WFM: 'Admin' or Strategic Role? | Corey Sewpersad

Is WFM just admin work, or is it a strategic powerhouse hiding in plain sight? In this episode, Corey Sewpersad joins WFM Unfiltered to challenge the outdated perception that WFM is just about schedules and spreadsheets. He unpacks the real impact of workforce management—how it drives business success, aligns departments, and plays a pivotal role in analytics and decision-making.

Corey shares his journey from traditional WFM into analytics, explaining why so many businesses fail to leverage the full potential of their WFM teams. We dig into the key differences between being reactive and proactive, why hiring the right people is crucial, and how companies sabotage their own success by treating WFM as a support function rather than a strategic driver.

But here’s the real kicker—how do you move WFM out of the “admin” shadows and into the boardroom? Corey has some strong opinions on what it takes to make WFM a respected, indispensable part of the business strategy. If you've ever felt like WFM deserves a seat at the table but isn't getting one, this episode is for you.

Ready to change the game? Watch the full episode and subscribe to WFM Unfiltered for more no-nonsense conversations about workforce management.

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Transcript

Irina: 0:18

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of WFM Unfiltered. And today for a first time, we're going to South Africa and Corey, I have been waiting for so long to have this conversation with you. How are you doing?

Corey: 0:34

Good. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Irina. It's very nice to be here.

Irina: 0:38

It's, it's absolutely my pleasure. Would you mind introducing yourself? just for

Corey: 0:42

Yep. Sure, Corey Sewpersad. So I'm from South Africa and been in the WFM industry for, since 2004 2005, around about there. And the typical RTA planner, work my way up, manager and so on. So been around for a while, been around the block.

Irina: 1:02

20 something years? It's not so much if you think for

Corey: 1:06

almost there.

Irina: 1:08

just 20 years and how do you find it?

Corey: 1:12

Um, you know what, it's been, it's been a up and down journey. There's so much that has changed over time. Industry that has changed over time. Different types of businesses that switched over to context center models because they've grown. And, I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed WFM over the years. It's as much as it's the same tasks that you do. It's the same conversations you have. There's always something different going on. There's always, it's about forecasting, but You've got your forecasting about, your typical daily, weekly volumes, and then you'll have a Black Friday coming up, and then you've got to plan for that. So it's been an up and down journey. It's been good and bad. A lot of learnings. I've enjoyed it. It's still a passion of mine. I haven't been in WFM in the last couple of years. Um, I decided to get involved a lot in the analytical space of business to enhance the WFM understanding just before COVID, there was this whole shift of Analytics and software and, new, new things coming into the market. WFM was shifting towards this whole WFM analytics approach. And I thought, you know what, in the long term, it would be good for me to get more knowledge about data science. About data analytics, about SQL, about Python, all these things and how they would eventually relate and, integrate into WFM. So that's where I've been in the last few years, but overall, it's been such a lovely experience working in the industry that it's still a passion of mine. So now it's I get involved in conversations and, talk to people where I'm not even in the industry, like at this point, but, just getting to know what's going on out there, getting involved in the conversations, it's, it's a really good place to be.

Irina: 3:00

You know what we have a little bit of a different topic for today, but now that you mentioned analytics, I, I just cannot stop myself. So I'm gonna ask you this question, it's it's a very strong position of mine, and I'm always fighting in organizations wherever I go. If the, let's say the business analytics team is completely separated from the planning team and all of your reports and all of your dashboards and all of your information needs to be requested to the BAs. This is something that I personally. Would never accept. For me, if you are in the WFM industry, yes, there is a big part that it's communication and strategy and relationship, but it is based on data and that data needs to come from somewhere and you need to be able to understand that data. So going constantly to someone else asking, Hey, can you provide me with this? Yeah, sure. In a week, that just doesn't work for me.

Corey: 4:04

It's highly frustrating. It really is. And the data is always going to be what's the word? It's, it's going to be dirty, just to be honest. You're not getting it yourself from the system. So anything you get out of that data, you go into an, into a meeting and you're not a hundred percent confident because that data has been pulled from somebody else. And you don't know if that number formatting, is how you want it. The date format is how you want it. And you've got to do a whole lot of transformation in Excel and you've got to go into a meeting and present it and the confidence level just drops. That is, that is a pain point. I hear you. I hear you on that one.

Irina: 4:43

And, and you know what, it's so important that you're mentioning that because every single time when I'm with a client, I'm asking, okay, are you certain about your data? How do you do your service level? What are your formulas? Are you sure about your offer calls? Or whenever we do new integrations and new implementations, the data doesn't match. And usually it doesn't match because the data that we were capturing before that was completely wrong. Everyone was assuming that it's right. But yet again, the WFM team never had access. So they were just filming because someone once said it's okay, the data is okay. So that's one, you mentioned pain point for me is just gets me out of my skin and I wanna scream about it.

Corey: 5:32

It really is. And, and it comes back to this point about, the strategy of WFM. Besides, besides the thing about, okay, having that relationship with the department, whereby you can go and fetch the data from the system yourself, it then goes back to The question, when the system was set up, did you have a professional in there to define the metrics that you need, to define the calculations, to make sure the formatting is correct? Even a simple thing like naming convention, does it match does it talk to what the rest of the business considers that queue to be called? If you've got a queue running, everybody calls it a certain name. Is that what it is? So that is a big point. Building that framework and building that strategy should come from, the inception of WFM. And even if it doesn't, there's nothing stopping us from revisiting that. I mean, there's nothing stopping us from going back to say, guys, we understand that our system is not fully aligned to what you're seeing. Doesn't matter where it sits, where the problem is on the analyst side, or if the problem is on the WFM side. But we can then go and get it aligned. We can go and sit with the guys and say, show me what you have on the database. Show me the heading. Show me the formatting. Let me show you what I have. And then clean it up. We've done that. There was a time when We switched systems, WFM systems at the company that I worked for. And we moved from a pay as you go system monthly subscription, where we purchased the IEX feeds and all of that. And we went through that whole change. We took that opportunity and we said, guys, let's go and understand the differences. Let's go and fix all these things while we can. And that is, is something that people often overlook. It's. Get the software in, map it up as fast as you can, so that business continues running. But in the long run, it's every month you end that Manco session, or you end that performance for the month session to review it and, We're looking at the stats, we're not 100 percent confident, and then it's somebody needs to go back and deep dive. Somebody needs to go back and double check. It's because we're rushing to get the stuff out, and nobody's going through to say, let's define it. Let's see, AHT, this is what it means. Definition, center to the business, calculation, center to the business, we know what it means. And that's, that's a step that's missing. That's the strategy that, or part of the strategy that's not in there. Um, it's, it's completely blocked off from the rest of the business because we tend to work in silos. That in itself is a problem.

Irina: 8:09

I, I hear you. And this has been my journey for the past Good 15 years. And for the past, I don't know how many years as a consultant, and I just, I, I cannot, I don't understand why companies still see that as a loss of time, as you mentioned, especially if we're implementing a new system, it's usually, Get it out there, get it as fast as possible. And everyone disregards that the system is a system, right? It can work very well. It can not work at all. And my personal opinion is that somehow, especially the last year, we're somehow over relying on technology. And you know what, especially with AI and all the tools out there, we're just thinking that You just get it out there and everything is going to just work and you don't have to monitor and you don't have to adjust or you don't have to have an input and that's trash. It's just,

Corey: 9:12

is, yeah. There's, there's, there's off the shelf systems, but it will never be the case. You take a retail store, for example, and you give them the same system that a banking sector would use, but what they want out of it is two different things, so it'll never be a plug and play solution. And that's what I don't get. That understanding of, yes, we'll get the software in, plug it in and it works, it doesn't. It has to be customized a little bit, tweaked a little bit, to get the results that you want out of it. That's just the nature of the beast. That's, that's how it works. It's, it's scary how, how often we have situations whereby there isn't any WFM experts in the room at the time that these decisions are being made.

Irina: 9:58

You know what? I will stop you right here because that's one thing that frustrates me a lot. And it's not about not having WFM experts. It's about that in a lot of companies, WFM is seen as. You are a support function. You're there to execute what we implement and you don't have a say in what we're implementing. And I keep on saying that if we are to, to, manage basically the budget that you're giving us, the headcount, if we are to allow them to go on vacations, if we are to assign tasks for them at all times, how the hell are we not a party? to this conversation. And you're absolutely right. Most of the times. Companies are more focused on operations, and this is where the game is. And WFM is the laptop is broken, please fix it. The schedule is broken, please fix the file. But it's not about the stupid file, it's about what is in that file.

Corey: 11:01

Exactly. No, that's a hundred percent. And there were times I, I feel your frustration and, and I can hear the passion of, in, in, in what you're saying, because I felt the same. And there were a couple of times where, you know, I feel bad for saying this, but I took a different approach to get my point across whereby I would intentionally do some analytics to say, guys, this is. What you're supposed to be doing. This is why WFM should not be sidelined. There was a an example whereby when it came to attrition I went in and I got some, some data from HR about the type of employees we have, the age and the tenure as to when they leave the company. And I put together the a whole. Dashboard and, analysis about our business, not what the customer's behavior is for when they calling us, and when they need us. I said, okay, that, that'll get done. We'll do that. On the side, I did this analysis to say, here's what's happening in our business with our own employees. Here's at what age group we are hiring at. We're getting people at this age. Youngster, stay out of school, which is fine. We're hiring from this location. Now we're not considering how far they're going to travel. And they are the ones leaving because they're getting jobs closer to their home. Then we want to get, middle aged people with families and they've got commitments, which is good. That's a good thing, but they have commitments, which means extra leave for them. And I did this whole thing and I went to business with this mindset of, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you why I need to be in the room and I put that out there and it became a dashboard. So there are opportunities for analytics and for WFM to explore analytics in that perspective to say, here's how I get into the room. The challenge is by default, that is not the case. By default, we are. Asked for advice after the fact and not before or during the procurement phase of the software or the decision making phase. And that's the sad part about, what we face today.

Irina: 13:07

I hear where you're coming from, but I'm going to challenge you. It's true that in a lot of organization, WFM is just misunderstood, but isn't it also our job to be maybe a little bit more proactive, maybe a little bit more curious and to look for those relationships and connections and proposals. Post it to the to our other stakeholders because sometimes they just don't know. I have been in so many organizations where I'm speaking to the contact center manager and they're like, it's just schedule. What's so difficult about it? Okay. Just come sit on my chair for 30 minutes and you're going to see exactly what's so complicated about it. And. Because you gave a super good example about the tenure and what kind of people are staying longer versus shorter time in the company. This is such an important feedback to recruitment, to say, okay, you know what, if we're looking at this age group, probably we're going to be able to keep them for six months, for eight months. But this is something that Someone needs to be able to dig deep into. And I've been in conversations when usually this that's an HR job. Okay. But it affects my job, right? So why wouldn't I be interested? Why wouldn't I be chasing? Even if it's not my job, why wouldn't we secure that input?

Corey: 14:28

That is a good question because there's two parts to it. There's the very passionate, and this is just my opinion, right? There's a very passionate, Passionate WFM workforce out there, as in specific WFM employees and professionals that are passionate and they'll do that. And then there's those that aren't. Those that come into the business because they need to get out of answering the phones. They need to get out of being an agent. They end up in that RTA step. They end up maybe moving up because that's where the career path takes them. And, I think where the situation comes in is that, if That grows too quick whereby, companies will promote an RTA because they need to, and, they need to rush with it. That RTA then moves up to a planner and they need to rush with it because of business growth. And then another new RTA comes in. That's where the laziness and the bad behavior is coming because nobody's there to teach them the right way. And if companies just consider, look, let's get one professional or two professionals who has been in the industry for many years to come and teach my team. And train my team and build that strategy and explain to them why all these departments need to connect into WFM and why WFM needs to output into all these departments. I think that'll fix the problem. But again, I guess that's wishful thinking, right?

Irina: 15:52

Oh, I can go into so many directions with what you're saying. And, I am starting to hesitate whether it's a good approach to directly look at the pool of the agents just for the sake of, okay, their agents, maybe they can go directly in real time. And I started reflecting on when I was a hiring manager in organization, I always looked at curiosity, right? And productivity solution orientated, no matter if you had the or not I know you'll get the experience, but what I cannot get out of you is if you're just executing tasks and that's it. I know that if I give you that task, you always deliver it exactly as I asked you to, but there is it. That's your limit. And I feel this is where, for me, the conversation should start. Is WFM a career in general? And is it? A career that's strategic that should be maybe better paid that should lead to better opportunities or it is purely administrative function. And if you're comfortable with that, there's nothing wrong, but the expectations then will be, we show you how to do a report. We show you how to copy pay shifts and that's it.

Corey: 17:12

Yep. I hear you. And that mindset exists in, in my opinion, in our generation. Of when we started in workforce back then and how we've moved up over the years. And my opinion is that if a company wants tasks to be executed, rather they go for, some of this fancy software that automatically codes and will automatically do the, some of the RTA work and automatically send out a dashboard at the end of the day. But if a company really wants to, or if somebody really wants to consider this, and I think it should be a clear path on its own their HR and their recruitment teams in the companies should do a bit of research into reaching out to WFM professionals on LinkedIn or wherever to say, Hey guys, we, what would be the job spec for this role? How would we, how would we write this out? What would be the ideal candidate that we need to find? And, simple things like that, just to get an understanding of what What type of person you're looking for. Uh, and from the employee side, if an agent is just looking to get off the calls, I started as an agent, I was looking to get off the calls, but it became a passion for me because I enjoyed it. But even if you're an agent and you want to get off the calls, Also do the research. If somebody is just applying for the sake of it, you'll be able to see it. Like you said. But I honestly think to your point, it should be a career on its own. I, I did a small little ebook on LinkedIn where I tried to explain this to people to say, if you're considering WFM, consider that it's, it's a support function, but it's sitting in between your intro and extrovert whereby you've got to speak to people. But you've got to do a lot of work alone at your PC. Consider where your career is going to grow. It's going to be analytical. It's going to be away from ops. You're going to be heading into a support role. That's the direction it's heading in. And I think a lot of people need to just do a little bit of research. In today's world, it's just the guys want to get off the phone so quick that they don't consider it. And then there's managers who want to move stuff around because of growth, and they don't consider what they're doing, and it probably creates that frustration for everybody. That, that, that's, that's what I see often. There are times when you see people just doing things for the sake of doing it, and you think to yourself, if this was my team, that wouldn't happen.

Irina: 19:37

Yeah, I, I, I need to admit I'm very critical because for me and I'm not sure that I would call it only passion of mine WFM, but I see it as the impact on the business, the impact on the organization, on the employees, on the customers. So I would never agree to focus on people in WFM. Who are not proactive and curious because that's the point why we're stuck in a situation where we're not revisiting KPIs, we're not revisiting definitions, we're not revisiting approach. Everything changes. Now we're talking about AI, but we're stuck with our practice and the way we did schedule 20 years ago in our organization. It just doesn't match. So for me, it's always like, How can we do better? Can we do something different? If we're doing it the same, what is that going to lead to? So I think you're spot on. And actually, I think you read my mind because I was just about to ask you, isn't it the problem that majority of planners Forecasters many real timers, even, even though they're more on the extroverted side are introverts. And maybe they're a little bit more comfortable in just not exploring those relationships, but just executing their tasks. So I'm just thinking how, how do we work around that?

Corey: 21:07

Yeah, but, but, but that's fine because in my opinion, that would be the ideal career pathing that you'd build. That would be as a manager, that's how you'd start your, your department and build a, a, a career path for your team. Part of being in WFM, like your RTA will be more of that extrovert cause they're on the floor talking to people. Then when you get into planners, you close out because you, and part of that career. The goal of that plan, or that career path, is to focus on the WFM skill, but then to pull them into the meetings, even if they just sit and listen to the meetings, to say, here's what we're planning, the meetings with ops and with, some of the senior managers, to say, here's what we're planning going forward pull them into the monthly performance meetings where WFM has to explain, and I think it's the job of the WFM manager or the senior WFM people to say, let me bring my planners into these sessions So that they can hear how we discuss it, so that they can get comfortable with speaking to people and try and pull them out again into that slightly extroverted role. They don't have to be, the spotlight in the room, but being able to explain the performance in a way that your stakeholder can understand. That's a key part of growing in the industry. And if that's left out, that planner is going to stay an introvert and going to get very frustrated and very stuck in his role until he leaves WFM and finds another industry completely.

Irina: 22:35

I completely agree with this one. And to mention one more thing on top, what I have noticed is because we refer to WFMS support operations, this is why we're often enabling team leads, for example, to Have executive decisions on, I'm taking away my agents and now we're on training on meeting on whatever. Yeah. I don't care. I put them on emails because their voice something happened, blah, blah, blah. And we understand about it afterwards. Then we get frustrated, but we never get to ask the teammates, okay, just let me sit next to you for half a day. Explain me what's your job. Explain me what's important for you. And I can give you my perspective because I did not come from the phone. I directly started in working in planning, so for me, that step of being on the phone, I used to do outbound previously to that, but there's a part of an internship, but I never had that experience of, Okay, my team lead is nagging me about quality, about whatever type of scores, and then the real time is nagging me about calls waiting in the queue. And then the team lead is being nagged by the operations about the quality and so forth and so forth. So this is where the disconnect is. We're often saying, okay, let me pull the team leads, explain to them what's important for WFM. But we don't seem to be very interested what's important for operations, to be honest. It's eh, quality, it's their thing I don't care. They're annoying us. Mm.

Corey: 24:12

It is. And I guess maybe this conversation is now leaning towards company culture because you might have culture that promotes that kind of behavior or attitude. And I don't mean that in a, in a bad way. It's just that. An organization might be at a point whereby you've got leaders in place that'll say, send it to that department, send it to this department. I need you to focus on this task. Let them send you the information. All good and but the, what's, the message behind that from a senior leader is, is what's not being said is that you putting the idea in your employee's head that they don't have to be proactive, Like you said, they don't have to be curious. Whereas if a senior leader says, you know what, this data sits with quality, find out what you can and get me the answer. That approach changes everything. And now we're deviating a bit, but we were getting to some root cause analysis here. It's that's probably what's causing all the disconnect that we're having. We might have. A good understanding of all the different functions of WFM and all the different functions of the contact center, but they're not connected only because we have so many disconnects in terms of the understanding or maybe the words that are being used to motivate the staff to get things done. We motivate them in a certain way whereby that message that they're receiving to them sounds like, okay, I need to get the job done. Instead of let me get proactive and see how I can holistically close this task off,

Irina: 25:47

yeah, I, I completely agree with you and and we haven't even touched on the conversation about involving other departments like HR. And then it gets even more complicated who is responsible for what and who gets the data and who needs to ask for the data. And I don't know. I, it's just, I don't know how to work around that problem. Do we do we educate organizations individually? Do we create webinars? But it's a huge problem for me. And I genuinely think that WFMers should be paid more. Their role should sit higher in the organization because they oversee everything and basically they create the The foundation for your workforce to be available for your customers. So it's all starts with availability. So that's why for me, if you don't secure that first step, what kind of a customer experience are we talking about? If you can't meet anyone to speak to you, like where's the customer experience then? So that's why I think we need to rework the whole kind of roles and structure and where WFM sits in the organization.

Corey: 26:59

exactly. That's, that's the strategy. And that's why I like talking about WFM strategy because once we understand where it sits and not, not in the sense of Somebody's saying WFM needs to sit in this level. It's about where it contributes to the business. If somebody on that level can take a step back and say, what are all my functions in my business? It's quality frontline service, it's WFM, it's HR, so on. And how, and understand from a strategic point, how they all link together. That's where you, you finally get some structure in the business. And that's when. The seniors will understand just how important WFM is because one of my mentors actually did this for me, like way back when. She took a whiteboard, she wrote the words WFM, she drew a circle around it. And then she says does WFM send. FTE requirements to HR for recruitment. And I said, yes. So she draws a line and she puts HR. And she goes along all those things with all the different departments from training to quality to every single, facilities as well. We talk about desk space. We've got to understand. And, and that's the mindset that we need. So strategy and structure needs to be the starting points of WFM and not the concept that we have now where it's RTA up. It should be when a company looks at WFM. It should be, start at the top, WFM provides all these functions, and even if they don't understand all of them, or they don't know all of them, they can always reach out, there's a lot of information on, online, and if we start there to say, what is my 5 year goal as a business, do I want to grow my business by 20 percent in terms of customers, If I do that, what is my headcount going to look like in the call center? How, how's that going to change? Do I need more floor space? Do I need to change my telephony platform? Do I need to introduce chats? WFM fits into that strategy and they'll tell you over the next five years, your growth plan of 20 percent per year, this is how much of it, you're going to grow by. This is where your channels are going to go. And then it goes into tactical. And then we can tell them, look, tactically, this is what you need to do. These are the people you're going to need to have. These are the systems you're going to need to run. This is the reports you're going to need to have. These are the number of metrics you're going to need to have. These are the dashboards. And then operationally it's the execution. And that's what we're missing. I think for all WFM people out there, I think that's the message that we need to send. To, everyone, the people that we work with people that we chat to is that WFM should be spoken about from a strategic level. Always start at, you know what, it's not how many people are on break at this time. It's, At the top, what does, what does my five year goal in WFM look like? How am I contributing to the business? Am I aligning to the company's goal of expanding into a new country, a new region and then from there, all those rules and structures and, measures come into place if WFM's sitting on the same level. Senior Operations.

Irina: 30:11

Actually, I have an offer for you. Let's, let's make a webinar. on that topic. Let's just start putting the thoughts out there because I feel it's the time for a WFM revolution and we need to start being a little bit more vocal and not hiding the corners and nag between each other. So let's, let's have a webinar about it.

Corey: 30:31

Happy to, happy to do that. Thank you for having me.

Irina: 30:34

Perfect. Any final words of advice?

Corey: 30:37

Yeah, just, I think, based on my experience, it's a case of like you said, the curiosity, but as a person, you've got to think about your own future. And I think whether it's WFM or any role for that matter, but more for us, because with WFM, that's, that's why we're here. Think about where you want to go. Is it going to be data analytics? Cause that's going to pull you away. Is it going to be management? Because that's a completely different ballgame and you can still be. WFM manager, but you're going to be working with people more than you're working with numbers. So I think for the guys listening just understand what's your passion and try and focus your, your efforts towards that and build your own career plan. And, and go for it. That's, that's just it. We push for, for what you will make you comfortable.

Irina: 31:25

It was a fantastic chat. Thank you so much, Corey, for joining me.

Corey: 31:29

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.