BPO's young & troubled

Nitin is 22 years old. He is a process trainer in a Gurgaon-based BPO and has been in the industry for three years, though with the current employer he's spent just two. In the last six months, Nitin, who hails from Delhi, has resigned 11 times. And each time, his employer has refused to accept his resignation. Nitin says, he has issues with his superior (an assistant manager) and wants to move out of his team, but the human resources (hr) department doesn't seem bothered. He even tried the 'skip' channel and spoke directly to his boss's boss, but since the former is the latter's blue-eyed boy, Nitin's request for a transfer was turned down. So, why doesn't he simply quit? He says no one else will employ him without a reference letter from the previous employer. Meanwhile, the stress has made him double his alcohol and cigarette intake and is affecting his sleep, too. He desperately wants to leave but feels trapped.

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Sanjay is 25 years old and lives and works in Bangalore. He went to college in his hometown of Kanpur, but moved to India's Silicon Valley two years ago when a BPO offered him a job. He smokes a pack of cigarettes daily and does weed during his 'sutta' breaks with his colleagues. He goes back home once a year and doesn't remember how many girls he has dated (read: slept with) in the last couple of years (he stopped counting after he hit 12). Sanjay had initially planned to send money back home, but instead ends up borrowing from friends and colleagues, since he can't keep up with his expenses.

Tupur is 26 and lives in Kolkata. She got into a live-in relationship with a young man who worked with her in the same BPO. Even though Tupur could make out that her partner wasn't serious about the relationship, she persisted as she felt emotionally committed. Soon, she got pregnant and had to abort the child. She conceived again, but this time around she could not abort the foetus early enough and married her partner in the fifth month of her pregnancy. Immediately after her child was born, she left it with her parents because she did not have the time to look after it. She has since changed her job to take care of the baby, but continues to face problems with her marriage. She says she wants her marriage to work, but feels so 'bored and stagnant' that she doesn't even want to go to a counsellor. However, she wants to hang on to the relationship for her child's sake.

Partho is 24 and has been working with the BPO of a multinational bank in Kolkata for the last one year. He is currently on his notice period that ends in August. He has vowed never to return to the industry and considers it a den of promiscuity.

He says he will take time to relate with a normal workplace where everyone is not going around with everyone else. He says sleeping around for promotions is quite normal and goes up to the Assistant Vice President level. Partho also got propositioned by an older married female colleague just before he resigned, but he declined. Just the same, he had to dump his girlfriend when he found out that she was two-timing him just for kicks.

But that's not where the tragedy ends for Partho. His old school friend and also a former colleague, Arnab, died of drug overdose a few days ago. Arnab's wife had earlier left him when she caught him during one of his 'night stands'. According to Partho, the BPO management was quite aware of Arnab's addiction to drugs but decided not to interfere since he was a top performer. Arnab did go into rehab once, but that didn't help. "There is so much pressure from the management to meet numbers and after getting abused so often by the goras, you tend to make up your self-esteem by drinking up or using drugs whenever you can," says Partho.

BPO India is in trouble. Big trouble. Even as the industry grows at a breakneck pace over of 50 per cent per annum in terms of job creation, according to a NASSCOM & McKinsey study, sucking in thousands of young, barely-educated workers from all over the country, it is spawning social and ergonomic problems on an unprecedented scale. Stories abound of young BPO workers losing control over their lives and straying into drugs, crime, unfettered promiscuity, and eventual depression and severe suicidal tendencies. Sure, there have been workplace-related problems as long as there have been workplaces. What makes the BPO's case so alarming and pervasive is the unique nature of the industry. Never before have young workers run an entire industry almost on their own; never before has an entire generation of young, white-collar workers worked only in the night, often away from their small-town families; and never before has any industry pulled so many youngsters into a world of make-believe, glamour and relative affluence like BPO has.

Before we get into the story, BT would like to clarify a few points: One, the objective of the story is to turn the spotlight on an emerging social phenomenon, and not be judgmental about what's happening; two, although none of the BPO workers that BT spoke with had any issues about being named or disclosing the identity of their employers in print, we have chosen to refrain from identifying the 'problematic' BPOs and have used fictional names for the examples that opened this story. The idea, as you can imagine, is to single out the issues, and not either the young workers or their employers. Finally, such problems relate more to voice-based call centres rather than those that do pure back office work. But the fact is, voice-based business accounts for 70 per cent of the industry's revenue.

Coming back to the story, why is the BPO industry, home to roughly 400,000 workers directly employed in it (by the end of 2008, the industry is expected to employ over 1.1 million people), mostly in the median age of 25, rife with a multitude of problems? Blame partly the nature of the industry and partly the complex socio-economic changes taking place in the country (See A Life of Pressure). To begin with, since the outsourcing industry caters primarily to customers outside India, there's the issue of time zones. Most BPO workers work at night, and sleep during the day. Such a routine tends to upset the natural bio-rhythm. They get sick, irritable, and depressed. In a bid to sound like the customers they serve, the call centre agents often assume a fake persona and put on a fake accent. As it turns out, switching between their real person and the fake persona isn't that simple. When a Jhanavi becomes a Genevieve or a Murali becomes a Mario, the association is not just with a temporary new identity, but somewhere it begins to seem that the real persona is less worthy. "The put-on accents seem to tell you that this new persona is far more 'cool' and respectable. It is another form of mental slavery we're witnessing, but it is insidious and, therefore, far more sinister," says Dr Ajit V. Bhide, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and independent researcher based in Bangalore.

That's made worse by the nature of the job, which is monotonous, repetitive and heavily target-oriented. Often, the workers get only short breaks and must deal with indifferent or abusive customers. More importantly, there is little career progression. Not everyone who joins a call centre ends up becoming a team leader or moving into top management roles. "Everyone wants to be team leader because it sounds good and all their friends also aspire to the same position irrespective of their individual capability," says V. Anandkumar, Wipro BPO's Vice President (Supply Chain & Employee Branding).

The nature of workplace engagement is unique, too. Most of the BPO workers ride to and from work together, work just a few feet away from each other, and sometimes also share apartments if they are staying away from their families. Because of all that, "their personal and professional lives tend to fuse since they spend so much time together and, of course, this leads to problems at the workplace," says Aditya Gupta, President, Infovision, India's biggest domestic-focussed BPO.

Bangalore-based Archana Bisht, a co-founder-director of 1to1help.net, which runs employee assistance programmes (EAPs) for several it companies, even has a name for this phenomenon: She calls it the 'dis-inhibition effect'. "Because these people are living away from their homes and work night shifts, when chances of being 'found out' are low, they experience a dis-inhibition effect, which means the normal inhibitions that prevent people from doing something that is not socially acceptable no longer operate," she explains.

At any rate, the majority of BPO workers are young, relatively inexperienced and immature, and when they suddenly find money and a lot of freedom-not to mention peer pressure-they often don't know how to handle this potent cocktail. Uma Arora, founder of idamlearning.com, another Delhi-based EAP firm, says that the problem tends to be worse in the case of young workers who've come from smaller towns. Such people may be technically competent, but generally lack basic etiquettes like how to talk to their seniors or girls or whether it is appropriate to shake hands or how to address the clients or even how to dress up. "They don't know where to draw boundaries or how open to be in office relationships. They suffer from low self-esteem as they think their colleagues from bigger cities are doing better," says Arora.

Bisht, who often deals with such cases, agrees. She says that it might happen that a boy from a small town who has never freely mixed with members of the opposite sex assumes that he is in a long-term relationship, even though he would have just gone together with the girl for a cup of coffee a couple of times. "He is devastated when he sees his 'girlfriend' with some other person," she says. Bisht isn't exaggerating. Take the well-publicised case of Gururaj Kishore, an employee of Aviva contact centre in Bangalore, who last year killed his colleague Tanya Banerjee when she mocked his marriage proposal. Apparently, Banerjee herself had a police history, having been charged under the Immoral Trafficking Act in Kolkata in 2005. "Sexual promiscuity, ethanol (alcohol) dependence and rapid burn out among some technologically brilliant but emotionally unintelligent, or perhaps not so intelligent, are some common traits here," says Bhide. "They live in an unreal world that often borders on the undesirable," adds Raman Roy, Chairman and Managing Director of Quatrro and a BPO pioneer

The employer response

As much as the employees, employers suffer when things spin out of control at the workplace. BPOs are already paying a big price for this unprecedented phenomenon. According to some estimates, the loss of productivity (and investment in the person) can range from Rs 30,000 to Rs 70,000 per person if a new hire ends up having problems within the first 60 days. In the case of a tenured operations person, the figure can touch Rs 95,000. That means a BPO with 15,000 employees and an average rate of attrition can lose as much as $25 million (Rs 102.5 crore) a year.

Understandably, then, the BPOs are going out of their way to deal with the problem. Companies like Infosys BPO, ibm Daksh, and Genpact lay a lot of emphasis on induction and orientation programmes. At Infosys BPO, for example, the induction programme goes on for a month and the recruits are trained not only for skill-sets, but also for workplace etiquettes and other behavioural aspects. Genpact says it racks up 5 million hours of training every year, and new hires go through at least 6-8 weeks of induction and training.

Most of the other top BPOs have similar practices. At HCL BPO, there's an employee first policy that actually puts employees ahead of customers. There are dedicated line hr teams for each delivery centre and they are assisted by employee engagement SPOCs (single point of contact) whose job is to ensure speedy resolution of employee issues. Some others such as Gurgaon-based Vertex offer a straight communication line to the CEO, besides which the executive team regularly takes out groups of employees, by turn, for lunch or dinner under an initiative called Sparsh, meant to connect team members.

Although well-intentioned, such programmes don't do two things: One, identify the best-fit employee ahead of recruitment and, two, offer professional counselling, which is what some of the deeply troubled employees may need. In recognition of that, IBM Daksh recently launched Mitr (or friend), a counselling service for its employees that allows them to phone in, meet or e-mail a counsellor. D.P. Singh, Vice President (Strategic HR), IBM Daksh, says, there were strong indications coming from various quarters that such an initiative was needed. The firm also has a 'speak-up' programme that allows employees to raise issues anonymously. "I believe that the typical age group that we are dealing with is bound to have personal and emotional problems, which can be handled best by an experienced counsellor," says Singh. Agrees Ashu Calapa, Vice President of hr at Firstsource, which launched counselling three years ago: "Eighty per cent of the time, the employees have personal problems that need sorting out."

At Wipro BPO, which runs a counselling programme also called Mitr, employees with background in psychology can volunteer for part-time counselling. Infosys BPO has a 24/7 helpline manned by a team of in-house psychiatrists. Says Nandita Gurjar, the firm's Vice President of hr: "Whenever someone gets in touch with the helpline, we try to delve into the deeper aspects of an employee's issues and identify the root cause." Others say professional counsellors may be a better option, since not all employees feel comfortable sharing their problems with colleagues. Says Aniruddha Limaye, Chief People Officer, wns: "We haven't had any people-related incidents yet, but we introduced counselling early this year because it is a progressive step."

Some others tend to be more proactive. Heroites, a Delhi-based call centre, conducts surprise drug and alcohol tests to keep a check on substance abuse. hcl BPO plans to introduce a programme to reorient its employees on cultural issues. "Cultural values need to be adhered to in this kind of environment and while the new employees have their core values in place, the cultural re-orientation would be more focussed on existing employees," says A.P. Rao Head (HR), HCL Technologies, BPO Division.

An India challenge?

By all accounts, the problems that BPOs in India are going through are unique to the country. Globally, 50 to 70 per cent of the workforce tends to comprise women. In India, women make up less than 30 per cent of the workforce. There are several other differences, as brought to light by a recent Global Call Centre Report by Cornell University. World over, only 22 per cent of the call centres employ graduates; in India it is more than 60 per cent; the percentage of permanent employees on an average is 71 per cent (in South Korea it is 40 per cent), but in India the figure is 100 per cent.

The net result is that there is a mismatch between what the young workers expect and what the job can at best offer. Add to that the increased exposure to different ways of life, high disposable income and freedom from traditional societal norms, and the cocktail gets potent enough to blow up. Says Karuna Baskar, counselling psychologist with 1to1help.net: "In situations like this, professional counselling could be very useful in enabling young people to make informed decisions, preferably before they land up in such serious situations." Indeed, once someone has slipped into unhealthy or demeaning relationships or drug addiction, "the path back is much more difficult," says Baskar.

Perhaps, parents have a role to play, too. But as Sukhdeepak Malvai, CEO, M-Power (an HR solutions company) says, people in this age group are experiencing new-found freedom and don't always listen to their parents. "My opinion is that they don't have the emotional maturity to handle that much money with that much freedom and they don't listen to elders so the problem intensifies," Malvai puts it bluntly. According to him, someone who can't take it should either get out of the industry or get some professional help and learn to cope with the pressures.

Others see it as the teething troubles of a nascent industry. Says Gurjar of Infosys BPO: "I have a basic trust in life. They are basically swayed by the economic boom, but I am sure they cannot live like this for long. People will calm down. They will stabilise." For the sake of the industry and its young workers, let's hope Gurjar's words come true.