Buelah?.... Buelah?... Buelah?...
WORKING AT A SOUTH INDIAN BPO: TAKE TWO
So... yeah. You get the picture. The thing about the traffic, is that it really is emblematic of the culture here. By that I may mean just the culture local to Chennai, I may mean all over India. I'll let you know once I've been around more.
Everywhere you go, in everything you do, there never seems to be a distinguishable lane to travel in. Everyone just goes through when a spot appears. If no spot comes, then you just go around; if you can't go around, just stop the car and get confused.
That's how it works in a business context here too: time, like speed limits are merely suggestions. Meetings start five or ten or twenty minutes late, never have all of the right people, never seem to fully resolve, and in the middle of an essential moment, someone will just start talking on a cell phone.
Like the guys carrying ginormous boxes or whole families on bikes, what logistical resources available are put into constant maximum use and strain. Stations, chairs, headsets, computers, they are bought and used with an economy of scarcity; there are not enough for every agent, but enough for every person working in this moment (if we're lucky). My classroom was built out of a boardroom, and was constantly under construction for the first three days I was in it (and even sometimes after that). There was a giant flat screen TV set up to hook your laptop up to teach, but I found out quickly that it didn't work.
Instead, a projector was looted from another classroom used to teach a class that ended immediately before mine. It would come to my boardroom table still warm from the last instructor's information. At the end of my class every day there would be a man hovering just outside my door to come and take it away to its third assignment of the day. No building in a BPO ever sleeps. In the Centre of Learning, three shifts of eight hour classes ran seven days a week. In the actual work centres, shift follows shift follows shift in an endless progression of logins and logouts. There's never even a quiet time of the day or a single physical resource not being used to its full potential.
At first, I thought: "Well that makes sense. Companies in India must just really work on a very different operating budget that we are used to back home. When we buy things in Canada, we just have the CAPEX (capital expenditure) to purchase all of what we need." Then I realized that while this might be true, that it’s a trap to think of it so simplistically.
The BPO we are working with is one of the largest in India. It has four massive call centres in Chennai alone, and has offices in Delhi and Bangalore and Hyderabad and Mumbai. It takes calls from some big-time companies... not just us, but Intuit and Dell, HP and Microsoft. It's likely got cash on hand to pull together on the things it needs to buy.
The difference doesn’t lie in how much capital an Indian company might have in comparison to a Canadian company, but rather, it lies in the kind of currency that the capital is spent in. In Canada, if a company has a hundred dollars to spend, that capital is worth 100 dollars Canadian. Most of the product that those CAPEX dollars are being spent on are made and/or bought locally. Even if they have been made in whole or in part in another country, the product that they are buying are priced at a value close to equal what Canadian currency is worth.
I apologize for a moment as I go all corporate economics on you I promise I’ll explain: In Canada, OPEX (operational expenditure) is also priced in Canadian dollars, so often spending CAPEX now to offset OPEX later makes sense, especially when the CAPEX maintenance cost is stable and finite while the OPEX costs, in the form of EQE, is unstable and infinite. Translation? Well it’s just like the argument of buying a condo vs. renting an apartment: As a CEO, I’m more likely to invest 500K right now to build a system that will eliminate the need to pay 100 people for the next 20 years, because people cost more than product and their maintenance needs also cost more and are more unpredictable.
In India, this is not how things work. Here, OPEX dollars aren’t dollars at all, they’re rupees, and there are 40 rupees in every dollar the company will spend on OPEX costs (E.g. overhead, employee salaries). However, the CAPEX costs we’re talking about: the headsets, workstations, chairs etc, are priced in dollars (US) not rupees because they are not locally made, but bought on the world market, and so for each CAPEX widget bought, 40 times more rupees are spent than would be if an OPEX widget were bought.
So in Canada, it’s worth it to the company to buy more computers, headsets, and projectors than needed to ensure that a group of employees are never idle and waiting to be matched with the thing they need, while here, there would have to be a lot of people delayed a long time to make the case for buying a piece equipment that isn’t in demand right now.
What all of this also means is that there’s a high turnover of employees working, because it’s not expensive to try people out with different processes, or let them gain experience in the training of one process for when they end up going to another. There end up being clashes between we North Americans and our counterparts in India because to us, training is an extremely costly process that you work hard to get right the first time, and to them training is like the traffic: employees weave in and out of the chaos until they find a process that fits, or get off the road.
What this means to me as a trainer is that there are a lot of students on my training list that aren’t expected to make it to the end. Some won’t show up the first day, some will be lost to attrition as they leave the process or the company unexpectedly, some won’t make it through the mid assessments, some won’t make it through the end assessments, some will be retrained and reassessed.
On the very first day, Theresa, the other trainer, and I showed up for training to discover we had 34 students. Instead of having 2 classrooms of 17, we had one classroom of 10 and one of 24. On the first day, three people didn’t show up. Our Indian counterparts didn’t realize they hadn’t shown up for the first hour. The co-delivery trainer from India was calling out attendance and came to one name on the list: Buelah. I kid you not, he stood at the front of the class for a full two minutes saying: “Buelah?. ..Buelah?..... Buelah?.....”
I almost fell on the ground laughing, or raised my hand and said while smacking my gum: "Um, she's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Buelah pass out at Sri Krishna’s Sweets last night. I guess it's pretty serious. "
I want to make sure that the point of this post, even if it has been long and rambly, is not that the BPO’s are terrible and disorganized and don’t know how to run a business, but that sometimes cultural difference can really look like incompetence, when you’re looking at business process with a western filter. If you don’t learn to drive the Tamil way: to give up on the lines in the road, talk with your horn, and abandon yourself to the idea that the traffic will win, life will be stressful while dealing with a BPO.
So... yeah. You get the picture. The thing about the traffic, is that it really is emblematic of the culture here. By that I may mean just the culture local to Chennai, I may mean all over India. I'll let you know once I've been around more.
Everywhere you go, in everything you do, there never seems to be a distinguishable lane to travel in. Everyone just goes through when a spot appears. If no spot comes, then you just go around; if you can't go around, just stop the car and get confused.
That's how it works in a business context here too: time, like speed limits are merely suggestions. Meetings start five or ten or twenty minutes late, never have all of the right people, never seem to fully resolve, and in the middle of an essential moment, someone will just start talking on a cell phone.
Like the guys carrying ginormous boxes or whole families on bikes, what logistical resources available are put into constant maximum use and strain. Stations, chairs, headsets, computers, they are bought and used with an economy of scarcity; there are not enough for every agent, but enough for every person working in this moment (if we're lucky). My classroom was built out of a boardroom, and was constantly under construction for the first three days I was in it (and even sometimes after that). There was a giant flat screen TV set up to hook your laptop up to teach, but I found out quickly that it didn't work.
Instead, a projector was looted from another classroom used to teach a class that ended immediately before mine. It would come to my boardroom table still warm from the last instructor's information. At the end of my class every day there would be a man hovering just outside my door to come and take it away to its third assignment of the day. No building in a BPO ever sleeps. In the Centre of Learning, three shifts of eight hour classes ran seven days a week. In the actual work centres, shift follows shift follows shift in an endless progression of logins and logouts. There's never even a quiet time of the day or a single physical resource not being used to its full potential.
At first, I thought: "Well that makes sense. Companies in India must just really work on a very different operating budget that we are used to back home. When we buy things in Canada, we just have the CAPEX (capital expenditure) to purchase all of what we need." Then I realized that while this might be true, that it’s a trap to think of it so simplistically.
The BPO we are working with is one of the largest in India. It has four massive call centres in Chennai alone, and has offices in Delhi and Bangalore and Hyderabad and Mumbai. It takes calls from some big-time companies... not just us, but Intuit and Dell, HP and Microsoft. It's likely got cash on hand to pull together on the things it needs to buy.
The difference doesn’t lie in how much capital an Indian company might have in comparison to a Canadian company, but rather, it lies in the kind of currency that the capital is spent in. In Canada, if a company has a hundred dollars to spend, that capital is worth 100 dollars Canadian. Most of the product that those CAPEX dollars are being spent on are made and/or bought locally. Even if they have been made in whole or in part in another country, the product that they are buying are priced at a value close to equal what Canadian currency is worth.
I apologize for a moment as I go all corporate economics on you I promise I’ll explain: In Canada, OPEX (operational expenditure) is also priced in Canadian dollars, so often spending CAPEX now to offset OPEX later makes sense, especially when the CAPEX maintenance cost is stable and finite while the OPEX costs, in the form of EQE, is unstable and infinite. Translation? Well it’s just like the argument of buying a condo vs. renting an apartment: As a CEO, I’m more likely to invest 500K right now to build a system that will eliminate the need to pay 100 people for the next 20 years, because people cost more than product and their maintenance needs also cost more and are more unpredictable.
In India, this is not how things work. Here, OPEX dollars aren’t dollars at all, they’re rupees, and there are 40 rupees in every dollar the company will spend on OPEX costs (E.g. overhead, employee salaries). However, the CAPEX costs we’re talking about: the headsets, workstations, chairs etc, are priced in dollars (US) not rupees because they are not locally made, but bought on the world market, and so for each CAPEX widget bought, 40 times more rupees are spent than would be if an OPEX widget were bought.
So in Canada, it’s worth it to the company to buy more computers, headsets, and projectors than needed to ensure that a group of employees are never idle and waiting to be matched with the thing they need, while here, there would have to be a lot of people delayed a long time to make the case for buying a piece equipment that isn’t in demand right now.
What all of this also means is that there’s a high turnover of employees working, because it’s not expensive to try people out with different processes, or let them gain experience in the training of one process for when they end up going to another. There end up being clashes between we North Americans and our counterparts in India because to us, training is an extremely costly process that you work hard to get right the first time, and to them training is like the traffic: employees weave in and out of the chaos until they find a process that fits, or get off the road.
What this means to me as a trainer is that there are a lot of students on my training list that aren’t expected to make it to the end. Some won’t show up the first day, some will be lost to attrition as they leave the process or the company unexpectedly, some won’t make it through the mid assessments, some won’t make it through the end assessments, some will be retrained and reassessed.
On the very first day, Theresa, the other trainer, and I showed up for training to discover we had 34 students. Instead of having 2 classrooms of 17, we had one classroom of 10 and one of 24. On the first day, three people didn’t show up. Our Indian counterparts didn’t realize they hadn’t shown up for the first hour. The co-delivery trainer from India was calling out attendance and came to one name on the list: Buelah. I kid you not, he stood at the front of the class for a full two minutes saying: “Buelah?. ..Buelah?..... Buelah?.....”
I almost fell on the ground laughing, or raised my hand and said while smacking my gum: "Um, she's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Buelah pass out at Sri Krishna’s Sweets last night. I guess it's pretty serious. "
I want to make sure that the point of this post, even if it has been long and rambly, is not that the BPO’s are terrible and disorganized and don’t know how to run a business, but that sometimes cultural difference can really look like incompetence, when you’re looking at business process with a western filter. If you don’t learn to drive the Tamil way: to give up on the lines in the road, talk with your horn, and abandon yourself to the idea that the traffic will win, life will be stressful while dealing with a BPO.
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