This is an article to unveil the blanket spread on the working of Indian BPO’s. If the marketing words like fun thrill and great career opportunities are taken away, it will reveal fear, suppression, exploitation, discrimination, unfair methods and harassment practiced by Indian BPO’s.
I have worked for more than seven years in some of the biggest names in Indian BPO industry. During this past 10 years since I joined BPO industry, I have given interviews in number of different companies. This article is the result of my interview, training and work experience. This is also based on my personal interviews with my colleagues.
BPO’s strategy to exploit begins early at the recruitment stage itself. They hire youth who are fresh out of college and do not have any professional qualification. These guys expressly decline to entertain professionals. The underlying motive is, younger and less qualified you are, the less exposed and informed you are and more the chances of suppressing your rights and dissents, if any and exploiting you. In one company, I was told that children of parents working in government department are not employed.
During the interview process, even before you are selected for the job, you will be told of the salary package, which even today is abysmally low. To put the package in right perspective, Indian BPO's offer the same package to entry level jobs what they used to offer in 2004-05. I have personally been offered this kind of ridiculous salary and have the evidence to support my claims.
The strategy is simple. During the interview process, you are still not sure if you would make it. So, during this uncertain phase, when you are being offered a salary and you are desperate for a job, you would say yes for anything. And, they know it. The supply is much in comparison to demand. If you do not accept it, there are multiple candidates who are in queue for the job.
But, these are just the beginning of an ordeal which you never bargained for.
During the training period itself, you will be made to realize that you are just another pawn in the big game. It will be stressed to you time and again that you will be chucked out of the company at any time. They are very verbal about it. You are always stressed out due to the fear of losing your job.
And, it is easy to instill fear in the minds of youths coming from different parts of India, who have not seen the big cities and it's culture, mesmerized and overwhelmed by a whole different lifestyle, not accustomed to office and professional life, staying alone, far away from their loved ones, not having information regarding their rights, from poor families trying to make a life and career in a country where industries are condensed in a few cities and industries and multinational corporations are non-existent in vast majority of cities in India.
The gullible youths from small towns of India throng the offices and placement centers due to quick money, higher compensation than you may get outside the industry for a fresher, girls, free alcohol and parties.
All these and many other factors help in favor of BPO's to exploit and suppress the youths.
Employees are afraid to stand up against the injustice, exploitation. There are many reasons for this. There are no jobs in the market for a fresh graduate with the kind of money BPOs offer for a fresher. A graduate from lower middle class or one coming from small town cannot make a career in his/her respective field because his/her parent may not have the money to support his/her further studies. With the dream of financing his/her studies, youths unwillingly suffer in silence. Another reason for the lack of unity is diversity in the composition of employees. The diversity is in terms of different states that employees come from, educational qualification, language, religion and age. Many do not even know that they are being exploited and are happy to, at least, have a job to make a living.
Indians have been reared with the notion that any injustice meted out to them must be the result of their own doing, undoing or fault. Indians are raised with the perception that 'nothing can be done about it', 'i am too small to bring any change', ‘let it go’.
You cannot fight for your rights when you do not have food in your stomach or are uncertain about the next meal. When you are caught up in providing bread, clothing and shelter to your family, you do not have the time to stand up for your rights.
The thing that struck me the most is the working tools that are provided for the job. The systems are slow and run on outdated operating system. The systems do not match with the speed with which the job needs to be done. Often, you will find computers break down and lying in the same state for days. This is the situation when IT department is working 24/7. This results in tremendous frustration as you lose your precious production hours, which is always a challenge. You may also have to move to another system and lose the comfort level which you may have become accustomed to with continuously working on the previous system. This results in the loss of productivity as well. There is always an issue of space and system crunch. When you move an employee to another system, an employee may have been working on that one. This is one reason for the rise in conflicts between employees as no one wants to lose their comfort level, production hours and productivity.
Headsets not functioning, old, broken down headsets and telephone machines, wires and cables missing are usual stuffs which no one wants to rectify and result in frustrating the employees.
Months pass by before your keyboard is sanitized even when multiple users use the same computers in different shifts. This is a normal scenario and no one makes a hue and cry over it. I personally found this very disturbing.
They do not give a damn as to how you do your work. All they care about is that the work gets done within the shortest possible time with minimum of cost.
The grueling working hours will kill you. In many companies the actual production time, i.e., the amount of time that you spend making or receiving calls is 9.15-10 hours. Where’s the exploitation in this? This is excluding the breaks and travel time to and from office. Overtime which in India cannot be forced upon is a routine affair BPO's.
Over a period of time, it shows on your health, performance and personal relations. Sleep deprivation brings with it a whole lot of issues.
You are daily, weekly and monthly monitored, counselled, reprimanded for the hold time (time for which you placed the customer on hold), idle time (time space between two calls), talk time (amount of time you spoke to the customer), ringtone time (within how many rings, you picked up the call).
If this is not enough to make young boys and girls between the age group of 18-23, there is the added pressure of knowing that each call is being monitored either by an internal auditor (company's quality analyst) or team leader or by the client itself. Every single call makes your heart beat faster.
I am still not done.