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| Managing growth in the BPO sector |
| At a clear moonlit night the cool breeze kissed my puffed hair. I walked briskly towards the colossal building from the guesthouse. My heart pumped with excitement as this was my first brush with the BPO industry. I opened the glass doors walked in. The security guard verified my credentials and opened the doors for me as I still didn’t have the access cards. He looked into each of the entries in the papers and cross-checked them with his colleague whenever he was in doubt. Well, one definitely can understand the heightened measures after all the heat IT crimes have been generating in the recent times. Coming all the way from a consulting firm this definitely took some time to digest where even the security guards recognised each of the employees and never asked questions to familiar faces. Here I was standing in a place where I felt like another brick in the wall out of the ten thousand employees. I pressed the button for the lift and waited for it. The wait seemed eternal to me and my eyes started exploring the surroundings. Suddenly the din of the air-conditioner was broken by the humming of the evening shift bus which had just arrived and had parked itself in the portico. Soon the place was teeming with a young crowd dressed up in anything but formals. I got into the lift and disembarked on the second floor. A thought crossed my mind and pictures of call centres streamed before me. “Good evening Ms Brown this is Eva calling from ….”, I was jerked out of my reverie when again I was stopped for verification on the second floor. It got me wondering: are we overdoing in the name of security? Well comparison with my previous organisation was unfair as they both seemed to exist in different worlds. I was checked and allowed to pass through and there I was standing in a hall which seemed to my like infinity and filled up by calling agents. I stood there, awed and shocked, trying to comprehend the situation. I saw millions of faces and smiles. I saw aspiration and dreams coming alive. Yes this was the industry which was bringing hope to the educated masses of India. My next few days went through all sorts of training that I could imagine and which yanked me out of all my inhibitions and pride of an MBA. I went through the voice and pronunciation training metamorphosing and armed myself with a completely alien accent. I was given the alias of ‘Kevin’ so that I could be more comfortable with my customers from the western part of the globe and sooner than I could imagine I was on the phone “Hello Smith I am Kevin calling from ...”, I was made to call like an agent to get a feeling of the floor so that I could appreciate their problems and could be an effective manager. The buyer’s remorse The honeymoon didn’t last long and soon my tryst with the exploding industry started turning sour. Questions like ‘Do I really needed to get into this after going through the rigours of an MBA and engineering, ‘Is my job really taxing my grey cells?’ kept on pestering me. But leave me apart. I saw the distortion that this industry was bringing into the society. Not long ago one of the chieftains of the Indian industry raised concerns about not being able to attract talent to the core industries as IT and ITeS was gobbling up resources with unmatched compensation and benefits. This industry was going a step further, it paid less to a chartered accountant doing remote financial reconciliation (basically non-voice outsourced process) than it paid to an undergraduate calling agent (voice-based outsourced process). Today it is not uncommon to see Phds, working in research labs or teaching in colleges drawing peanuts compared to IT professionals who may be much less educationally qualified. This was the outcome of demand and supply of resources. The demand for resources in voice-based processes is far more than the demand for resources in other processes. I doubted if this was a healthy development for the society in the long-run for the skew it’s creating. This underling fact was brewing discontent among some of the more qualified people coming into the industry. They are slowly realising that it was difficult for them to differentiate themselves from the masses as the job demands a very different set of qualities and it gave little importance to your qualification and domain knowledge. Job satisfaction was something which had taken a backseat or maybe I had to redefine it. Even though people handling skills were put to test, but there was much wanting with regards to my job content. The growth problem Another problem that some of the ITeS organisations are facing is about managing growth. How do you maintain the same work culture that you had when you were an organisation with just a few hundred employees or at the maximum a few thousands? hings are bound to be different when you grow to a couple of thousands and add another hundred every month. It’s definitely a difficult proposition to maintain the culture of openness, innovation and closeness. Also how does the organisation ensure that they recruit people with the right calibre and potential? Since there is so much pressure on the recruitment team it is bound to affect the quality of process and the recruits. Suffocating bureaucracy As the organisation starts growing, new processes and procedures are put in place to manage growth. And as the old debate rages, how does one put processes and procedures without stifling creativity and freedom. This was something which hits some of the old-timers. They are accustomed to a completely different organisation and find it difficult to cope with the changing face of the company. Professional growth Cruising through the levels was something I thought was given in an industry which was growing exponentially, but soon I realised that if an organisation needs numerous people at every level to go and support the growing business needs, it is definite that they will look outwards and fill up their needs. This also in a way affects the growth of the people down below as their opportunities are being eaten up by outside recruits. As the industry is maturing and competition is increasing there is tremendous pressure to cut costs. This is reflecting on the compensation of the employees. Even though organisations are trying innovative things to retain people, but slowly it is no longer able to attract people by offering mind-boggling figures. Of course there are exceptions but they are too few to become a rule. Personal life Odd working hours become a pain in the long run, especially if you have a family. People get very little opportunity to spend quality time with their family. As one of my colleagues said that he had only seen his son grow up in bed in the last few years. When he woke up in the morning, his son was already off to school, and when he returned, his son was already into bed. Sustaining such a time schedule in the long run also has an impact on one’s health as one is distorting the natural biological clock to an artificial routine. It is not surprising that according to one of the recent surveys done by a leading business magazine, none of the ITeS or BPO firms feature in the top ten best places to work. In spite of all the concerns, the industry has come as the harbinger of hope and has helped many educated people realise their dreams. It has helped to remove despair and has infused young graduates with energy and determination to become successful in life. But it definitely needs to redefine itself if it needs to attract the best of the talent. But does it really need to attract the best? This is an important question that needs to be answered. Maybe it can do with people who are more hands-off rather than with people who like to tax their grey cells and come with the baggage of good educational qualifications. |
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