OVERVIEW
Call centres have been instrumental in bringing business efficiences to organizations over the last 15 years. They have brought jobs and economic activity to a number of locations inside the UK as organisations have sought to set up specialised Call Centres in areas with the green field sites and cheap labour force that they need. Leeds, Scotland, Wales and Newcastle among others have all actively grown this sector, and a recent survey by Monster.com forecasts the total population of agents to exceed 650,000 by 2007.
However, this growth has come at a price – it has been so fast in some of these areas that different Call Centres have ended up fighting for each other’s labour pool. Competition has driven up wage rates. This increased job choice and wage inflation, combined with roles that can be quite repetitive, have led to high levels of volunitary staff turnover in the sector. The difficulty in finding and keeping staff at cost effective wage rates has been one of the factors that has led many organisations to move these roles offshore to India, South Africa and elsewhere.
Despite the lure of this ‘offshoring,’ opinion leaders in the Call Centre market maintain that there will always be a case for UK-based Call Centres, especially where the service they provide requires knowledge of UK lifestyles and culture. It is, therefore, clear that the organisations that remain in the UK will continue in endeavouring to reduce their staff turnover as much as possible’. This article covers some of the psychological research in to Call Centre turnover and illustrates, with a recent piece of research, why it is relatively poorly understood, despite being a real ‘hotspot’ within the UK economy.
LITERATURE REVIEW ON STAFF TURNOVER
Attempting to reduce staff turnover forces organisations to change the way that they think about their employees, and to pay more attention to how it feels to be in their shoes. The candidate’s perspective on the selection and induction process was for a long time a neglected area of study in organisational behaviour. Indeed the very term ‘selection’ implies that it is the organisation that is ‘selecting’ the individual from a pool of keen and potentially able applicants. However, recently the candidate’s perspective has become more important when designing and reviewing selection processes for the following reasons:
The move in HRM towards the high ‘involvement’ of employees has encouraged employers to think carefully about the impact that a selection process has upon the applicants going through it. The selection process does indeed act as a sift, but it also forms the first stage in the process of socialising the employee into the organisation’s culture. It is thus critical to employers seeking to build commitment and attract employees who fit their values.
It has become more important to consider the consequential impact (Messick, 1989) that a selection process can have upon the wider stakeholders of an organisation, particularly for organisations that are in the public eye. The process must seem fair and appropriate to all these future, potential ‘customers’. The cost implications of running a sophisticated process, only for the most talented applicants to leave (Hilmer, Hilmer & McRoberts, 2004) or reject the job offers (Murphy, 1986) because they disliked or felt uncomfortable with the way that it presented the employing organisation. This interest has had a big effect on models of staff turnover. Many models postulate a wide range of factors that can lead to an intention to leave, e.g. Morrel, Loan Clarke and Wilkinson (2001); Maertz and Campion, (1998), Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner (2000.)
The quantitative analysis of these models is relatively embryonic:
Realistic job previews have a generally good track record of preventing early staff turnover (Premack & Wanous, 2002.) Brasher et al. (2005) show the impact of a number of other organisational factors upon tenure in sales people. Porter and Steers (2002) report on a variety of factors that predict staff turnover and absenteeism, including personality. Barrick and Zimmerman (2004) confirm that careful selection can reduce turnover significantly.
Given the large number of people employed in Call Centres both here and abroad, and the high reported levels of staff attrition, there is a dearth of research into the ability of organisations to reduce staff turnover within the Call Centre environment itself. This study is thus of interest because it tracks a substantial sample of Call Centre workers on a longitudinal basis to examine whether a priori hypotheses concerning their fit for the role predict job tenure. It exemplifies many of the difficulties that this type of research involves.
DESIGN
This is a field-based, predictive validation study for high stakes recruitment purposes.
METHODS
1223 Call Centre recruits were assessed using a conventional recruitment process of a structured interview and walk around the organisation. At the same time as this they were asked to sit the Customer Contact Styles Questionnaire CCSQ7.2 on line (SHL, 1997). The CCSQ results were not made available to recruiters in their decision-making.
The CCSQ results were scored and entered into specification equations incorporating four scales selected from the tool. This scale choice was based a priori on job analysis and expert interpretation of validity generalisation evidence between CCSQ and success in incoming Call Centre roles elsewhere. Based on these specification equations the group was divided into two groups:
- The ‘good fit group’ (N=423)
- The ‘poor fit group’ (N=620)
The groups were then allowed to join the organisation and proceeded with their four-week training process and ultimately started work. Performance during their training and subsequently on the job was tracked for both groups. Leavers during these periods were also tracked.
RESULTS
There was a large amount of restriction of range in both the job and training scores in the first months of work. Hence there was no relationship between these measures of job success and job tenure. In other words both the good and less good people were equally likely to leave their jobs.
The CCSQ showed some intuitively obvious relationships with some of the job and training measures for dimensions such as time keeping, although the restriction of range present in these criteria made these modest.
The strongest relationships were with tenure. The ‘good fit’ group showed much better retention than both the ‘poor fit’ group and past applicant groups within the first three months. See Table 1.
Table 1: The rates of retention after three months for the two groups.
Retention Rate after three months
- `Good fit’ 74%
- `Poor fit’ 50%
chi=36.379; N=1043; sig=0.00
CONCLUSIONS
Staff turnover is thus moderately understood at a conceptual level. The reasons why a job in a Call Centre experiences much higher staff turnover, than a role that appears no more repetitive, such as a car assembly line role, cut to the very heart of occupational psychology. However, our understanding of those reasons remains poor. This study shows some of the problems associated with improving staff retention in Call Centres:
Longitudinal studies – This kind of longitudinal study is time consuming to set up and quite hard to sell to Call Centre managers pursuing other short-term targets.
Modern business practices – The outsourcing of the recruitment to outside agencies, often held hostage to legally binding performance targets, often precludes experimenting with new measures in this fashion.
Globalisation – It is possible that the trend towards offshoring has reduced the attention being given to the remaining UK Call Centres.
Modern recruitment techniques – Psychologists and the HR community have become accustomed to targeting candidate skills and competencies. In this study there was a zero correlation between job performance and tenure. This suggests that one could recruit some skilled employees and not improve tenure significantly.
Short-term focus – This study showed that a clear (50 per cent) improvement in the retention of staff in the first three months can be achieved by systematic scientific selection and job matching. However, a longer-term follow-up of this study would be valuable to show the extent to which this effect changes over time. Do new scales become important? Does the relationship between job performance and tenure change over time
The need for multi-disciplinary approach – Staff turnover among the ‘good fit’ group is much better than the control group, and because of the sample size in this study the result is significant. However, it still remains quite high by external metrics. Many organisations would struggle to raise a triumphant note when reporting this to senior management. It is likely that other tools (RJP, pay review and so on) might reduce this further, but a hard pressed recruitment function would struggle to know which of these interventions to attempt first, and this may result in ‘initiative fatigue’ as they attempt multiple unrelated projects simultaneously. This is why insightful OD approaches based around psychometric exit interviews may well be an important step forward, since they allow an organisation to target their initiatives around the most important gaps in their employee offering.
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CORRESPONDENCE
