The Hindu Business Line : Put that zing into your job

The BPO industry has its own share of drawbacks - not the least being the charge that the job is one of monotony, the chores so repetitive that they sap employee morale.

Even the ex-head of a large BPO company with international operations was heard saying that BPO jobs are monotonous. Maybe that's why he is the ex-head now.

Every job is boring

Jokes apart, which job in the world is not boring? If an agent's job is monotonous, so is the team leaders', managers' and the CEOs'.

The accountant, head of administration, technology manager, quality analyst; all have monotonous jobs (or so it can seem).

A very large portion of most jobs has repetitive components. Most of all, an agent in the BPO industry can definitely find his job to be devoid of excitement. And why not? 6:00 p.m. -Auto in. 9:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. -Aux 3 (or what ever aux for break), 4:00 a.m. logout. In between, complete as many transactions (voice or non-voice) as possible.

Add the following to the mix, repeat every day, and that is a formula for boredom. Is there no escape from this?

Talking to people who hold such jobs - but love doing them - gives us insight into how we can keep the excitement levels high, constantly.

Enrichment

Doing the same thing repeatedly without knowing the science behind it can become boring. Therefore, the idea is to seek external or internal inputs to discover why things are the way they are.

For example, if I am a frontline BPO employee, I could find out why are there so many metrics. What do they mean? How are they related? Why are they important to the client? What are the metrics in other processes? Why are they different from mine?

Similarly, I could discover answers in other areas e.g. what kinds of reports are produced? What do the fields in them mean? Who produces them and what can we understand from them? I could find out about other functions in my process.

What is QA all about? What is workforce management all about? Why do we have a Csat lead, etc. The number of answers to discover is literally infinite.

Another way to find enrichment is to read up on topics related to work. Such topics can be found in books, Web sites, journals, etc.

People who continuously engage in this process will probably not find their job boring because every day will be different.

Depth

Another way to keep the excitement going is to explore the depths.

For instance, if I am an associate in a process that deals with accounts payable, I could seek to learn more about the domain (e.g. invoice processing). I could also study at length the large number of variations in the types of job processes for my client.

If I were in a technical support process, I could deepen my knowledge base. These endeavours would make me an expert in the process.

Contribution

People who continue to remain excited about their jobs engage in a high level of contribution towards the job.

This could be in the form of taking initiatives, lending a helping hand to the boss/colleagues or to volunteer for tasks.

One comes across numerous instances of people taking the initiative to improve process training, increase contribution to the knowledge base, improve quality or customer satisfaction or any other form of process improvement.

Volunteering to resolve problems also makes jobs enjoyable (e.g. helping to clear up a huge backlog of work, volunteering to perform root cause analysis to identify a problem, etc.). Volunteering to help in other functions/departments also helps to keep boredom at bay..

For instance, an agent in a BPO company wanted to move to a role in the HR department. This was proving to be difficult because of the non-existence of a formal lateral movement process within the company. So he decided to volunteer his free time to help out the HR department on odd jobs. During this time he became familiar with most people in the department, including the head of HR.

When the time came for the HR dept to recruit a person, they obviously chose this agent, who was already familiar with them, and had built up his equity in the department by volunteering his time.

Professional interaction

Interactions with peers within and outside the company at a professional level help to foster interest in one's job.

For instance, it is interesting to note how people from another company are addressing a work-related problem that we are currently facing.

These interactions could happen in person (e.g. through friends) or online. There are numerous groups on the Internet where people discuss issues at a professional level. Another way to foster such interaction is to contribute to a newsletter or a magazine and then seek feedback.

Experiment within tolerable levels

"If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got" goes the saying. Therefore, it's time to change something in the way we do the job.

One can always experiment, within tolerable limits of course, by tweaking a few components of the job.

For example, if I were a customer support executive, I could experiment on ways to build better rapport. I could change something in the way I normally speak with a customer.

I could read up the latest on entertainment news from Web sites and use that knowledge (did you see the Oscars last night?).

Or I could choose a completely different technique: speak to a friend of mine who is in the collections process. How do they build rapport with customers whom they have to convince to pay up?

Building relationships

Another way to keep monotony out of the picture is to build relationships with different people. These are people with whom we would not normally interact with.

For instance, as a BPO associate, I might interact 70 per cent of the time with my colleagues, 25 per cent of the time with my team leader and only 5 per cent of the time with others (including managers, people from other functions.)

If I took the initiative to take a portion of the 80 per cent and allocated it to interactions with other people, I would give myself a chance to build completely new relationships with a variety of people.

A key success factor for people in any company is the number of relationships they build horizontally or vertically in their organisations. Again, such endeavours keep the job interesting.

But all said and one, each individual's attitude towards his/her job will determine how exciting or boring the job becomes.

Nothing works like self-motivation.Assigned tasks could be seen as boring. But self-generated enthusiasm and initiative beat the odds, every time.

(The author is Director, OnTrac, a BPO training company. )

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