Why India?
Discuss about the Human resource management plays a significant role.
Human resource management plays a significant role in any organization. There are various roles and responsibilities that are fulfilled by the human resource department of any business (Bailey et. al., 2018). This includes effective recruitment and selection of employees in the business, addressing their grievances, training and mentoring them, competitively compensating them as well as ensuring their motivation and maintaining a positive work place environment in the business. This report highlights upon the case study of the Indian call centers. The case study throws light on the advent and growth of call centers in the Indian sub-continent. They are faced by tremendous problems and it is high time that efforts are being made to address the same.
Call center industry has grown leaps and bounds since its inception in the 1990s. This has been possible with the help of effective human resource management strategies adopted by the organizations of this industry (Das et. al., 2013).
As pointed in the case study, despite the flying start of the industry, the industry is under tremendous pressure. The pressure is mostly at the hands of the Human resource department. It is the inability of the Human resources to retain their employees whilst providing them enough avenues of growth and development in the industry is one of the critical issues at hand. This lack of motivation amongst the employees has a direct relation with their relationship with the clients.
Unfortunately, there are several other problems that haunt the industry even today making their future blurred and uncertain. The idea of a call center entails around the fact that a business can outsource their customer service to a group of experts who are competent at addressing customer grievances in an efficient manner as well as encourage repeat purchase by offering quality after sale service.
India has been a leading ground for call centers. Various leading organizations and brands have established their customer service call centers in India. There are several reasons behind India being a highly lucrative destination for business call centers. These reasons include high population, well educated population, cheap labor and various opportunities for growth.
India stands at over 1.3 billion population. A lot of these people are unemployed and consistently on a look out for a job. The high rate of unemployment in the country makes the labor very cheap. Employees in the United States need to be paid over ten times more than Indian employees. This is why most of the companies prefer opening their customer service call centers in India.
Problem with the Indian call centers
Immense government support is also an added advantage for the country. The BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party) led government of India is highly in support of call centers and has been putting efforts to promote their growth by offering various subsidies and rebates. This next part of the report aims to analyze the case in further detail by understanding the problems from their very crux and making recommendations to address the same in an effective and highly sustainable manner.
Employees working in India are predominantly facing a lack of growth and opportunity. As explained in the case, there is a single Team leader for over 50 employees. This largely reduces chances of growth of the employees working (D’Cruz & Noronha, 2013). Within a team of 400 employees, there are only 20 team leaders and four service delivery leaders, one head of department and one head of business. This makes the chances of growth for employees almost meagre. Freshly passed graduates join their new job with immense enthusiasm but when they see no growth for a long time they tend to get demotivated. Therefore this lack of growth is a major drawback for employees working in Indian Call centers. The issue raised here is directly related to the working of the Human resource team. The lack of coaching, training, development and growth of the employees make them rethink about their career in the industry, which limits its growth.
The high attrition rate of the call centers is one of the biggest problem faced by the industry at the moment. This rate refers to the number of people leaving the organization for any reason on an annual basis (Negi, 2013). The attrition rate, according to the case, for the Indian call centers is over 40-45%. This makes it difficult for the industry to effectively function because of increasing costs. There are two major problems that are faced due to high attrition. The first problem is increased cost of recruitment as well as training. The second problem is reduced customer service (Gupta, 2013). This is because a new employee is not as competent as an old employee. It takes training and mentoring for any employee to become perfect at their job. But with high attrition rate it is difficult for the call centers to maintain a high level of service.
Whenever a freshly graduate person join a new job, they are excited to be working in a large firm. The call centers specifically portray this flamboyance owing to their massive infrastructures and large buildings. These buildings are equipped with world class technology and other services like gyms, health centers, rest rooms and food courts. All these aspects of the facility largely attracts new employees. However, the long working hours act as the first burden for the employee’s interest in the job. Moreover, employees working in call centers spend a lot of time simply talking on the phone. This makes their job highly monotonous and they often feel that they do not learn anything new. Therefore it is essential that jobs are designed in the manner that leads to enhanced learning for employees (Freeney & Fellenz, 2013)
Analysis: Recommendations for the human resource department
A major issue faced by call center employees is that they end up facing an identity crisis. When an employee joins a call center, they are given a different name and are often asked to speak in a different accent. They spend over 8 hours of their day talking to people as an entirely different person and hence most of the employees feel that they feel an identity crisis (Taylor, 2017). This makes it difficult for them to associate strongly with the job and they continue to feel demotivated.
Lastly, a call center job offers no form of growth or creativity for an individual making it a very dull job for employees. People look for their personal learning within a job. A call center employee is simply given a book full of expected questions and answers. The employees are only supposed to use that guide while speaking to customer. This basically gives them no experience or opportunity for doing anything on their own. Such lack of decision making and authority is a major demotivating factor for employees working at call centers.
The first and foremost step that call centers need to take is to ensure that the employees working with them can experience growth and development. For example, several banks convey to employees at the time of recruitment that even if they are joining the call center of the bank, they would be welcome to switch to other departments of the bank if they suit well for the role. This kind of growth opportunities offered by the business will help call center employees in seeing a long term future within the same industry (Anitha, 2014). Therefore at least they can use the call center as an entry level for the brand. In such a case, in order to preserve the bank from being unfairly exploited, they can sign a contract with employees hired stating that the employee would have to at least invest one full year in the call center department of the business without switching to others. This can be an effective collaboration and the brand will also be able to improve its recruitment practices and attract employees who already have a basic knowledge about the brand as well as its customers.
The work place environment of any organization largely impacts employee motivation. The workplace environment at call centers is highly dull and hence there is a lack of motivation for employees. Motivating employees is an important responsibility of the human resource department of the business (Beehr, 2014). The high attrition rate is a clear evidence that the employees are not happy with the firm. Therefore the call center industry must adopt various strategies to motivate employees and create a lively work place environment. This can include playing games, having contests and most importantly establishing an environment of open communication within the business.
Indian call center employees are largely underpaid as compared to their counterparts in other countries. US employees in call centers are paid ten times more than Indian employees. Therefore in order to motivate employees and retain them in the business, they must be offered incentives and rewards for their performance (Watkins, 2013). These tangible and financial offers for employees help in motivating employees. Salary or the financial benefits received from any business are the predominant factors that impact the level of employee’s satisfaction. Therefore it is important the incentives and rewards are offered to employees of the call center in order to keep them motivated.
As mentioned earlier, majority of people working in the teleworking industry are graduates who are looking for fast earnings in a short span of time. After completing their short term goal, these employees have to look forward to something which would distract them from the monotonous job and give them something challenging to learn, grow and develop. Thus, it is highly recommended that the industry provisions for Job enlargement and provide additional responsibility to the employees. By this way, they would be getting more and more challenging work, which will get them out of the trap of the so called boring work. In the similar manner, Job rotation would again help them in having hands on experience in the other department of the business organization. This will contribute to their overall personality development, thus overcoming the challenge of mundane work which leads to high attrition rates.
The hierarchy at the call center is a major problem at the business. The number of leadership roles offered by these organizations must be increased. These leadership roles offered to employees can be a major source of motivation for employees (Bolman & Deal, 2017). Every employee enjoys a sense of authority and responsibility and a leadership role can provide them just that. As per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, after physiological and social needs, esteem needs of employees come into the picture and in order to keep them motivated, organizations must work towards fulfilling this need for esteem.
The call center industry must also focus on identifying new sources of employment. People who already have a large experience may not be willing to continue owing to the lack of skills that the job demands. However, as the case suggests, there are several groups of people who can be targeted to work in call centers. These groups include house wives, retired individuals, students who have just passed school and are not working currently. Housewives are yet an unexplored set of people who can be targeted by call centers. Since they are currently not working, they would be happy to work in a business with less expectations. Students can also be targeted because they are fresh from school and hence more open to learning and growth. Both these target groups do not have severely high expectations as well as their skill set perfectly matches the needs of the call center.
The call center managers must work upon ensuring that people have more jobs in the call center besides calling. Employees should be allowed to make shifts towards chat bots, after sale service, acquiring new customers etc. Shifting the business that they work for will also help them in understanding and learning more about a new business and hence increase their level of growth and learning. For example, an employee who might be working for a bank’s call center should be allowed to switch to the call center of an FMCG. This will widen the horizon of the employee and also lead to their personal growth.
A lot of stress has already been put on the importance of communication. It is a highly important aspect for any human resource management. Transparency within the business can go a long way in ensuring employee satisfaction in the firm (Alvesson, 2013). Transparency regarding employee and employer expectations at the time of recruitment as well as transparency in every business is highly important. Employee grievances must be effectively addressed in the business and an open door policy should be adopted. Whenever an employee leaves, an exit interview must be conducted which would help in understanding why employees leave and then efforts must be put to work upon strategies that would address those issues.
Conclusion
Effective customer service and long term relationships with customers are highly essential for any organization (Rawson, Duncan & Jones, 2013). This is why customer service requires special attention. The inception of the Indian call centers was marked by the country offering cheap labor to several multinational companies across the globe for their customer service department. This led to the growth of call centers in India making India a hub of customer service representatives for leading brands from around the world. Through this report, a critical analysis has been made that reflects upon the issues faced by the Indian call centers with reference to the case study.
Within a few months of establishment, several issues faced by these organizations was that of high levels of attrition, demotivated employees, high cost incurred by organizations, lack of growth opportunities for employees and all eventually leading to poor customer service. The problem was at the human resource management and hence needs to be addressed in an effective manner. The job design offered by these organization limited employee learning. The large span of control within the business reduced opportunities for growth for employees. Lack of learning and growth eventually demotivated employees leading to strong rate of attrition for the entire industry.
These are serious concerns that need to be addressed. The report recommends certain strategies that can be adopted in order to reverse the impact of these issues. These strategies include lowering span of control and offering more growth opportunities to employees. The job roles must be designed in a manner that leads to enhanced employee learning. Several intrinsic and extrinsic rewards must be introduced that can motivate employees. Besides this, employees’ personal goals must be understood and efforts must be made to align them with organizational goals in order to assist them in planning a long term future in the organization. This will help the industry at large in retaining employees leading to reduced costs, improved productivity and in turn enhanced levels of customer service.
References
Alvesson, M., 2013. Communication, power and organization(Vol. 72). Walter de Gruyter. Germany
Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management, 63(3), p.308.
Bailey, C., Mankin, D., Kelliher, C. and Garavan, T., 2018. Strategic human resource management. Oxford University Press.
Beehr, T.A., 2014. Psychological stress in the workplace (psychology revivals). Routledge. United Kingdom.
Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E., 2017. Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. John Wiley & Sons.
Das, D., Nandialath, A. and Mohan, R., 2013. Feeling unsure: quit or stay? Uncovering heterogeneity in employees’ intention to leave in Indian call centers. The international journal of human resource management, 24(1), pp.15-34.
D’Cruz, P. and Noronha, E., 2013. Hope to despair: The experience of organizing Indian call centre employees. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, pp.471-486.
Freeney, Y. and Fellenz, M.R., 2013. Work engagement, job design and the role of the social context at work: Exploring antecedents from a relational perspective. Human Relations, 66(11), pp.1427-1445.
Gupta, V., 2013. An analysis of attrition: retention strategy for IT/BPO industry. International Journal, 1(7).
Joshi, M., 2013. Human Resource Management. Bookboon. India.
Negi, G., 2013. Employee attrition: Inevitable yet manageable. International Monthly Refereed Journal of Research in Management & Technology, 2(1).
Rawson, A., Duncan, E. and Jones, C., 2013. The truth about customer experience. Harvard Business Review, 91(9), pp.90-98.
Taylor, P., 2017. The Globalization of Service Work: Analysing the 12 Transnational Call Centre Value Chain. Working life: Renewing labour process analysis, p.244.
Watkins, M., 2013. What is organizational culture? And why should we care. Harvard Business Review, 5(10).
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
