Stress Factors
BPO differs from IT in a significant way about how the employees are stressed. While in the IT industryor for that matter, in any industrythere are work-related stress, in BPO, many of the top stress factors are not work-related.

Take for example the Stress Factor #1: Travel Time. With BPO firms, employing huge number of employees, usually situated in the outskirts/suburbs of city (ie, Gurgaon/Noida in NCR; Whitefield in Bangalore), most employees who stay in the city have to travel a long time before they can reach office for work and reach home after working. Since the jobs are usually not in the normal work hours of India, and thanks to Indias state of public transport, most companies provide door-to-door pick-up and drop services, often managed by very sophisticated custom-built software tools. But for someone who is picked up first, she will have to pick up a few colleagues before she can head for the office. Sometimes that becomes two hours, if one adds to the traffic in the Malad road in Mumbai or Delhi-Gurgaon road in Delhi. This is not directly related to work. Yet, many companies spend a lot of their management time and energy on this, realizing that this is a big stress factor. IBM Daksh, for example, is starting a transportation Centre of Execelllence (CoE) to devise solutions. That is the level of worry!

Source: DQ-IDC BPO E-Sat Survey 2007

Sleeping and digestive system disorders are common with night working and stress at job. But depression is also becoming a major issue

Similarly, work timing is something based on which this industry exists. There is very little the industry can do to sort this out. Insufficient holidays reflect more the type of people who work in the industrythe young fresh college graduates. The real work related stressWork Loadcomes at #4.

Health issues, as a stress factorwhich comes at #6is becoming a real issue. While the health ministers remark that started a big controversy on thismay be exaggerated, twenty-something employees citing health as a stress factor is, nevertheless, a reason to worry. The good part is that the industry is sensitized to this, and large companies are taking real measuressometimes to the extent of checking and controlling air quality; testing food in labsto curb this.

Health Issues
While companies are taking good measures, we decided to check the health issues that employees feel they are facing. The E-SAT Survey data reveal that sleeping disorder, digestive system related disorder, eye sight problem, severe stomach-related problem, and depression are the top five ailments afflicting BPO employees.

Insomnia is the most common of the ailments and mostly affects the agent or CRE-level employees, as manager and senior TLs mostly have flexible timings or at the least take the weekends off. Digestive ailments figure prominently on the list after sleeping-related ones. Not surprisingly, as most of the employees are eating at odd hours and, eating not-wholesome food, from medu vadas at 4 am to American chopsuey at 7 pm. Junk food has, more or less, replaced wholesome meals for BPO employees.

According to one physician, BPO employees are increasingly becoming obese and that would result in many more health hazards like Diabetes (type 2), high blood pressure, and even heart-related ailments.

The other worrying ailments that have increased over the years are psychological ones like depression and anxiety. Indeed, BPO employees are well versed with panic or anxiety attacks, and often have friends or colleagues who have been victims of the same. The survey has also, for the first time, collected data on back pain. This year, close to 2.34% complained about persistent and niggling back issues. Most of the BPO companies have a doctor on-board, but he or she is usually in a reactive mode, ie, if you have an ailment while at work, you could consult him or her.

A few companies seem to have woken up to the issues. Take the case of e4e for instance, it keenly promotes flexible timing as a means of lessening stress. It has also made it mandatory for managers to ensure that their juniors are taking at least a week off annually, while a lot many have tied up with local gymnasiums and health centers, offering heavy discounts to employees.

The good thing is that health- and stress-related statistics has more or less remained constant over the past few years, hence, there isnt much to worry about. But a spike is not necessarily an indicator of a problem, constancy itself is a big issue as well. When you are running a high temperature, the big problem is if it does not come down, not whether it keeps going up, isnt it?

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