When COVID-19 forced New Zealand’s contact centres to transition to home-based work, most operators expected the change to be temporary. More than a year later, it’s clear that homeworking is not a temporary accommodation - it’s a permanent feature of how leading contact centres operate.
Telnet’s homeworker programme has been running in its current form since 2020, and the results have been compelling enough to make it a permanent and significant part of our workforce model.
Who Works from Home
Not every contact centre role is equally suited to home-based work. At Telnet, our homeworkers are primarily experienced agents who have demonstrated the self-discipline and technical competence required to work effectively without the ambient structure of an office environment.
New agents typically start with a period of office-based or closely supervised remote training before transitioning to home-based work. This onboarding period ensures they have the product knowledge, system familiarity, and communication skills to work independently.
How We Support Homeworkers
Supporting a distributed workforce requires intentional investment in tools and practices:
Technology: Cloud-based ContactSuite and Amazon Connect work identically from home as from the office. We provide standard equipment and connectivity guidance to ensure consistent performance.
Communication: Regular team meetings, one-on-ones, and Workplace from Facebook for informal communication maintain the sense of team connection that physical proximity would otherwise provide.
Wellbeing: We’re attentive to the isolation risk that can accompany home-based work. Our supervisors are trained to identify and support agents who may be struggling with the social aspects of remote work.
Career development: Homeworkers have full access to the same development opportunities, recognition programmes, and career pathways as office-based staff. We’re deliberate about ensuring that remote workers don’t experience hidden career disadvantages.
The Results
Our homeworker agents perform comparably to office-based agents on key metrics - and in some dimensions, better. Absenteeism is lower. Retention is higher. And the talent pool we can draw from is significantly larger when geography isn’t a constraint.
The homeworker model is here to stay at Telnet, and we’re continuing to invest in making it better.
