Using accountability and incentives to manage agents effectively

You’ve empowered agents to take ownership - but performance still isn’t shifting. Why?

Sometimes, when we empower our teams without the right coaching and guardrails, it can be overwhelming. Like taking the stabilisers off a bike and saying: “There you go, go for a ride on your own.”

It’s better to understand the power of true accountability, and the many factors you need to make it a reality (many of which are long term). Trusting the process is key to building a high-performing team.

How to establish true accountability

The first step in building a strong culture of accountability is for people to take responsibility – displaying commitment towards the achievement of an outcome, and owning the results.

High performance doesn’t happen overnight. You need resilience as you stretch and mould your teams into becoming high performers. The teams also need to have an agile, ‘can-do’, or growth mindset.

Using your baseline reporting data, work with the team to agree the results they’re aiming to achieve. Then put in place support to help them achieve this.

This commitment could be further away than you’d hoped, compared to the performance the business needs to achieve. But don’t worry, you can badge this gap as ‘stretch’, and start asking questions about how to satisfy these needs.

We see plenty of contact centres confused about their responsibilities. Without true accountability:

• Team managers admit some team members don’t have the skill and will to meet necessary performance levels, and they’ve never had the support to address low performance.
• Agents identify their work as ‘resolution work’ instead of collections. To get the customer to pay, it needs billing, metering, complaints, or other back-office support.

Leading from the front

As we mentioned in part one of this series, improving frontline performance works best when it starts at the top - and the same is true for establishing accountability. If you want your agents to take ownership of performance, your team leaders and managers have to go first.

That means setting expectations clearly, following through on actions, and building a culture where accountability isn’t just expected, but supported. Leaders need to take responsibility for creating the conditions where people feel confident and capable of delivering what’s needed, not just measured on whether they do.

A few things make this easier to get right:

1) Make it a conversation, not a measure

We often see the best results in teams where leaders communicate openly, not only about team-level performance, but also the challenges, priorities, and trade-offs across the business. When people understand the wider context, they’re more likely to take shared ownership. It’s the difference between “hit this target” and “here’s what we’re trying to achieve together.”

Two-way communication matters here. It gives people space to ask for help, share ideas, and raise concerns before things go off track - building capability and confidence over time.

If you hand over accountability without the right support, it’s like taking the stabilisers off and pushing someone down a steep hill. But if you build their skills gradually - with honest feedback, clear goals, and regular coaching - they’re more likely to stay upright, and take on more challenging terrain when they’re ready.

2) Understand what’s really holding people back

A lot of underperformance comes down to one of two things - either people don’t have the skill, or they don’t have the will. As part of a wider leadership capability diagnostic, we help leaders produce a skill/will matrix that maps out individual performance across their frontline teams. It gives them an understanding of capability on a level they haven’t seen before, informing where to focus their support for better outcomes.

This could mean targeted coaching, clearer expectations, or adjusting how performance is managed. But the key is not treating everyone the same - and not jumping to conclusions before understanding the root cause.

3) Build habits that reinforce ownership every day

We’ve delivered our Leadership Excellence programme with hundreds of leaders across multiple sites and hybrid teams - so we know these behaviours can be built in any environment, with the right support.

The leaders who do this well have a few things in common:

• They have meaningful one-to-ones that look at what’s behind performance - not just the numbers
• They give feedback in real time, not weeks later
• And they connect day-to-day actions back to team and business goals, so people know where they fit

“The programme was incredibly helpful in helping me to develop how to have really successful one-to-ones with my team, how to have good performance dialogues, and really how to make my own team feel accountable for our performance.” – Team Leader, Energy Retailer

If you’re looking to build stronger accountability across your teams, our Leadership Excellence programme gives leaders the capability and confidence to do just that.

Watch the video below, or contact Kevin Scott to see how we can help.