WFM Unfiltered | Workforce Management Podcast

Where Should WFM Sit in the Organisational Structure? | WFM Unfiltered

• Irina Mateeva • Season 1 • Episode 39

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Where does Workforce Management actually belong inside a company? If you've ever felt like WFM is misunderstood, underused, or straight-up misplaced within your organization, you're not alone. In this episode of WFM Unfiltered, Irina is joined by Pier, a lifelong contact center and workforce leader who brings serious insight and lived experience from every level of the industry – from agent to director, and everything in between.


Pier breaks down the real-life implications of placing WFM under HR vs Ops – and why neither option may be right. He shares his unique view of WFM as an internal consultancy function, revealing how reframing the role of WFM can unlock real business value. Think more influence, better partnerships, and less chaos in daily operations. You'll hear how strategic planning, forecasting, and ownership of performance outcomes can transform WFM from 'spreadsheet central' to true business partner.


If you’ve ever been frustrated by clueless stakeholders, turf wars over decision-making, or the constant tension between day-to-day firefighting and big-picture planning — this is the episode that’ll hit home. Pier also unpacks lessons from a case study where he radically restructured contact center roles, proving that focus beats multitasking every time.


Whether you're leading a WFM team, sitting in Ops or HR, or just want to understand how to make WFM work better, don’t miss this one. It's packed with practical takeaways, mindset shifts, and strategies for influence.


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Irina:

Hi everyone and welcome to WFM Unfiltered. I'm your host Irina for another, for me, very late recording on the Friday evening, but thankfully with the brilliant guest. I think we're heading to Canada today Pier?

Pier:

Yes,

Irina:

We're.

Pier:

Are in Toronto, Canada today.

Irina:

Canada. Great. I cannot wait for our topics, but before that, guys, if you can do me a solid, please. If you have spare two seconds, go rate, subscribe or write a review for the show. It does help the word spread for WFM. And if you need. Some help with w fm, just shoot me a message or go to write wfm.com and we can work together. Who knows? But business aside, let's get to the fun stuff. Hey Pierre, how are you doing?

Pier:

I'm doing so great. Thank you for having me.

Irina:

Thanks for spending your Friday with me, or at least portion of your Friday with me. Can you please introduce yourself?

Pier:

Sure. been in contact centers entire career. I tried to get out for a little while, but it's like the mafia. They don't let you leave. And so I have to, you have to go back.

Irina:

Yes.

Pier:

I was an agent, a supervisor, a trainer, workforce scheduler manager, director, general manager. Had my own consulting company for a while. And so I'm. Very passionate about people and numbers. And I'm so excited that we connected and there's an opportunity for us to chat.

Irina:

Me too. And one thing that I can say even from our email exchange before we jumped on the first chat, you're just so positive and so passionate and you can talk about everything, that it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, and I cannot wait to learn more from you, to be honest. So you have. Covered so many different roles and you have such knowledge and such an experience that I wanted to chat about workforce management in terms of where should it sit in the company organization, because usually what we have, and this is always the fight and one that I am very opinionated about, so be careful what you're saying. We have mostly two aspects. Either it sits, WFM as a structure sits under hr. Hence it can get a bit tricky because everyone assumes that whatever HR do the same, does WFM and all the decisions streamed down from HR or it is directly from operations. Hence, the decisions are given by operations, but it's rarely seen as this independent department that it's there to basically support everyone else. So what's your opinion? What do we do? Where do we stay?

Pier:

Where do you go? My background is Italian, so my answer is normally, it depends.

Irina:

Oh.

Pier:

There's always a qualifier It depends on how an organization looks at workforce management. If You look at workforce management as the group that does scheduling. And that's the extent of what you think workforce management is, then Absolutely. It can report into the contact center directly because you just need'em to do that function. you look at it as, this is the group that does capacity planning and Determines how many people we need and what the schedule should look like for maximum cost effectiveness, you could put, you could argue that function belongs in finance. Yeah, so it, it all depends on what you think management is and what it does for your organization.

Irina:

I wanna challenge you here real quick because I hear you, but I don't know what your experience is, but for me, in a lot of organizations, they're clueless what WFM should does. So the easiest question is, we have some people, you have some Excel, like just. Make some planning and some schedule work and isn't it up to us maybe a lot of the time from WFM perspective to educate senior stakeholders and to find that position?

Pier:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I agree. I agree with you. A lot of what I find in general in the contact center industry, I. CX conferences, workforce management conferences. It's a lot of us just talking to ourselves. And we feel great about, we talk about quality, we talk about workforce management, and we feel we leave the conference and we feel great with each other,

Irina:

Yeah.

Pier:

we need to bring other people into that conversation. And I do think that we, it's on us to educate people in the organization what the contact center does. What workforce management does as a whole and how we can be a strategic partner. So I agree with you. We should be educating the rest of the organization. The way that I look at workforce management, and I love to geek out on workforce management because it's so data rich, right? A contact center, the way that I look at it really two things. It's people and numbers. the numbers say one thing, right? The numbers say, oh, you only need 127 people to manage this amount of work. And then you get into an agent's reality, the call type, the weather, the, state of how the contact center is, absenteeism, attrition, and all of those things factor into affecting those numbers. And so it's a, it's very much a. plus numbers equals outcome kind of environment. And and that's how I built my career my approach is we need to look after our people so that we can better explain, the num the better, explain the numbers that we're submitting. So when I say I geek out on workforce management, there is such a wonderful opportunity for. For workforce management to be the most amazing consultants to the operation. Like that, that, that's the way that I look at workforce management is you you think of them as a team of consultants and what's, what everyone loves or hates about consultants is they have lots of recommendations, but no real ownership.

Irina:

Yes.

Pier:

and I've been in that situation before where I'm like, I think the more that workforce management. Takes on that approach and feels less responsible for the decisions for the permissions, the more you unleash the potential of what workforce management can be. And sure you've been in a situation and anyone who's watching this knows in a contact center, there's sometimes that friction between the operation and workforce management, and that stems from. Them asking workforce management for permission to do something. Can see from your face. I'm speaking to the choir,

Irina:

Yes.

Pier:

So and in one center, just to to unblock that I went into one center, went in one organization and there was a real tension between work, between workforce and the operation. And it's because we were, were being asked to make decisions. So an agent, for example, would call workforce management and say, can I take my break right now? Has, in my mind, that has nothing to do with workforce management. that's, and so we made a little sign and we posted it at, at each person who was working workforce at their desk, and we create a sign that says, that's a great question for your supervisor,

Irina:

Oh wow. Okay. I love that approach.

Pier:

the it is. Because As consultants to the business, what you're saying is I'm not responsible. I can help guide the outcome. I can help and identify the people that have great AHT. help identify the people that have strong productivity. I can help identify the people that have the best. Quality scores or whatever the data is showing you. I the most absenteeism, the least absenteeism. I have all this, and so I have to paint a picture to operations to say, I'm going to show you who your best performers are. I'm gonna show you who your middle performers are, and I'm going to show you who your worst performers are. so based on the data that I have, and it's up to you to then how you want to manage top performers is you wanna reward them. How you want to manage those middle performers is, I think you've got some people that need to go back into training. okay. Or that need coaching. That's okay. And then you have people that are completely disengaged that we spend too much time managing. Is, these are, I'm just letting you know, I'm not going to put my, why would I put myself in the position of having to make those decisions or ask for permission? I think they're the ultimate consultants to the operation in terms of who's performing and who's not. Where coaching is needed and training is needed and where it's not. But also to feed all of that data to to finance in terms of, and capacity planning and being able to explain, with the answer of, it depends, right? Like how many people will it take to run the contact center? And someone says, oh, it'll take 500. I would say it depends what's your target, what's important to you? It could take 300, it could take 600, it could take 50. It depends on what you want. And so the more that they str they. They align themselves to that, it depends like, what is it that you're looking for, and I can help you. I think raises the effectiveness of workforce management. I think it raises their profile and I think it raises their reputation as a, as more of a strategic partner, as a strategic consultant, more so than. The, a department of doing, there's always the doing that exists anywhere, but it's more it's elevating that presence within the organization.

Irina:

I really love how you painted all of this and especially the fact where we can be, basically internal consultants. I always say that agents and team leads and operations are our internal clients, and usually I get a lot of shit from people saying, those are stakeholders, those are not clients. I'm like, it's internal clients. This is how I see it. This is how we are basically working for them and we need to make it work for them as well. But I do wanna challenge you

Pier:

absolutely.

Irina:

because as much as I, I don't know how I feel about what you're saying. I agree, but I also think that heavy is the crown and I think we should be in a position based because we have the full picture, right? We have all these data. We're looking of all the agents, of all the skills, the molecules, and for me, I would much rather have the decision making for. Capacity in any shape or form, like sitting with WFM for one reason. I think that for me, two reasons. First of all, again, we have all the data. Second of all, I think it's slightly unfair to team leads to ask them to do everything like coach the people, look after the people, speak. If they're feeling well, give them performance review now look at the cues, tell them whether they need to go to the break. So I think they are becoming. Not much of team leads, but just like they're spreading themselves too thin rather than being focused. Okay. My job is to make sure they're performing at their best and they're feeling at their best. But whether the targets are met from, I don't know number point of view from coverage point of view, I see it more of our tasks. So how do you feel about that?

Pier:

I I, maybe it's the way I'm explaining it, but I still agree with you. I think that workforce management does have the obligation to own the number and the result that is being created.

Irina:

Okay.

Pier:

They need to they own that they absolutely own own the service level, own the result. It's that, it's the nuance, I think is decision making same day. So

Irina:

Okay.

Pier:

So I have I love the term workforce management, but I saw on one of your, one of your, I can't remember where I saw it, was, is workforce management an outdated term? Should we call it something else? So I have always called workforce management, planning and reporting.

Irina:

Okay. Interesting.

Pier:

The reason I call it that is because that's where I think the main areas of focus are, because when the day hits. It's, it comes down to everything that you've planned, right? You've planned ht of all of the factors, right? You've factored in shrink vacation, seasonality, all of those factors in, and how well you plan dictates how well you're gonna do on that day, for the most part, barring some other examples. And then the day after. You can say, oh, how well did we do? How well did we plan? Like yesterday? How well did we plan last week? How well did we plan the month, the quarter, the year? And I get excited. You can see from my fa I get excited about that, right? It's, and it's how well can we predict what's going on? Because I think day of Right, I think in your planning, you bring in operations, you bring in finance, you bring into the you, you invite them to those discussions to say, this is what we think is gonna happen. And then we can report back and say, this is how it actually went down. I think Day of Management comes down to your relationship with operation your customer. I agree with you that it's a customer and how well you plan for that day.

Irina:

That's a very interesting spin. So how do you feel about the real time team then?

Pier:

I don't rely a lot on my realtime teams

Irina:

You're going to dangerous territory here!

Pier:

Because I don't rely a lot on my day, on my realtime teams. It depends. It, again, it depends on the center. If you have, complexity center with two Queues, three Queues, and the, it's, you're not in a BPO situation where you have multiple,

Irina:

Yeah.

Pier:

calls from multiple clients. It's a different, it, I think it's a little bit of a different story. It all depends. In some situations, you can be heavily, you need to be heavily reliant on real time and on some situations. I found that even not having a real time team, you don't miss it depending on the type of environment that you have. I know. I know. Little bit weird. A little bit weird.

Irina:

I like that because now we can have a discussion on it because you know what, typically, from what I have seen that happens in smaller contact centers, when we're saying, okay, we have the plan on it, because you know what? Typically from what I have seen that has, and my issue is the same, so do we want them to be. Team leads, or do we want them to change skills if it's necessary? Because for me, team lead is not operational to that part. Let me log into telephony system one and just remove skills and then, oh, you're in vacation. Let me mark that in the planning that you're in vacation today. It's just they can't be everywhere.

Pier:

It

Irina:

But there are certain tasks that needs to be performed during the day. If shit hits the fan, who does ask for overtime? Who corrects that in the planning? Who is making those decisions? Who is driving that discussion?

Pier:

Yeah. you know what's really interesting is this conversation reminds me of a case study from my work past. So I was managing I was director of operations for a company that had a location in the US and one in Canada at the time. I had the luxury of both centers being exactly 120 people.

Irina:

Oh, wow.

Pier:

they, they were exact, they were exactly the same function and just that they, the Canadian dollar was the US dollar was good. And so the exchange meant that they were doing some work in Canada. It was this, it was the typical one to 15. Ratio in both centers. And I had a thought, which was, asking, to your point, we're asking team leaders to do everything. We're asking them to provide coaching, provide training, look at the cues, give reviews, give feedback, a just vacation. And My thought, and I went to my vice president at the time and I said, I have an idea. And she and I explained what I was gonna do and she said, okay, try it. And so I really appreciated that. She said, try it. And so it was, I'm going to change the structure one of these centers see if it changes the level of performance. And so one, the center, one center, we left a one to 15 ratio. Of supervisors. And so we had, 12 or whatever, 12 supervisors. And on the other side we had had the same 1212 soups, but I said, I'm gonna make six supervisors. I'm gonna double the size of the teams And I'm going to make one supervisor more the administrative supervisor. And I'm going to make the remaining six supervisors coaches.

Irina:

Okay.

Pier:

And so what we did was, so you had one supervisor, we had you and so we had one supervisor that was the sort of the authoritative Crossing the asking for vacation per, like the decision maker and the other people who were naturally really good at coaching. So we said, oh. Your AHT is really high. I'm, I'm a great AHT coach, I'm gonna sit with you. Another person was, I'm really great at soft skills customer service. I can go around and teach that around the center I can. And I'm really good at teaching systems. I can help people how to navigate the system better. And so the coaches each had a specialty of things that they really liked to coach. And so they went through and. They coached everybody. That's all they did is they would just went one by one next, next, on whatever their specialty was. And so the, there was a 50% lift in sales and a 20% decrease in AHT over, over the, over that same period, center to center. And so what eventually we ended up doing was changing both centers to the, to that new model

Irina:

So you're proving my point because the thing that was changed is the focus, right? So rather than being spread for doing absolutely everything under the roof of the contact center, you do you what you're best in, and the other guys do what they're best in. And on that note, I'm completely changing gear and because you wanna geek out about WFM, what do you think? the traditional multi-skilling and blending of contacts and asking people to be available for everything can be good at everything. Is it working? Is it not working?

Pier:

It's always gonna depend.

Irina:

You're very political.

Pier:

I know it's always gonna depend. It's always gonna depend. And so what I found is, what I found is people like to get good at doing something. And when you have there's a plus side and a downside to everything, right? So the less multi-skilling you have, i the idea is that you'll do it better faster,

Irina:

Yes. Yes.

Pier:

I will have better service at a better speed. It'll be overall more efficient to be able to do that. The question then becomes, how do I keep that person motivated for a long period doing that one thing.

Irina:

Amen. Yes. Yes.

Pier:

And so that's where you need to, that's where you need to set up your contact center to have. to look at employee development, rewards and recognition, how you're moving people around. So I think you can get good at that one thing, a great thing. But people also burn out doing that one thing over and over again. And so it's how do you provide some variety? you provide some variety into into the role? Because it's, a lot of it is contact centers, repetitive.

Irina:

Yes. Yep.

Pier:

very repetitive and you're asking a human to do this same task over and over. It's often not a pleasant call because people are calling when they are at their limit and they haven't been able to self-service. And so doing that over and over again, you need to pro provide people with some reprieve or some. Some opportunity to go work in another department within the contact center to get a different flavor for other roles that exist within the organization. To answer your question, it depends on how many multi-skill. Are there is, does two provide enough variety? Does three does four? always very conscious, again, people in numbers. I'm always very conscious of how full an agent's brain is at all times. What I mean by that is like we, we can, you, we keep adding, right? There's, we keep adding oh let, they can do this transaction. Oh, they can do this transaction, or they can do this transaction and they can do this transaction. And so that's why it's really important to, I think, hold, you hold focus groups and town halls and you talk to your agents to say and just ask are, is your brain like are you full or are you bored? And in all cases, agents have been completely honest with me to say, no, I can take a little more. Or they'll be vo vocal and say, like timeout. This is too much. asking me to do too much. And I think you generally get a consensus with good management of, where you are on that line.

Irina:

I find myself smiling more and Paul in love with that conversation. So I'm already super grateful to Mike for introducing us because you framed that in a way that. I have seen people and organizations struggle in making the wrong decisions because they take either or approach. So either or from what I have seen is either we need to keep our agents motivated. So here is all the 70 skills in the contact center and we're gonna train them on absolutely everything. And that's how we are gonna keep them entertained. They don't absolutely don't understand what they're doing, or they're saying, oh, you know what? We're doing that because we would need less people because this is your universal agent. They can handle everything, so we don't have to have subs of people. It's just they're gonna handle this and this email and this chat, and this, everything at the same time, and it becomes an absolute mess. I am not sure if I have seen a company in a very good way articulating their decision around their skilling strategy in the way that you're explaining it right now. Or if they put the thought, is it agent related? Or we should have universal skilling strategy.

Pier:

The way that I, and maybe this isn't the right way to frame it, and maybe you can help me frame it differently, the way that I have communicated when I get the, this is when I get the request of, oh, can I have a specialized group that does this function? I've received that request before from, oh, we really need this to go can we have a dedicated team to do that? Can we have dedicated people do that? Immediate response is you that typically executives will forget that it's a 24 7 operation. And so do you mean a hundred percent of the time? Do you mean 50% of the time?'cause that, that, that's the discussion, right? Because if you want a hundred percent of. Certain call types or certain inquiry types to be handled by a specialized group because you want that white glove kind of service. My immediate reaction is, okay, I need 20 people, then I need one full team to be, at least to be able to cover that. And we don't have enough volume. If there's not enough volume those 20 people, then they automatically have to be multi-skilled because you are trying to filter one. One inquiry type to a specialized group of people. So typically you have to wait for that volume to appear so that you're not inefficient or you have to accept the inefficiency. And most often what I hear is, I'll accept the inefficiency because it's a little bit cheaper.

Irina:

So tell me who, because this is one thing that I'm always really curious about, and again, I'm very opinionated about. Who is deciding on the split of skills then? Because to your point, I have seen organizations where you have a queue with three calls and you're staffing people for this course, and you can of course argue that there, of course, it's specialized queue. Do you really want to have people waiting for these three calls throughout the day? Because the reality is that you can't forecast good enough for these limited low volumes. So usually you are bundle that with another skill. But who is doing that? How do we, who is the driver? Does WFM have anything to do or to say about it?

Pier:

I think they do. it's their responsibility to communicate and say, I think based on planning, based on the people we have, based on the volume, based on the inquiry types, we can capture 82% of these inquiry types with the specialized group. And then you need to accept. That 18% is gonna go to whomever. During certain periods or during certain times or whatever. I don't think you can ever, as you just said, you can't, it's difficult to capture that a hundred percent rule. Who makes that decision? I think that's why I think of workforce management as the ultimate consultants, right? I'm going, I can deliver X for you. You're gonna have, 82% of this call type handled by this specialized group. 18% is gonna overflow just because of natural state of business. Are you okay with that? The operation says yes, and you say, great. If you want, I can make you a system that captures a hundred percent, but it's gonna mean we have to change these other two parameters.

Irina:

That's interesting. Okay. I. Oh my God, my brain is going into completely other direction, so I'm gonna say this right now. I would like to do a masterclass with you on another topic, and we can sing after this recording'cause we have to wrap it up. But before we wrap it up, I have another question for you. And this is one that comes to me all the time and is discouraging a lot of people to pursue a career in WFM because traditionally, WFM, first of all, is seen as a no career path or not a good enough career path. So people are like, okay, the most I can be, it's a WFM manager or director, or depending on the size and listening to you, because you have been pretty much everything and quite senior functions and even having your own consultancy. I want you to tell me and tell everyone that's listening to us, can it be a career, can it be a good career, and how can we make it one?

Pier:

If you think that workforce is just scheduling. Then you'll just be a scheduler. If you think that workforce is people in number consulting, I think you have a big career ahead of you because I. A lot of business boils down to that. It's, this is a people, this is a people industry. You workforce management is scheduling workforce. Those are all human beings. And you've got all kinds of factors that you need to factor into that. And you have all of the business needs. And so workforce management is where people and numbers come together, and that's never gonna go away. And so if you think of yourself as I can elevate. The people management and make the numbers better and make a career out of consulting in that realm. That's huge.

Irina:

I wanna stop and pause on this one because it's so important and it's also a point that's currently is making a lot of people scared. So tell me what's your current title?

Pier:

I'm independently consulting now.

Irina:

Okay. So to get there, tell me, are you scared of. As an independent consultant, you're requiring to work based of customers. Are you scared that AI is gonna completely change contact centers? To the extent we don't need actual human workforce, hence workforce managers is us. It's gonna become obsolete or redundant.

Pier:

Maybe that's for part two, but I'll give you my quick answer.

Irina:

Okay.

Pier:

quick answer is. AI is going to continue to take away the easy stuff.

Irina:

So we should,

Pier:

it will, can take away the medium stuff. And so people. We're what? What? Because of AI with all the easy stuff going away, that elevates the level of skill required at an agent level. are taking all of our agents, and Mike has, Mike and I have talked about this, which is are, you're now, with the advent of ai, you're now asking level one agents to be level two, level three. And that changes the game entirely because I no longer need an agent to give me a password reset that should be gone.

Irina:

Yes.

Pier:

every phone call for an agent in 2026 should be, oh my God, I have never heard of the thing that you are telling me. Tell me more. Every call should be a surprise, every single one. And that takes an entirely different kind of training, compensation, skillset. I think the, I think workforce management is actually gonna be more complex with the advent of, with the advent of ai.

Irina:

I love that answer. And I actually fully support this one, but I know a lot of people are scared. This is a hot topic right now. It's a lot of speculation. I personally, I. For now, have not seen contact centers dramatically change the amount of people that they're working with. It'll change for sure. What they do will change. But I think for now, let's just keep our mind open because technology is a good thing. It helps us. So thank you so much for that conversation. Absolutely love your energy, Pierre, and how passionate you are. But not only, you're always welcome on the show, but stay so we can chat a bit more after the recording.

Pier:

Absolutely. It's a pleasure.

Irina:

Likewise.

Pier:

Pleasure. Thank you so much.

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