A DQ-IDC INDIA SURVEY: BPO Employee Satisfaction Survey 2003

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

DQ-IDC BPO Employee Satisfaction Survey 2003: Methodology

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.