What is Employee Segmentation?
Posted by: Diana Leccese on Aug 25, 2010
In consumer marketing research there are 4 P’s, with the first “P” being People. Marketers segment consumers by income, geography, gender, age, etc. in order to prescribe the right “treatment” or create the right message to the population. We are now taking that same segmentation concept and applying it to employee development.
All employees are not created equal. We suggest that team leaders and managers segment their employees and then target each segment specifically to get the most from that population. Segmentation will help the team leaders and managers determine how much time they should spend in meetings, coaching and training with each segment. Since their time is always tight, we want to make sure we can maximize the benefit team leaders deliver while minimizing time constraints.
What does employee segmentation mean? Segmentation is just a way to divide up the team based on performance. The team can be divided in to:
• Quadrants
• Stack Ranked
• Outliers
• Statistical or Mean-based
• Or divided up manually by the team leader
Not all segments need to be equal in size, as not all segments will need the same coaching or meeting time from the team leader. For example, I can easily divide a team in to four categories:
• Top Performers
• Solid Performers
• Weak Performers
• Bottom Performers
Depending on the priorities of your business, whether in Sales, Productivity, or Customer Experience, the best way to start employee segmentation is to select one key metric or a balanced score to stack rank the employees; use a metric that is well aligned to your business initiatives. From there you can decide how to divide up the population, keeping in mind this division will also dictate the team leader’s meeting, coaching and training time for each population group. Employee segmentation can also address some of the common questions you answer in your organization today, such as, “Who are your top performers, who are your bottom performers, who is struggling?”
For a typical team leader in a Call Center, their team of 21 agents might look something like the graph below:
From the segmentation above, I can easily see I have:
3 Bottom Performers
5 Weak Performers
10 Solid Performers
3 Top Performers
Where would a team leader in your organization likely spend their management and coaching time? Do they get the results your company needs from the current time management decisions (or ‘formula’)?
What we do with these Employee Segments will be covered in my next post – "Where do Team Leaders spend most of their time?"
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Author: Diana Leccese
Diana Leccese is Principal Business Consultant with Merced Systems. Diana has over 15 years experience in Sales and Service Performance Management as both pre and post sales consultant. She has worked with Fortune 1000 companies in Telco, Finance, Insurance, and Travel industries. Diana can be reached at diana.leccese@mercedsystems.com