Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Call Centers Least Happy Workplace in UK

July 15, 2013

In the UK, call center workers reported that they were the unhappiest and most isolated of office workers in a 2013 poll by Jabra. They found that 35 percent of call center workers feel they have poor interpersonal relationships in the office, 22 percent reported that they felt isolated from their co-workers, and 21 percent reporting that the work environment has also been a detriment to their home life as well, causing domestic breakdowns. In fact, the only quality which they reported as being better than any other workplace polled was that only 27 percent of them felt undervalued, as opposed to 35 percent of office workers and 36 percent of independent contractors.


There must be an underlying cause for the mass unhappiness of call center workers. There’s an obvious cognitive dissonance in talking for a living, but not being able to communicate to the people you work with because they are doing the same thing. That would definitely lend itself to the isolation mentioned by the workers, and the poor interpersonal relationships, as most call centers pressure the workers to make as many calls as they can during their shifts, so the employees have little time for socializing or collaborating, as they are often solitary positions.

It doesn’t help the workers’ satisfaction that the technology is often in a state of flux or woefully underserving or outdated. For only 17 percent of the call center offices, VoIP and UC services are their preferred modes of operating. In BYOD or CYOD workplaces, about 34 percent of workers use a mobile device at work, either provided by themselves or provided by the company. Over half of the workers, 55 percent of them, still prefer the time-honored landline office phone for conducting their business. While these all get their job done adequately well, using a device you bring yourself and pay for may actually be detrimental to work seeing as they will be more conscious of their minutes and not use it as much, outweighing the technological benefits if any that may be present from a standard landline.




Edited by Rich Steeves



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