WFM Unfiltered | Workforce Management Podcast

Why Does Nobody Listen to The WFM Team? | Jason Bartram

• Irina Mateeva • Season 1 • Episode 41

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This episode of WFM Unfiltered goes deep into the heart of every planner’s frustration — why no one listens to the WFM team. And to help us unpack that truth, Irina is joined by Jason Bartram, a global workforce planning leader at eBay, with decades of frontline experience in turning chaos into strategy.

Jason doesn’t just talk about planning; he talks about what it takes to make it matter. From the importance of defining clear responsibilities to the power of trust-based leadership, he walks through the hidden habits that separate good operations from great ones. He drops truth bombs about the limits of data, the myths around “perfect planning,” and why too many contact centres still run in a constant state of fire-fighting.

But this episode isn’t just about problems — it’s full of solutions. Learn how to build influence across silos, use AI without losing your human edge, and drive change that actually sticks. Jason’s perspective is refreshingly direct, disarmingly honest, and deeply rooted in real-world results.

For any workforce planner, team lead, or operations leader wondering why their voice isn’t being heard — this is the episode you need. It’s practical. It’s punchy. And it might just shift how you show up at work.

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Irina:

Hey, WFM Friends. Hi. Welcome to WFM Unfiltered. I'm your host, Irina, and today we are going to be shopping at eBay because I have a fantastic guest in line to speak with us today. And this is Jason, and I wanna hear a little bit more about you, Jason, and about eBay and about your journey. So how are you doing today?

Jason:

Thanks Irina. look, really excited to be here today. name is Jason Bartram. I've been in workforce planning for too many years.

Irina:

Too many.

Jason:

don't look it, but over 20 years. and it's been like, for me, it's been a fantastic journey. Like most folks, I. You kind of fall into call centers as opposed to kind of want to be a call center planner from the age of six or seven instead of a fireman or, or whatever else it is, football player. So, look, I progressed, from going into operations at a team leader. I. To thinking there's gotta be more just to dealing with this kind of stuff day in, day out to going into planning.'cause you've got that mix of numbers and people and then just go through, and progress my career. And I've been in small startups that have gone from little to massive. I've been in huge telcos. I've been in, not-for-profit. Organizations And for the last seven years, I've been working in the e-commerce giant that's eBay. And I started off in eBay, working in the European markets. I'd never done that before. So it was a great learning experience to, to plan outside of the uk. for the last two years I've been doing, global role. So working on the midterm planning execution in eBay. So from six weeks out, up to, the day we've got a team of folks, spread across the world, in Europe, in North America. We've got folks in Asia Pacific, that are all doing that, work.

Irina:

Thank you so much for the introduction and what a great career and Whoof, what a great experience. However, I have to start by saying. You mentioned that you started working in a contact center or post. Do you know being maybe a firefighter or someone? So what do you mean? Is it like working as a planner, not fancy enough career?

Jason:

Is working a plan and not a fancy enough career. I don't think it's six, seven year olds set out to be able to, to be able to do it. And. I've got a daughter, who's 16, who asks what I do. and interestingly, like what's the, I think it's meant to, you're meant to be able to explain it nice and

Irina:

Yeah.

Jason:

and simply. I think her eyes glaze over after about 15 seconds and she moves on to TikTok or whatever else. That's, that's far more interesting. Planning is, I think is fantastic. You get the benefits of, liaising with, people and getting, if you get your energy from people, there's ample opportunity to be able to, energize yourself by having all of those interactions with your team, with stakeholders, external folks, and as well as if you like, the mental challenge of, of doing a, almost like a, a numbers jigsaw every single day. Of every single, week and every single year, you get that opportunity to be able to do that one as well. And I like the mix of both. I'm not someone that's just gonna sit in a room and work on numbers and spreadsheets for day after day after day. I like, I like and get my energy from working with people. So if I do that, I like my energy sinks. Everyone can do it and you can do it for a period of time. But I get my energy from. Being around people, doing stuff like this is fantastic. I get a whole load of energy, from, from doing these kinds of things. So understanding how you work, understanding what gets the best from you, and this has been like, it's been a fabulous career for me I think and more as I get older, I think I've got an awful lot of value to add for people that are starting off in their career to help people. I, I guess like look round corners'cause I've been there, I've seen certain experiences over, over my years and I can help people kind of navigate round, some of those challenges, before they get to them, before it knocks'em off. Ben.

Irina:

you mentioned something that, just reminded me of a conversation that I had a couple of days ago with, one of my acquaintances from LinkedIn actually. And it was about how do we decide what's a good profile? For someone working in workforce management and he mentioned something very great. He was like, okay, you know what? We need to make sure that they're analytical in a way, because numbers are a foundation. it's not only about numbers, but it's certainly a foundation and you have a lot of people that are great with either or, either working directly with people, either working only with numbers, but we have such a. Such a great combination of both that I actually wanna start the discussion around it and ask you, do you think there is work for a w fmr for a planner if we don't have agents? So if we only work with, AI agents or with tech and we don't have actual human beings, is there a work for a planner?

Jason:

I always think, like I've done a lot of work and some, and some speaking on this, on this kind of stuff, and eBay's very much at the forefront of, AI and developing AI technologies. My, my take on things are, is that I. You'll get, and you want to get as an organization, as minimal contacts, possible. but the ones that you get are gonna fall outside of the rote and the rules that are in your ai, system. And when you've got those ones, you want real hu like human humans, you know, you've gotta be your best human as well as the machines are being the best machines. to, be able to answer those contacts and, and to work with empathy and, and to add all of your real human skills to those contacts. And that's where your add value as a business and where you'll delight, your customers and people will keep coming, coming back to you. So from a starting point, I think there will be less and less human interactions, obviously. but the, those human interactions that you do have will be. Will be key and organizations will be fighting over themselves to get the human beings with those levels of skills because they're not easy to get. the minute. You can get lots of human beings that are great at transactional stuff, and just doing that kind of stuff, but not so many that can join the dots and be creative and solution finding. And empathise with folks. That's the starting point in, terms of, do you think you'll still still need planners? yes. I think you will still need planners because some of the key roles that we've got, our organizations is helping support the operational in their goals in terms of what the experience, is gonna be. Whether it's through, AI agents, whether it's through human being agents, you are there to help. Guide and help'em make good decisions with regards to risk the risk that they have in their organization, either with, their outputs or with their future planning. in terms of. achieving their goals, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there will always be a need for planners where, my take on it is. where I think we will go and where I think we need to be starting to have conversations with our planners is we have a very kind of, run the business layer at the minute where all the tools in the industry are designed around our service levels. You know, providing our schedules, you know, working out budgets, et cetera, et cetera. You know, facilitating overtime and all of that kind of stuff. There are very technical pieces that planners do day in, day out that, we need to do. But my take on it, and I think, you know. AI is improving so rapidly. Gradually are gonna see that level of work done by human beings eroded. As AI gets better at forecasting, better at doing these kinds of different things, you'll still need people to supervise and oversee, et cetera, et cetera. but it will have less work to do in that particular space. And more work to do in understanding how we can use that tool, those tools and technologies in helping the business deliver collaborating, listening to what it is that they want to achieve. Working on things like, Wellness because as I mentioned, the few human agents you've got will have really high levels of skills. and you want to develop those and you don't want them to be off sick or to lose those guys and to have high levels of attrition. So you'll be working, I think, on different measures and they'll require different levels of skills. You know, maybe more nuanced, skills. It, it'll be less about you as a, as a planner, but more about how you can help the business develop those skills. And I think, planners have always been like helpless victims sometimes.

Irina:

I.

Jason:

We, we look, we have, we sort of sit in the middle and there's like competing goals and all of that kind of stuff. And, and you know, you plan to hit service levels and then team leaders come in and add more, shrink and do all of that. And, and you feel as though like all the work you've done has been unpicked and like. You know, there's nothing we can do about this kind of stuff. I actually think we'll move away from being helpless victims. If you're a good, in a good planning team, you'll be le you, you really will start to add value and you'll be able to see yourselves, you know, being consultative and, and, and folks coming to you to help you, help you deliver for them, goals that they, that they only need to achieve as they evolve. So, I, I've got real strong hope. that planning will evolve from, from helpless victims to, you know, a real valued and, member of the of the business.

Irina:

Wow. you are making my job as a host very difficult because you said so many great points that I can go into so many different directions. So let me pick one first. Maybe we should tackle it from psychological perspective. I'm one of the people who is very annoyed by all of the talks how AI is gonna make, everyone redundant and blah, blah and blah, blah. And I think we should move away from generic bullshit. Towards. Okay. Let's see how, and I think we're actually in a great position, having to shape where and how AI can be used and aid that enhances as human beings. But what I have noticed, like even before the conversations of ai, the last, for me at least 15, 16 years in workforce planning is that. Many people are scared, even from traditional WFM tools, and I've noticed that many times when I'm doing implementation, they somehow think, oh, the tool is gonna automate my entire job and they're gonna suck me and I will have to look for another job. And then basically, rather than spending my time trying to implement the tool to be of the best help possible for this organization, I'm spending the time. Trying to educate that person. No, the tool needs you to be driven in a certain direction. A tool is just a tool. It can be good, it can be utter, complete shit. And I think that psychological aspect for, from change perspective, there is something new. We are supposed to be feared from it. How, if you have your team members coming to you and that there is that resistance towards automation, tech, ai, what do you do as a leader? How do you tell them, okay guys, let's just focus, let's take that as opportunity opposed to no. We should, make everything possible to avoid it.

Jason:

Well look, we're currently in the process of trying to embrace a AI tools in helping us do our job better and quicker and, and smarter. And. This is not a, a fear for not, not outta fear, but a out of creating space where we don't have to spend as much time just doing repetitive tasks, but it frees us up to add more value. our business to call out more risks to highlight to the operation where things may need to be looked at, mitigated, et cetera, et cetera. So, for instance, if I can use, a large language model. To bring together, I, I, we use multiple outsourcers. If we can use a large language model to summarize kind of where our, partner organizations are at, what risks associated they've got. I've not gotta spend as much time in meetings talking that through with them. And being sat in a couple of people's heads because they were in the meetings, but other people across my global team weren't in those meetings. If I can get that through a large language model and that output exported, then spend the hours that I'd be spending in meetings, getting that information, analyzing it, understanding where the risks are, feeding into my operational teams to go, look, you need to watch out at these particular times. Here's the options that we've got. these risks, these risks happen. So we are, and, and I think everyone should embrace what it can do to help you be. more able to lift your head up, more able to, how you use the current tools and get the best out of those.'cause look to your point, I absolutely agree. You put in without any thought into a workforce management system and ask it to achieve a service level. It could do that by giving you a hundred percent service level nine to five, and then a 0% service level from five o'clock till eight o'clock. Overall, it achieves your daily goal that you've plugged into it. But if you wanna contact the center between five and eight o'clock at night, you're gonna get a terrible experience. But you'll all wake up the following day, you'll see that you achieved an 80 and 20 seconds, service level. Move on, pat your backs, and and, and off we go. And, and I think you are, you are quite correct. It, there's sort of shit in and shit out. And you need just to be able to focus your time as a human being to, to help you join the dots, analyze what's in there, to get the best out of our existing tools as, and, and I think upcoming tools and AI and, and all of that kind of stuff will just help us get better. being analysts, not button bushes. That's my, that's my take on it.

Irina:

I love that point, and again, I feel like there is such a big resistance from a lot of places, so I think it's very. There are two camps, currently. One is yes, let's get to ai. Let's finally get rid of, the simple tasks. And the other one is no. This is complete bullshit. We're gonna be left without a job. And I'm always thinking, listen, we're all consumers. If everything is AI related and not a single person in this world has a job. Then it's a completely different conversation. How do we go ahead with our evolutionist people, like without earning money or something like that. But that's, for another, conversation you mentioned something else that I wanna touch on. The helpless victims part, and this is something that I have seen, I have experience for many, years myself. Being in the room with senior management and operations management and country management directors, and I'm providing my information. And they do exactly the opposite. They don't listen to me, they don't, agree with my calculations. They make decisions that are completely against my, calculations. And then I go sit on my desk and I started feeling sorry for myself being motivated. Why the hell am I doing that? Nobody's ever listening to me. They're not taking me seriously. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I know that there are a lot of people who are feeling discouraged because they don't think they have any authority and their job does not matter. So let's define it once and for all. Is it in our scope to be decision makers on the back of our data? And what is it that it's actually a planners or a w FMRs work and scope?

Jason:

So like, don't get me wrong, I've been in exactly the same boat where you produce some recommendations. You travel across the country down to meet. The decision maker, you put your deck in place, they like have a quick scan through it and send you on your way. not having read it because they'd already got in their mind what it was they were gonna do anyway and.

Irina:

You get the last and they're like, nah, we're fine.

Jason:

yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, and it was never gonna happen and you just feel as though you've wasted like however many months of your, your time. This is a glorious opportunity to showcase you in front of all of like senior man bloody, and it just goes by without you even, I. Almost saying a word I look, I, I, I get it. I really do. I think one of the things that I have found that's really helped in, I guess, I. helping sort of set an understanding of where you play from A WFM perspective is ensuring that you've got a raki with operational teams and your key stakeholders. So, who's responsible, who's accountable, who's supports, and who consults? Because over the years I found the biggest levels of frustration, and a amongst planners and operational folks, when it's not clear who ultimately makes the decision. And, and I've been in previous organizations where I. You see conflict occurring day in, day out and you look at it and go like, they're like at odds with each other. The planners are do trying to do one thing. The ops guys are trying to do the other thing and, and I've sat and gone. Right. Okay. Operational folks, like who do you think's responsible for service levels? For shrinkage, for all your key sort of business metrics who do you think are responsible for all of these? The same key business metrics. And it's a fascinating exercise to do because when you do it, you find that all the planners think they're responsible and accountable for all of these measures. And all of the ops folks also think they're responsible and accountable for each of these measures. And for certain ones, none of them. Either the planners or the ops guys think they're accountable for it, so nothing happens on those particular ones. And then the other measures, everyone's scrambling over themselves to unpick what the other side's done because they think they're responsible for it and they. Know and understand the way forward on all of that. So it's, it's quite interesting once you've like observing how it works and then putting that in place and going, right, okay, we've gotta agree who ultimately makes the decision on this? Who supports, who's consulted on it? And once, once you've got that clear, it makes it an awful lot easier to, to operate. Because to your point, you are not doing a whole load of work. You know, to, as a decision maker, you are doing a whole load of work to help somebody who's responsible and accountable for that to make a decision. So therefore, what you recommend and how you think you should go and, and, and how that's all pitched is slightly nuanced and, and slightly different. And everyone understands how all of that bit operates. So I think that's one, one area that I've learned that if you can get that clarity and, and everyone understands that it can make it work a whole lot better and there's a whole lot less frustration from folks, particularly planning folks, but also ops folks in terms of how you work together day to day.

Irina:

it's interesting, from all my years being into different companies, I have found very few that have broken the silos and they're actually helping and supporting each other, and they understand that they're one big team that are simply contributing to a major goal in different ways. And. You know what, I started thinking about while we were explaining it is like you are, you are in a new relationship with someone and you're going for a family dinner and they are the whole family and you're seeing everyone bickering at each other and making sense, and everyone is trash talking. The other one. And then you end up thinking, oh. if the relationship between everyone is that bad, do I really wanna enter this family and be a part of it? And that's something, what it's like being, being a customer currently. Can I talk to this, person? we don't have anyone available because this and this. And then somebody is not planning the correct way and we're. Excuse my language. Everyone is trying to cover their own as all the time. It's either the planner's fault or it's the agent, or it's the team leads. It's never sitting together and saying, listen, that's my responsibility. I'm gonna provide you with this information, but ultimately, you're the decision maker and whatever happens, you need to, you need to carry that responsibility with you. It's. I, don't know. Why are we still in that kind of a vicious cycle of team leads is a dirty word in the planner's community. And don't even mention the role of a planner for a team leads, because cussing starts immediately. So for me, how, what, could be the recommendation that Rasi or Rasi that you mentioned? Where in many organizations this is not existent. I want to understand from you, from your opinion, who needs to be the driver in putting something on the table, at least to have a discussion around it.

Jason:

So, so my take on it, when, when I did this, it was me, as a new planning lead coming in, observing the, observing that. Chaos and observing the frustration from, from my folks, but also seeking to understand my operational colleagues were they, how they were feeling about it. And I think at the minute in the organization, such as you spoke to, you'd speak to the team leads who'd go like, oh. planning do is stop us from doing stuff. You know, we've gotta achieve our, our CSAT goal, but they're stopping all of our offline activities because the planners are there going, we need to achieve 18, 20 seconds, so we're not gonna do that today. So all shrinks canceled, you get into that whole kind of, oh my god, like one side against the other side. They're all unpicking. Everything else is, and, and I think what you need to understand is. What is the success criteria? Like you are there to support the operational teams. What's our, what's the operational team's mission? What are their key goals? And as part of that, how do you work together to, to achieve that? And who ultimately is responsible and accountable for all of those different, activities? Could be a key, a key one. abandonment rate could be a key one depending if you work, like, if you work in a sales environment and marketing's spending millions of dollars to drive in leads and you are abandoning 15% of them, then you know, abandonment rate actually could be at like a massive, and, and key goal that you've gotta achieve because. You leaving, revenue, of the outside of the door. So understanding your different centers and your different operational, key metrics and then working together and understanding on how everybody contributes to, to having those achieved is, is the key to it. and. Like, I'm not really bothered whether it's a planning person that does it, whether it's an ops director that does it, but someone should be doing it in your organization. So there is real clarity around what you're looking to achieve, and how people can help you achieve that goal. I eBay's not perfect. sure some of my stakeholders may even watch this and go like, oh, yeah, shoot, your team doesn't do that. But I actually genuinely believe, we do a really good job in having, in who makes decisions and how that support is bubbled up to make a as good a decision as you, as you can do.

Irina:

You know what, one thing that I have learned throughout my, existence as a human is I learned that you can't make everyone happy. This is like utopia. It is just someone will always say, no, this is bullshit. It's not happening. It's not good. And I've learned to accept it and move forward as long as you have. Enough people that are of support of a calls a process or something. That's all we can do. But for the last part of our conversation, because we are approaching, time, I wanted to ask you something that I'm getting messages day in and day out about is. How do I move up the ladder? How I can get promoted? How can I get to a manager's position, director's role? And I'm saying the same thing. People often think that it's a simple answer in terms of learn this formula, exercise, excel, get the planning accuracy to move up a bit, and you get promoted and every single time I'm saying build relationships, this is the way forward and. Let's say that in my business, I have my own consulting company. Let's say that I'm going after a lead and there're 15 like me going for that lead. And all of us are more or less equal in our proposition, in our skillset. If somebody has a very good relationship with that lead, the lead is gonna trust that person. And it's ultimately the same whether you're working in the organization and trying to move up the ladder. If we see that you're having great conversation and communication with the team leads, they trust you, they come to you for, getting a mutual decision, this is going to make a mark much more than you just be like, my forecast in accuracy is 97%. Fantastic. So you can continue making that great job as a forecaster, right? And this is how things are. So I wanted to ask you, because you moved up the ladder and you're having such a great role that many people would like to have and go and pursue, how do we do that? How are people going forward?

Jason:

I mean that, that. That's a great question. it, it really is. And sometimes I, I ask myself, how the hell have I got here? so no, no, no, no. It's, and I, look, I genuinely am not, I've not got imposter syndrome. But look, I think there's sometimes where, You are absolutely right. Building relationships is, is key. understanding a little bit what you are good at. there are lots of people that I've come across over the years that are brilliant individual contributors. But them to like, well, they see kind of the next step up on the ladder is, is managing folks. And, you, they get that opportunity to do it and they're like, they're terrible. They don't enjoy doing it because they enjoy, You know, the certainty of their own output. You know, you are only as strong as your weakest person and they, they end up micromanaging, showing people what to do, you know, telling people what to do, all of that, all of that kind of stuff. So then, you know that I. That doesn't work for them. They're not happy. They then go backwards in their career because essentially the, the, the, they're in a role that's not right for them. And, and they're sort of seduced into thinking that like managing is the, is the next, next big thing. what we're trying to do in eBay, is we are trying to, to map skills, and requirements to various different role types. So if you want to go off and manage, and, and lead a team, here are the kind of levels of the kind of skills that you need to be able to, do that. In terms of your ability to coach, your ability to, to communicate, all, all of those kinds of things. So if that's what you wanna be able to do, these are the skills you need to go off and develop. And, and like eBay can help you with some of those skills, but you've gotta go off and, and develop those skills, yourself. I think that's the bit is like recognize almost like what you're good at. What it is that you wanna do. And I also think you've gotta take some risks as well. You've, you've got to be prepared to go, do you know what? I don't know all of this stuff, but what's the phrase? I'm gonna fake it until I make make it. But you've got put yourself in a position where actually, you're gonna take that risk and you're gonna jump up to that next step. And the more people and relationships you build, the better. and the more opportunities that come your way to be able to take and to take that risks. I've had very little, over my career, most of the jobs I've got have been introductions from someone that I used to work with in the past that said, X, Y, Z organization are looking for a role. you might wanna have a look at it. And that then starts a conversation. And that conversation then eventually can, if, you believe that an organization's right for you and the skills that you've got, then that can open up opportunities. But for instance, I would never go into an organization that just wants me, for instance, to micromanage everything and to. drive results at the expense of, people. some organizations want that, and that's not something that I can do it, but it takes a lot of my energy Yeah. to be able to do that kind of thing. And I know that I'll, you'll run out of energy eventually. and it's not my natural style to, to do that kind of stuff. So it's around understanding what your style is, where you get your energy from, developing skills to help you progress in terms of whichever way that you want to go in. So if you want to be an individual contributor, then learn the latest tech. Understand where, what's happening and what's new in the world. And be in the forefront of that, kind of stuff and be, be happy going. That's the route that I want to go down.'cause I want to be just responsible for my own work. You wanna lead folks? Then develop your critical thinking skills, your communication styles, your ability to join the dots, network, meet as many people as you can from different organizations and, opportunities will come from that.

Irina:

it's great that you're sharing that. And it just made me think, so many times in my career I have seen, I. Amazing professionals that are doing something specific, a task, and they're doing it so well that when it comes to promotion, they become the natural selection because they're so great at that particular task. And then they have to manage a team. And it turns out that this is the worst type of a person to put in a manager's role because I'll say that in conclusion of our conversation. A manager, a director. It's never about you. It's always about the people that are contributing to the team. So if you wanna pers pursue individual tasks, I sit on my desk and I deliver the best result of what I'm giving as, tasks that's completely different than I wanna move up the ladder because then it's about motivation, leadership, relationships, and so on. So, happy that you spend that time with me and gave such brilliant advice and insights. I really appreciate it. And come again for a second. Sorry.

Jason:

Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. I'd love nothing better than to talk about myself.

Irina:

I'll give you another opportunity. Don't worry about that. Thank you. so much.

Jason:

Thank you.

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