Research Design
The survey was designed and carried out in two phases. In the first phase a series of depth interviews were conducted with panel of HR experts in Delhi and Bangalore to understand the changing HR scenario and identify the parameters to be considered for ranking the “Best-Employers”. 

A large-scale survey was then conducted among 544 employees in 15 short listed companies across the country. The six major cities covered were: Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. In each city, the sample quota was assigned based on the company’s employee strength in that city. This quota system was followed strictly to get a proper representation of different types of employees in the sample. 

The employee survey included only call floor executives and operational managers at all levels but excluded back-end support staff from departments like HR and administration. This comprised of face-to-face interviews with employees at different levels in each organization. These interviews were based on a structured questionnaire which comprised of a number of statements classified under different broad parameters like Composite Satisfaction, Company Culture, Job Content / Growth, Training, Salary & Compensation, Appraisal System and People. The employees were asked to rate each of the statements on a 10-point agreement scale. Other than the above parameters, they were also asked about their salary structure, preferred company in the industry, overall satisfaction, reasons for joining or wanting to leave a company, work related stress and ailments if any, etc. 

A process of crosschecking was established to ensure the authenticity of the data and the veracity of the interviews. In order to retain objectivity, every attempt was made to take on an unbiased sample. Every effort was also made to ensure that the management of the company did not influence the employee responses. 

According to DQ estimates, the 15 short-listed companies are among the top 20 call center/BPO companies in the country.

While an attempt was made to include all the Top 20, a few could not be surveyed for one reason or another including HSBC and Amex. 

The DQ-IDC BPO Employee Satisfaction Score 2003

The Employee Satisfaction Score was calculated based on 13 parameters, and was weighted and indexed on score of 100.

The parameters taken for calculating the Empex scores are: 

• Employee Size (Operation level executives)

• Percentage of last salary hike 

• Cost to company 

• Overall Satisfaction Score 

• Composite Satisfaction 

• Company Culture 

• Job Content / Growth 

• Training 

• Salary and Compensation 

• Appraisal System 

• People 

• Preferred Company: Percentage of respondents of a company who named their own company as the preferred one. 

• Dream Company: Percentage of respondents in the total sample who preferred a particular company. 

The scores on parameters 5 to 11 were calculated based on the number of statements under each of these parameters. A correlation analysis was run between overall satisfaction and statements across all these broad parameters. It gave us the dependency of the dependent variable (Overall Satisfaction) on each of these statements, which in turn provided the weights of each of the statements. The weighted average of the individual scores of statements gave us the scores at each of these broad parameters level, which was used for the final ranking.

Dataquest decided the weights for all the parameters in consultation with other HR personalities, which was used by IDC during the analysis.