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HR issues in Indian BPO industry
‘Workers see their work in call centres as transient and are in constant search of opportunities for more fulfilling work.’.
D. Murali

Readers’ choice.

D. Murali

Despite technological advancements, the attitude and commitment of the CSRs (customer service representatives) are the key
to ‘customer delight,’ write Mohan Thite and Bob Russell in the introduction to The Next Available Operator: Managing Human
Resources in Indian Business Process Outsourcing Industry ( www.sagepublications.com). “Research on call centres indicates
that where cost-minimisa tion is a dominant business approach, the work environment is generally fast-paced, routine,
monotonous, tightly controlled and contains little scope for employee discretion,” they observe.

A note of alarm, in one of the essays included in the book, is that India is inflicted with significant HR (human resource) issues,
the most acute in the region. “Upward pressure on wages and high employee attrition, which has processional effects on
customer service and knowledge retention, is eroding the existing competitive advantage India has,” warns Catriona Wallace in
the opening chapter.

“The industry is caught in a critical management tension of reducing costs, increasing service and selling, and this tension is felt
at the front line, at the expense of its HR.”

Studying the transnationalism in Indian call centres, Kiran Mirchandani finds that rather than becoming the ‘ideal Indian
workers’ promoted in the state literature, workers see their work in call centres as transient and are in constant search of
opportunities for more fulfilling work.

“Neither are workers grateful and satisfied with the so-called ‘comfortable’ jobs which allow them to escape the perils of
joblessness or work, nor do they want the subcontracting trend to end despite their recognition of the many negative
professional, social and physical effects of the jobs.”

Recommended study.

Monkey call

What happened when a handful of engineers at Sarnoff Corp’s lab in Bangalore were sitting around a table in a meeting room,
conference-calling with colleagues at the research-for-hire outfit’s headquarters in Princeton, US? “They heard loud banging
from behind an air-conditioner cover on the wall. One of them lifted the cover, and a baby monkey leaped into the room and
raced around underfoot,” narrates a snatch in Chindia: How China and India are Revolutionising Global Business, edited by
Pete Engardio ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

“Two of the engineers were so surprised that they jumped up on the table. Then, ‘We all fled the room and closed the door,’
says Kiran Nayak, one of the participants, who recalls the incident with a huge smile and continues the story, in a chapter titled
‘The leap ahead.’

It all turned out well in the end, the author adds. “In due time, the monkey returned to its mother, out on the building’s ledge,
and the engineers reclaimed their conference room and resumed talking about data-compression algorithms. Such are the
oddities of global research collaboration.”
Engaging account.

Raju’s insights

Thomas L. Friedman recounts in Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why the World Needs a Green Revolution – and How We Can
Renew our Global Future ( www.penguin.com) his ‘long talk on the subject with Ramalinga Raju of Satyam, one of the most
dynamic business leaders in India,’ and how Raju explained that no country had a better system for producing a
transformational breakthrough around clean power and energy efficiency than the US.

“‘America still sits at the boundary of technological excellence. You are, for now, still the best architects we could imagine.’
America’s job, he added, is to make the big front-end investments in the new clean, green technologies — as it did with PCs,
DVDs, and iPods — and then leverage the low-cost service economy of India and the manufacturing platform of China to
quickly get those new technologies down to the ‘Chindia price,’ the price at which they can really get adopted in China and
India.”

Raju had alerted Friedman that if the US didn’t seize the opportunity, India, China and others eventually will, though their
solutions will not be the best, “because they will not be coming at the problem from the cutting edge of scientific and
technological knowledge, and they will not go to scale as quickly, but they will be a lot better than nothing.”

Friedman quotes Raju, thus: “Without the best architect, the brick and mortar carriers will learn to do their own designs. The
house will take four years to build instead of two. There will be more mistakes. Less capital will be available. But it will get built,
and once they get going, the replication process will take place every six months and [America] will not have a place in it. You
will be watching. You will not be part of the house-building and will not derive the maximum benefits of having been the
architect. If you do take the lead, the world will be queuing up at your counter.”

A narrative to warm up to.

Online intermediaries

Just when people thought disintermediation would be an important consequence of the Internet, another trend emerged:
reintermediation. Thus write S. Tamer Cavusgil, Gary Knight, and John R. Riesenberger in International Business: Strategy,
Management, and the New Realities ( www.pearsoned.co.in). They explain that reintermediation occurs when a new firm —
usually an online intermediary — injects itself between buyers and suppliers in the online buying and selling environment. “For
example, consumers can buy high-definition TVs directly from Sony at its Web site or from an online intermediary, such as
CompUSA.com or Tesco.com.”

The authors find that, today, countless online intermediaries are brokering transactions between buyers and sellers worldwide,
and are adding value in the distribution process, even if it meant adopting newer roles. Worryingly, however, the easy
accessibility of the Internet has led many shady online marketers to cause harm to unsuspecting consumers, the authors rue.
“For example, a recent Business Week investigation has found that only 11 per cent of Web pharmacies require a prescription.
An astounding 89 per cent, scattered largely in developing countries, appear to operate illegally…”

Suggested starter material.

When ‘flat’ fell flat

To check if the world is really flat, as Thomas Friedman portrayed in The World Is Flat, Chris Patten visits the Infosys campus
just outside Bangalore. “It is extremely impressive: brand-new buildings like an Ivy League campus and (when I was there)
14,000 young Indian software engineers,” describes Patten in ‘What Next? Surviving the twenty-first century’ (
www.penguin.com). “For Europeans worried by competition from Polish plumbers, this looked like the real McCoy. But it did not
convince me that the world is entirely flat. Nor do I think Mr Nilekani takes this view,” he continues.

Why? Because, driving to the Infosys campus, he found too many examples of how uneven the world is, even in a booming
and often shining India, with too much poverty on view. “Moreover, the road to the Infosys campus is anything but flat, the sort
of incongruity that is still so present in India for all its progress…”

Good pick for the weekend.