The first survey of its kind in India discovers that while call center employees may be more satisfied than IT pros, that satisfaction rapidly decreases with experience, promising high attrition. And that high stress and work-related ailment are a workplace reality

Final Rankings: The BPO Top 15 Reason for Joining this Organization Reason for Leaving this Organization Preferred Employer Employee Parameters Comparison Dream Company
	Call center/BPO professionals more satisfied than their IT counterparts. But satisfaction decreases rapidly with time and is lowest among those with more than 5 years experience
	Job stress and work related ailments are a work place reality. Sleeping disorders, digestive system disorders and eyesight problems are widely prevalent
	Working through the night—a key business strength—is a key HR weakness. 35% of the employees said they are likely to leave because they cannot handle the timing
	More than 85% of the respondents were less than 30 years old. This may be a difficult group from which to build a stable, low-attrition HR environment

They are all over the place. At dingy placement consultants’ offices—being repri-manded for saying yel, yum and yen (instead of l, m and n). At air-conditioned call center test rooms being checked out for their ability to sound pleasant on the phone. At city college campuses—arguing if Convergys was a better bet or GE.

If this were an age in which pioneers were easily born, one would say they looked a lot like those who hotfooted it to California during the gold rush days. The stereotypes are different of course. That was a bearded, scraggly, more often middle-aged man. This is a smart, clean, well-dressed person—mostly young enough to be called lad or lassie.

Beyond the looks though, there are surprising similarities. For both the Californian gold-digger and the call center employee it is about what the West called "easy money". If one said, "I ain’t got what it takes to be a Senator," the other says, "I really don’t want to put in what it takes to be an engineer." If one was in it for the wide-open spaces, the other is in it for enclosed, air-conditioned partitions (read work environment).

That may have been fine if the similarities ended there. They don’t. Both classes of people may have changed the face of a state or a nation, but both have found that it isn’t easy money. That being a gold digger or a voice-for-hire requires a completely different kind of perseverance. That too much of gold dust or too much of re-circulated air takes its toll on people.

DQ-IDC’s BPO Employees’ Satisfaction Survey 2003 is the first ever of its kind in the country. It looks at why people join the industry, why they leave, what work-related stress and ailments they suffer from in this unique workplace and most of all—at what they have to say about the companies they work for. In short, it takes the closest look ever at the HR environment of this nascent but quickly growing sector.

Of Scale
This may be a young industry—barring GE Capital—most companies are less than five years old. But it is not a small one. In this survey alone, the Top 15 BPO employers add up to 46,000 people—already about three-fourths the size of the Top 15 in the IT and IT services HR survey.

Of these, GE is almost as big as Infosys, and bigger than Wipro Technologies. Spectramind and the just over the two-year-old Convergys have more people than IBM, which has been in India for over a decade. HCL’s fledgling BPO services arm has more employees than Philips and Sun have put together painfully in a decade.

Essentially, it is an industry in which scale matters—for both outsourced centers like Spectramind or captive ones like GE. Unlike in the IT services sector, where a bunch of 20 embedded software engineers could be putting together a solution for Texas Instruments, in this industry the rationale for outsourcing to India doesn’t even exist till you have at least 200 people together.

This has its advantages—and disadvantages. The advantage: the call center/BPO industry is likely to reach size and maturity in less than half the time it took the software industry. The disadvantage: in doing so, it will face far more serious HR issues simply because it does not have the luxury or the time to grapple with them while hiring at a breakneck speed. Another unexpected and interesting problem that the sheer scale of the industry threw up—large call centers meant large office spaces, inevitably on city outskirts. It meant that "availability of transport" became a key reason for joining a company and "travel time" became a key contributor to stress.

Of Age and Motivations
The issues of scale have also to be seen in the perspective of the age of this industry’s employees—about 87% of them are less than 30 years old. And only about 9% of them are between 30 and 40 years old compared to 22% in the IT industry.

This has been a deliberate hiring strategy in the industry. Young, just-out-of-college vanilla graduates are the profile companies have deliberately sought out and tailored their messaging for. So the three key come-ons the industry puts out are: high growth opportunities, great salaries and a good work environment.

The upside—the message is getting through. Most employees across the industry say they joined for the very same reasons. The downsides: (a) growth opportunities are just not there; only one in 10 people will ever make consultant; one in 100 will make it to line/practice manager, (b) it is difficult to hang on to people who essentially sign on for the money; reason—at least so long as the industry is young and growing, there is always someone willing to pay more, and (c) while the work environment is fine, at the end of the day, it isn’t adding up too much to employee satisfaction and fidelity.

Case in point—while 45% of all respondents across the industry said they joined up for the money, 42% also said they would most likely leave for better money elsewhere. Most good consultants tend to jump about two jobs in a year, often with a salary hike that is 25% or more. More importantly, the issue with reaching out for this profile of candidates is that other motivations become key. One in five said, for instance, that they joined because education levels did not matter. A slightly lower proportion said they joined because they "found nothing better to do" or because "they couldn’t get a better job".

Combined with age, education and motivation profiles—this is a difficult set of people to hang on to. They join with enthusiasm—satisfaction levels in the call center/BPO industry were actually higher than in the IT industry on most parameters.

But they are also quickly disillusioned—satisfaction fell substantially with experience across each parameter and statement.

Bottom line—they leave. Often for apparently trivial reasons. Some of these reasons the industry has identified. A good 42% said they are likely to leave for higher education—result, most call centers are beginning to offer part-time higher education courses. But what do you do with the 33% who also said they would leave when they got married? Considering that only 26% of these were women, and assuming all women said they would leave after marriage for cultural issues peculiar to India—that is still a substantial chunk of men saying they would leave once they had other responsibilities at home.

More importantly, what do you do with a good 35% who said they would leave because they cannot handle the timings? This industry is premised on the idea of being able to work nights. What do you do with those 27% employees who said they would leave either because work stress or the sheer physical strain was too much to handle?

Of a Few Answers
Some answers did come from this survey itself. Two companies that topped the employee-sat rankings did not sell themselves on salary—GE Capital and Convergys. In fact, they are among the lowest paymasters in the industry if average cost to company per employee is measured. Yet, employee satisfaction on most counts was a lot better here than at most other companies.

This is not a case for paying less. Only perhaps, for messaging differently. That maybe, a little less of the mercenary attitude on all sides would help a bit and bring attrition levels down. Some of it will change evolutionarily as the industry grows. Some will have to be done deliberately. Secondly, no matter how much one revels in the fact that the night shift is generating an entirely new economy around it and how it is good for everyone around—this survey shows that it doesn’t really wash. Timing is an issue. As is the big effect it has on the personal lives of employees who work nights. More, it is peculiar to the Indian call center industry, causes the largest amount of stress and is a big reason why employees leave.

However, since the industry cannot do away with the source of the problem and start working days, it is perhaps time to start looking for ways to work around it. There are no easy answers on how that can be done, but shorter shifts are a likely answer. They could even help alleviate a whole host of other stress contributors including work load, the pressure from irate customers and work-related illnesses (for more on stress and work-related ailments see later in this section). Perhaps there are other answers waiting to be found.

Either way, these are key HR issues that a young industry looking to grow cannot ignore. Optimism is fine. But as Ralph Sockman said, it pays to be careful that today’s victories do not carry the seed of future defeats.

Sarita Rani & TV Mahalingam in Bangalore