BPO JOB BLEED

Despite the soaring fortunes of the global services sector in Jamaica, business process outsourcing outfits (BPOs) are haemorrhaging hundreds of jobs monthly, stoking concerns among some sector interests about companies’ retention rates.

Many of the approximately 90 companies operating in Jamaica are reportedly experiencing labour shortages - a trend knowledgeable insiders say is linked to competitive salaries that are wooing workers who have no ambitions of getting a long-service award.

One highly placed official at a major BPO in the island revealed to The Gleaner that it loses about 300 employees monthly to terminations, lay-offs, or resignations.

Anand Biradar, president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ), the industry’s lobby, has confirmed that the sector is affected by high levels of employee turnover.

Biradar, who has 10 years of experience in the industry, acknowledged that within the past year, business has been challenging.

“We did well during COVID as an industry. Now, I hear from quite a few BPOs that they are putting more effort to get people to join them,” he said in a recent Gleaner interview.

“BPOs, by choice and by design, don’t want to replace people because every time you replace someone, there is a cost, and the cost is heavy,” he added.

That concern, sources say, is reportedly graver in medium-sized to large companies with 100 to more than 1,000 employees.

But even smaller BPOs are now suffering from attrition, The Gleaner understands.

A representative from a BPO company in Montego Bay, St James, who has worked with a number of organisations, told The Gleaner that the industry is awash with opportunities for jobseekers hunting improved remuneration.

She has requested anonymity because she is not authorised to speak to the media.

The BPO company where she works has close to 200 employees. Although more than 75 individuals were hired over a two-month period in the summer, attrition rates average between three and six per cent per month, the representative said..

In other circumstances, said the source, workers would - in a case of musical chairs - submit sick leave and utilise the period to work with another company before returning.

“People now have so many choices. They leave one company today, and tomorrow, they are at another company, working,” a source said.

Jamaican call centres have suffered from the reputation of being cramped sweatshops, but sector leaders have bristled at that characterisation, saying their operations are above board.

They point as well to the exponential growth of the industry as evidence that BPOs are places of choice for thousands of Jamaican workers.

In a speech in October, Biradar said the sector raked in US$780 million in the year ending June 30, 2021 - a performance he described as “staggering”.

In June, Prime Minister Andrew Holness participated in the groundbreaking of a $1.2-billion K&T Development BPO complex in Mandeville, Manchester.

And in September, the Morocco-headquartered firm Intelcia opened a BPO site in New Kingston with more than 600 workers.

Major players like Conduent, Sutherland Global Services, and Ibex Global Jamaica employ more than 5,000 people.

High attrition rates, according to David Wan, president of the Jamaica Employers’ Federation (JEF), can harm workplace productivity and companies’ overall output.

That risk rises and becomes more disruptive in more technical fields of work, he said.

However, Wan noted that high attrition rates could have less of an effect on lower-skilled jobs.

In an interview with The Gleaner Thursday, Wan said that in order to resolve such issues, cross-training current employees was critical to enhancing productivity.

Cross-training is a technique of training employees to work in different roles or to execute duties outside of their routine responsibilities or to work in multiple roles.

“Another [solution] is to have good succession plans in place so that any given position is easier to be filled when it becomes vacant,” Wan said.

The representative from the Montego Bay BPO noted that some “fly-by-night” companies might not be run within the ambit of best practices but believes that the majority are operating above board.

“These persons are taking decisions in the interest of not just the company but its employees and sending people home, having hired them, trained them, just to send them off for send-off sake. That would not make any business sense whatsoever,” she said.

Biradar acknowledged that in some cases, the rigours of the job may not be ideal for some employees, which might lead to resignations. In other instances, he said, employees are terminated because of policy violations.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com