“Congratulations”, I exclaimed to Chintu, my neighbour, accepting the ladoos he was offering. Chintu had bagged a job in a BPO. A brilliant student with a bubbly and effervescent temperament, Chintu had been prevented from pursuing an engineering degree due to illness and lack of funds. Illness at the time of his 12th Standard (HSC) exams had resulted in his falling short of the high standards of marks required by professional engineering colleges. After doing the rounds of all engineering colleges, he failed to get anywhere. An opportunity arose in a remotely located college promoted by a politician which required him to shell out a huge amount in capitation fees. Dejected, Chintu settled for a B.Sc degree in a Mumbai college.
However, three years later, the job market for BSc grads being what it is, Chintu was running from pillar to post to no avail. Finally, two years ago, the BPO industry started picking up and Chintu was one among the hordes picked up in a walk-in interview.
The first few days went off superbly. Chintu described the swanky offices, the state of the art equipment and the hep colleagues that he had. Almost all his colleagues were in the 20-22 age group, fresh out of college, loved to party atleast 4 times a week, spend hours on their cellphones talking to their resp boyfriend/ girlfriend, tattoos were the latest in-thing and some even had their eyebrows and/ or navel pierced. Although he was from a suburban middle class background, he quickly adapted to his surroundings. After a small period of training where the new recruits were trained to handle the equipment and speak in an American accent, with a few tips on dos and don’ts, there were put on the job directly.
The job involved talking on telephones to customers of a bank who could be located in any part of the world. Most of the calls would be for making some complaint; hence inevitably the callers would be irate and spew their venom at the hapless call centre staff. At any point of time, an employee would be talking on one call while four other calls would be waiting for her. All calls would enter the system through a common channel and go and wait at the counter of the person who had the smallest queue of calls. Performance evaluation would be totally system driven based on:
1) No of calls answered in a day
2) Amount of time calls were kept waiting
3) The time spent for each call (i.e. how quick you could satisfy a customer)
What was worse that the working hours would be odd in shifts, with the peak time sometime during the nights since the customers were mainly located in the western hemisphere. Since girls were given preference for the day shifts, the night shifts were mainly manned by the guys.
This started building up a lot of stress on the employees in the form of:
a) stress due to pressure of the constant blinking of the queued lines
b) stress due to constant sound of ringing and talking coming thru the headphones
c) stress due to the odd working hours and irregular sleep timings
In addition, Chintu had the problem of trying to keep up with the partying culture that prevailed in the organization. So whatever days he had the day shift, the evenings had to be used up in the social functions.
The last straw was when the management decided that in addition to listening to complaints of customers, the call centre people had to convert a complaint call into a sales call and try to telemarket the company’s products. This was a bit too much. Finally, the high degree of stress led to short tempers, foul language in the office and fast turnover of employees. Chintu wisely enrolled for a meditation course and tried to get himself calmed down.
Points to ponder:
The purpose of narrating the above story is that we Indians are gloating over the fact that more and more companies are shifting their back-office and BPO centres here. But the problem is that this leads to a situation where young men and women spend the best and most productive years of their working lives in jobs which are mechanical, robotic and not mentally stimulating. I’m sure many MS members who might have undergone a similar situation would relate and agree with this view. It’s quite obvious that neither the employers nor the employees have any plans of having a lifelong employment with the organization. Hence, the idea seems to be (from the employer’s point of view) to extract the most out of energetic, enthusiastic youth and once they are burned out, they will be unable to bear the stress anymore and opt out. From the employees point of view, most of them either don’t get any other job or manage to get poorly paid jobs. Thus a call-centre job appears lucrative from the salary angle, without taking a long term view of the skills acquired and sustainability of the function.
It is possible that many of the readers here may not agree with the view expressed here. Some may feel that the BPO culture is leading to a positive revolution in the country and creating new jobs. But I would only request them to think deeply whether we want to reduce this country into a nation of low skilled, burnt out 30-somethings who have not acquired any useful skills and not employable anywhere. My advice to young graduates is to have a long term plan for their career and only then plunge into this industry, without getting influenced by the current fads.