Combating Fear and Anxiety in Agents
The Player Support Newsletter - 9 SEP 2024
Introduction: A Hidden Challenge
One of the hardest things to help new agents do is develop confidence. It is natural to feel anxious when you have a new job, especially if you have no experience. I would be more alarmed if one did not have any at all. What is important is to deal with the anxiety and fear before it creates bad habits. One of the earliest signs is constant escalation or questions.
In our experience, we have found that the most common reason is that people don’t trust themselves to make judgment calls. People tend to get upset when a workplace is too strict, but when asked to exercise their critical thinking skills in ambiguous situations there tends to be a different set of criticisms. The information is incomplete, which is probably true. Processes aren’t clear; yes, I am sure. Our tools are not fit for purpose. I believe it. Yet, it is exactly these kinds of scenarios where human talent is at its highest. We are the ones that need to come up with temporary solutions or what I like to call “the best we can with what we have”.
I will periodically be releasing more free issues of the newsletter as a way of communicating with my teams, but also as a way to share with the broader community. Our company is still so young, but we have a huge passion for games, for live service operations, and want to be a positive force in the industry. We hope everyone benefits from these materials as we seek to be more prolific as a content producer and publisher moving forward.
Agent anxiety and fear is not often discussed, but we will put a spotlight on it here for the benefit of all agents, experienced or not. Your support is appreciated.
1. Encourage Practice of the Fundamentals
Anxiety and fear at work are signals that we do not have enough knowledge to make us feel safe. The primary way of dealing with these negative feelings is to school ourselves in the fundmentals of the job. For player support agents, that’s knowing the core processes, figuring out how to use the tools well, and how to navigate the knowledge base more easily. Knowing the game itself is also very helpful. Just telling people to relax is a temporary bandaid at best. Our anxiety or fear is based in our perceptions and the reality of what it takes to be comfortable in our current situation.
Practice the fundamentals after work. Quiz yourself on the processes. Map out the knowledge base so you know where to go. Do the same with your tools, no matter if they are in a state of neglect. Start tackling the problems, not with perfection in mind, but with doing the best with what you have today. Today is where we are.
2. Encourage Agents that They Have A lot to Learn (and it’s good)
When my son started playing violin, he would get so frustrated with himself that he had to stop. One time, I sat down with him on the nearby steps to talk about the incredible amount of anger I saw in this 5 year old boy. I asked him why he was so upset. At first he told me he didn’t know, so I sat with him a while.
Then I made a guess, “Is it because you can’t play what you want to?”
“Yes”, he said.
We had a short conversation about practice and I told him how much I sucked at various things when I first started. It’s normal to be bad at something that we just started. I shared how much his favorite sports stars, musicians, manga artists, and writers to practice to be good at what they do. What a terrible burden to believe that we should just be amazing the first time we do something new. No one taught him that directly, per se, but part of him believed it. Perhaps it was because a child progidy was one of the reasons he was motivated to start playing in the first place. I don’t know, but I know that this false belief is pervasive in many people.
Accepting that it is normal to not be immediately at the top of the job when you start is healthy. It means you have so much to learn and so much more opportunity to grow. Taking on the disposition of a student means that you are easier to teach, that it is easier for you to learn new things, and it will help you let go of any bad habits.
3. Encourage Reasonable Risk-Taking (Dealing with Ambiguity)
I believe that a world that believes it always has all of the answers creates an unresilient people, increasingly unable to handle ambiguity well. In our line of work, especially at the top of the craft, cases increasingly have more than one viable solution. My push for people to eventually operate at this level as a baseline is because this is where the human value is mostly easily experienced. All of the simple, straightforward problems that only have one real solution will be automated away sooner or later. The work that will remain will be reserved for the best problem solvers and conversationalists in the industry. If it is something you want, I want for you to get there.
You can’t get there without becoming comfortable with a reasonable amount of risk-taking.
Think of processes, guidelines, procedures, and policies as guardrails on the side of a massive playground - they prevent you from running into traffic and getting seriously hurt or killed. You should know how to stay on the right side of them, but you also have the freedom to move, to play within the spacious boundaries. Sometimes, when the conditions are right, when there are no cars in sight, you can even jump over the boundaries to do something new or unexpected.
I encourage a bit of mischief in my son because I think that learning how to break rules in a smart way will help him much more than it will hurt him. A worthy life is filled with at least a few key moments of risk, leaps of faith, a quick decision to act based on instinct and the accumulation of experience.
We do not have all of the answers, all of the time.
And I believe that this is a wonderful and exciting thing.
Learn to steadily trust yourself as you work hard to master the fundamentals. This is called confidence built on the basis of competence. It is not a blindly hopeful fantasy, rather it has a solid foundation of hard work, observation, contemplation, and correction over time.