working the amount of hours that I'm paying you for But you're not working at the time that I needed you for So this is where I am seeing more of the difference between adherence and conformance And I think this is where a lot of operational issues start happening because Especially for the countries where if you come late to work you're still paid for the time that you're being late It's obviously incentive for the organization to say okay but then you stay 30 minutes later and work your time and we're gonna be fine we're not fine because we needed you in the morning because there was no one else covering that channel So yeah technically I'm going to get the hours but I'm going to get them when I don't need you And that's a whole another issue for an entire different episode But what do you think about that Does it make sense Have you seen it How do you tackle that

Frank Berlanga:

Yeah, no, I think for me, when it comes to the two, I think adherence is for life. I think conformance should be for non live front line staff. I think you can't measure live staff in the way that we're describing. to be fair, actually, you can measure whatever you want with whoever you want. You actually can, it's fine. Conformance is probably, as I mentioned when I was doing my sort of, My little explanation of it, my thought process behind it. It is about the output you give on a day. That's what conformance for me is. I've, as you said yourself, been paid for 8 hours, I've worked 8 hours. Sure, I was an hour late, but hey, I worked 8 hours. So I think conformance is useful even even for a WFM non frontline RTA role, you could say that all resource planning managers could be on a conformance metric because we, sometimes I start at 7 in the morning, sometimes I start at 9 in the morning, depending if I've got something with the children or I'm on my way up to London or whatever, so you could say that back office staff should be done by conformance, especially if they're home workers, non office workers. But conformance when it comes to frontline staff, and especially frontline live channels, so chats and calls, etc. You can't use conformance. And it's you simply can't because we may as well not have a forecast then we may as well be like, we need 50 hours on Tuesday. Just do 50 hours whenever you fancy peeps. Oh, you've done the 50 hours? Great. Of course, everyone did the early, so Norm was there on the late, but hey, we all did 50 hours together. That's obviously an extreme example. I'm being somewhat obnoxious when I say that, I know. But, I feel like that's why conformance doesn't work for the instant, Instant access channels. But I think it would really work. I think it's a really useful metric for back office staff. I really do. And pretty much everyone else. I think everyone should have a conformance metric. And don't get me wrong, it would expand outwards. So you'd have people who have a conformance level over a day, but then over a week and over a month. I'm fully aware that some people work, some people in my team work shorter days, some days and longer days, other days, as long as they're doing their work for the week, I'm fine. But they don't need instant access to their. To their abilities, they can do that. so conformance is useful, but it's completely, in my opinion, and I'm going to say a very strong word here, I think it's completely useless when it comes to frontline live channel staffing, completely useless.

Irina:

I absolutely agree with you that conformance is really important for a back office because we wouldn't necessarily care if your break is 15 minutes later when you have to do some kind of admin tasks or emails or what have you that it's not going to impact a live customer that's on the phone waiting for you So it makes sense that we track okay were you available you came in 30 minutes later you stayed but the work is done we don't care Okay for frontline though for me it's the same concept Again and I think this is where they have a slight bit disadvantage because then the adherence will kick in but also conformance And this is where eventually we can double penalize them Because first we're saying Oh your adherence for the day is out in the drain but on top of that we're making you work later so your conformance is okay So that's where for me the difference comes in but hey again as I said probably we're going to end up having a drink virtually after this to just drown our sorrow from savaging completely that topic

Frank Berlanga:

I will add one more controversial thing because I'm just feeling controversial at the moment, clearly. I think if someone is half an hour late, we should mark them as late and they should work that half an hour back when the business requires it, not on the same day. So I don't think adherence and conformance should be applied to the same frontline live staff. I actually don't think they should. I think it should be adherence only and that's it. Cause that's when the four, that's when the schedule said they should be there, which is built on the forecast, which is great work and everything. I think conformance is for back office staff. I don't think it should be both. So if someone is, comes in at half nine, not nine o'clock, we don't need them between five and half five. They can go home, or stay home, or log off, and they can work that half an hour on Saturday when we actually need them. Or they can, or, dock their pay, but I'm not a great believer in docking people's pay for being late. I've never believed in that. But I just feel like, yeah, that's, yeah, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't make someone work till half, unless we needed them. Then I suppose I would. But yeah.

Irina:

But I will challenge you here no matter if you're going to work them over on the same day or on a different day overall when you look at the amount of hours that you're paying them for They've worked them

Frank Berlanga:

Yeah.

Irina:

So there you go Challenge for the day

Frank Berlanga:

which is why I think conformance is useless for frontline staff. Exactly why I think that it's useless because it doesn't mean

Irina:

I see that we're not gonna end up in an agreement on this one

Frank Berlanga:

we're not going to agree this at all. We're actually not.

Irina:

this topic If you join Team Frank for Conformance Not Applied for Front Staff vote for Team Frank under the episode Obviously I'm going to encourage everyone to not listen to him it That's how generous and gracious host I am This is what you can expect If you're joining the podcast I'm in for myself basically

Frank Berlanga:

a generous host. I just, I can't believe we're all so lucky to have you. I can't. Metaphorically

Irina:

But jokes aside I hope that we were at least a little bit more educational with also examples and with descriptions what adherence and conformance is Obviously there is a different approach depending sometimes on the vendor that you're using depending on your process depending on whether you're going to be tweaking it to use it for bonuses or tweaking it for any other type of purposes or if you're going to use one the other or a combination of both It is important You need to understand the difference of both and if you have a different opinion basically shoot Frank that's what I can say It's Frank's fault

Frank Berlanga:

shoot me. Don't actually do it.

Irina:

Of course we need him alive

Frank Berlanga:

Unless you want to shoot me a message. that's fine,

Irina:

and pray that he's gonna reply to you because he's not the best in reply

Frank Berlanga:

True. I'll ghost you, unless you agree. Unless the message starts, Frank, I 100 percent agree with you. you're ghosted. No, I won't. Anyone, obviously, as you said, I'm more than happy to talk about it with anyone else. I've said something very controversial in a very public forum, so I'm expecting some reaction, hopefully. Oh, look

Irina:

Yeah me too And on that note before we leave that episode I need to confess something to you Frank You are my first If that episode doesn't go well you mister are in trouble Because it's gonna be entirely your fault

Frank Berlanga:

If it doesn't go well, it's cause people don't have good taste, clearly, because this has been amazing talking to you about this. It actually has,

Irina:

Likewise Thank you so much for joining me I always have such a great time talking to you And It's very important for me that we can also showcase that it's possible to have a banter in WFM It's not about only being so serious talk about the numbers hide behind the desk and just be basically boring We're very colorful people and I wanted to show someone that can prove that theory. Honestly it was absolute pleasure talking to you and Please follow Frank try sending him a message He might reply most probably no but That's it for our very first episode and if you want to learn more about my sponsors read in the notes below and if you want to support the show please give me a comment a reaction subscribe to your favorite podcast platform and if you want to suggest a guest or be a guest yourself shoot me a message

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