alt Hacker News> "Nurses fear that having long calls can lead to bad performance reviews"
> A company spokesperson said, "Kaiser Permanente does not use Average Handle Time to assess agent performance"
So uh, average time wasn't raised as a concern, calls beyond a certain threshold was. I wish this semantic discrepancy was better highlighted in the article.
Replies
Terr_ • yesterday at 11:01 PM
There's definitely a lot of room for weasel-wording there, where the metric really being used isn't the mathematical mean, but punishes people just the same.
monknomo • yesterday at 11:12 PM
balls, that's the metric line managers use to figure out who's out of whack
I have some inside information (but not much!)
They claim they do not use average handle time, but it is very common to get called into meetings to discuss why they spent a lot of time on some calls. The nurses get defensive (by definition - they have to justify the time used - it is a defense).
They also do get called into meetings if their average handle time is large.
It may still be true they don't use it for evaluating performance, but they absolutely do utilize it to "coach" the nurses.