Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Thiruvananthapuram
Yankee Doodle comes calling
|
Wired to the rest of the world, young Bangaloreans with phoney names and accents man call centres, selling products and services to populations on the other side of the globe. They also celebrate Halloween instead of Holi. MONISHA VARADAN has a look at the youngsters' `night life'.
|
Call centres go all out to retain their employees. The trend now is to have a Chief Fun Officer.
AS YOU step into any one of the large towers in ITPL, acres of technology spread across its floors, one wonders what kind of employee would like to come back night after night to work in these foreboding glass and concrete structures. Especially employees of call centres who work through night shifts, night after night, making sales pitches to people on the other side of the globe.
For their unseen clients, Anand becomes Andrew and Shalini, Sally. These youngsters, with phoney American accents and names, wired to a world they have probably never seen, stay up all night, talking to people they will never ever see. They also lose out on a normal life, coping with disrupted biorhythms and a crushingly monotonous job. As for a normal family life, forget it.
Take an organisation like First Ring for example, one of the first call centres to be set up in Bangalore. It has 650 employees working in two shifts right through the night. The sterile environment, pale walls and hospital-like lobby make it a highly unlikely place for anyone to enjoy working here.
So it is a little unexpected when the door opens and a gang of fresh-faced youngsters walk in raucously, yelling and greeting each other, some of them demanding to know the fate of their dinner.
Such enthusiasm is a little surprising. For, what is ahead of them is just boredom and monotony through the night. What is it that keeps these 650 people coming back, given that the turnover in call centres is very high? Lots of freshers join, only to quit in months, if not weeks.
Well, this is what keeps the Human Resources Department of any call centre busy. And it's a tough task.
A call centre or a contact centre can be described as a place where customer service representatives make and receive calls, answering queries and selling products to customers, mostly in the West. This means that the minimum qualification for recruitment is a good command over English, and sometimes a university degree. Scores of graduates flood these call centres and most often opt for the night shift. Trouble arises once they discover the monotony and repetitive nature of the job.
Says Mr. Achar, Director (HR) of First Ring: "Initially we had a lot of employees quitting their jobs. The dropout rate was very high. So we were quick enough to introduce incentives, schemes, and added benefits that make these night shift employees stay back in the company."
So, what exactly are these incentives, schemes and added benefits? Monetary, of course, that little extra for every night shift done.
As for incentives, call centres install a device called a dialler on every floor that records every employee's productivity.
This enables the supervisors to run "on the floor contests" for the first sale made, the maximum number of sales, persistent and successful salespersons, and best teams.
At First Ring, these prizes are decided on the basis of a five-point rating system comprising the number of sales, quantity of calls, attendance, punctuality and time spent on the phone. These incentives are given in the form of on-the-spot cash rewards. Every successful sale is received with cheering, clapping, and shouting from the entire floor. "Sale" also includes services like credit cards and banking.
As part of the incentives, First Ring provides medical insurance for six people in the family. Other benefits include free transport and food. Practically all call centres provide free food and transport. Buses ferry the employees to and from the workplace. Food is provided at regular intervals at night, and the employees are allowed to take short breaks every hour.
Apart from these regular HR policies, the extremely dreary nature of the job has led to the creation of a new concept and job designation. Call centres, desperate to retain employees, have devised fun-related activities that are handled by the Chief Fun Officer, no less.
Sujit George from the call centre 24/7, apart from being team manager, is also designated as an e-relationship manager. His job involves creating a calendar of fun events for the employees, keeping 24/7's in-house music bands and theatre groups going.
However fun-filled these events may be, it is significant that employees can't have fun with the family on, say Holi or Bakrid. Call centres don't recognise them as holidays. Instead, it is American holidays that are off-days. However, Indian festivals are "celebrated" even as the employees work on those days.
Mr. Sujit George says: "Halloween was a really huge event last year. Even our American visitors were surprised by how much trouble we took over the celebration. People dressed up and stuck paraphernalia all over them and continued working through the night. The 24/7 teams run on the concept of FITO or Fun In The Organisation and run by the line, `Great place to work in'."
Mr. George believes that since most of the crowd is young and just out of college, it is necessary to create an extension of a similar environment to maintain high enthusiasm levels.
The Fun Club at Healthscribe.com, run by the Chief Fun Officer Vijayasai, continuously organises food festivals where the employees cook food and hawk their ware at their workstations. This festival, also called Nalapak, encourages bachelors to try their hand at cooking. HealthScribe.com runs the "Best Workplace Competition," where every workstation is festooned with the employees' favourite objects, flowers, pictures, and so on.
The Fun Club also organised the Baby Watch Competition and kicked off World Health Day with quizzes and prizes. Mr. Vijayasai's job involved recognising and rewarding good work, and building a happy open culture.
Ring offers a meditation room, a library, a karaoke room and yoga sessions with trained experts. Tellingly, it plans to introduce a space with a punching bag.
Healthscribe offers lessons in Carnatic and Hindustani classical music and Bharatnatyam.
Most of these creative ideas are constantly reviewed. Healthscribe has something called an EveryBodyMeeting that sometimes takes place at midnight.
Mr. Achar at First Ring is a member of E-CRM/HR club that meets every quarter and reviews its strategies and policies. A NightWalker system most centres have takes feedback from a member of every team and is available at all times in the night to answer queries and suggestions.
So how do employees feel about working for call centres? Dilraj Nair of First Ring says: "I'm enjoying every moment of my work. It gives me enough time to spend with family, catch five hours of sleep and wake up to spend time with friends." Mathew Abraham from 24/7 says: "Even for people who are in it for the money, the returns are quite good."
Even so, the fact remains that there is little challenge in the job. Night shifts prevent employees from leading a life the rest of the world lives. Upset biorhythms and changing sleep cycle lead to common colds, exhaustion, insomnia and irregular metabolic patterns. As a leading psychologist points out: "On a long run basis, jobs like these do not make workers happy and often lead to an early burnout. The lack of challenge makes them lose focus of their career paths."
Clinical psychologist Shanta Soundarajan, who is with the University of Pennsylvania, says: "However much training is provided, it is not easy living through the day with an Indian identity and changing almost immediately at 7 p.m. to an American name with a fake accent."
She also feels that no amount of superficially induced "fun" in work environment can change the nature of the job. It is also ridiculous that Indians have to celebrate alien festivals like Halloween or Thanksgiving.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Thiruvananthapuram
|
