Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres

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1 New Technology, Work and Employment 17:1 ISSN Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres Vicki Belt, Ranald Richardson and Juliet Webster This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women s employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women s feminine? social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised. Introduction It is well documented that the economies of advanced industrial nations have undergone major transformation in recent years. A fundamental feature of this change has been the decline of manufacturing employment and the increase in the number of jobs in the service sector, to the extent that the service industries now dominate employment in many countries (Marshall and Wood, 1995; MacDonald and Sirianni, 1996; Poynter, 2000). As this general shift towards the services has taken place, there has been a considerable increase in the numbers of women participating in the labour market. In Britain, for example (which has the highest women s employment of any major EU country), recent figures show that between spring 1985 and 2000 the economic activity rate of working age women in the UK rose from 67 to 73 per cent. During the same period, men s labour market participation continued to decline (Labour Market Trends, February 2001). The reasons for the feminisation of the labour market are of course highly complex. A number of authors have observed, however, that female labour power is increasingly in demand at least in part because women are believed to naturally possess in abundance many of the social skills required by employers in the service-based econ- Vicki Belt and Ranald Richardson are at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle as research associate and senior research associate respectively. Juliet Webster is a research fellow at the Employment Research Unit Trinity College, Dublin. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. 20 New Technology, Work and Employment

2 omy (Adkins, 1995; McDowell, 1997; Woodfield, 1998; Bradley et al., 2000). This is particularly the case in so-called interactive service occupations, in which the central emphasis is upon face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with people (Leidner, 1991; Adkins, 1995; Taylor, 1998). Bradley et al. have claimed that the growing concern in contemporary organisations with customer service has meant that stereotypical feminine qualities such as caring, communicating and making people feel good are now regarded as highly important and sought after employment assets (2000: 78). It has even been suggested that femininity itself has become a market requirement in contemporary advanced industrial economies (Woodfield, 1998), and that many service sector employers are now actively engaged in marketing a version of femininity that emphasises passivity, servicing and generous attention to customers needs (McDowell and Court, 1994: 733). Relatively little empirical research has been carried out to date, however, that focuses on the implications of these developments for gender relations within organisations. In particular, how are feminine social skills being used by employers in the service industries, and to what extent are these skills valued, acknowledged and rewarded? Feminist researchers have long argued that skill definitions are saturated with sexual bias and that as a consequence women s work has traditionally not been defined as skilled work (Phillips and Taylor, 1980). Is this situation changing in the service economy as traditional conceptions of skill are being challenged? The broad purpose of this paper is to contribute to this discussion about gender, work and skill in the service economy. It does this by focusing on the particular case of a new and rapidly growing form of interactive service work in which women are well represented, namely that which takes place in telephone call centres. Call centres are specialised offices that are established by organisations in order to deliver a variety of services to customers over the telephone. Employees or agents 1 spend their working hours in near constant contact with customers, making or receiving telephone calls and processing the resulting information using desk-top computers (Fernie and Metcalf, 1997). Call centres are particularly good sites in which to explore the kinds of questions outlined above. This is not only because women make up the majority of employees in the industry 2, but also because it has been claimed by employers that women are more suited to the work than men because they are more likely to possess the appropriate social skills, particularly the ability to smile down the phone (Marshall and Richardson, 1996). Despite the fact that the rapid growth of the call centre industry has recently prompted considerable interest both within the media and within the academic community (see for example Fernie and Metcalf, 1997; Baldry et al., 1998; Frenkel et al., 1998; Knights and McCabe, 1998; Taylor and Bain, 1999; Bain and Taylor, 2000), questions about gender, and to a lesser extent skills, remain under-explored (Thompson et al., 2000). On the issue of skills, the evidence from existing literature is somewhat contradictory. Call centres are often portrayed by employers and industry representatives as knowledge-intensive working environments employing skilled, semiprofessional workers recruited for their strong interpersonal skills (Frenkel et al., 1998). However, most academic accounts of call centre work have stressed that routinisation, repetitiveness and general absence of employee control are the salient features of the call centre labour process (Taylor et al., 2000: 3). In this context, some authors have highlighted the ways in which information and communications technologies (ICTs) are used in call centres in order to industrialise the work process, drawing comparisons between call centres and factory assembly lines. As it has been well documented elsewhere (see for example Richardson, 1994), call centres use a range of ICTs in order to maximise efficiency and productivity. The technology that 1 Terminology varies from call centre to call centre, but customer services agent is probably the most commonly used term, certainly in the UK and Ireland. 2 Call centres are not an industry in the commonly accepted sense, rather they represent a particular way of delivering a range of services. However, the existence of a call centre industry is now widely acknowledged by a range of commentators. Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 21

3 is central to the call centre is the Automated Call Distribution system (ACD), which automatically processes in-coming telephone calls and distributes them to agents. According to Fernie and Metcalf, the ACD system allows calls to be force-fed to call centre agents on an unstoppable telephonic conveyor belt (1997: 9). The content of the calls themselves is also often heavily scripted and monitored. The use of this form of work organisation has lead Stanworth to conclude that call centre employees work in deskilled Tayloristic factory conditions (2000: 29, our emphasis). It appears, therefore, that a tension exists in call centres. Although employers claim that the interactive nature of the work means that the social skills and competencies of employees are central, at the same time the labour process is highly routinised and controlled. This paper is concerned with three key issues that arise from this situation. Firstly, it asks whether there is any evidence that women are being recruited to call centres because they possess the right social skills, or whether call centres merely represent the latest manifestation of a long-established trend in which women are recruited to routine, deskilled work (see Game and Pringle, 1984; Cockburn, 1985; Bradley, 1986, 1989). Secondly, it examines the extent to which employees can actually utilise and further enhance their work-related social skills, given the Taylorist approach to work organisation favoured in call centres. Thirdly, it explores the degree to which the social skills used by call centre workers are actually acknowledged and recognised by employers. In addressing these issues, the paper aims to capture the complexity of call centre work and provide insights into the ways in which it is experienced and perceived by female employees themselves. Research methodology This paper is based on data gathered during a comparative study of women s employment in call centres in three European countries Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK, carried out during 1998 and 1999 (Belt et al., 1999). These countries were chosen for study because at that time they were the most mature call centre markets in Europe (Datamonitor, 1998). In order to take into account the diversity of call centre industry, the study examined call centres in three different sectors: the financial services, the computer industry and outsourced or third-party call centres, and it involved four main elements. First, discussions with 40 call centre industry experts (including trade union representatives, professional associations, training providers and management consultants); second (as an information exchange and validation process), two workshops involving industry representatives; third, a postal survey of call centre managers, and fourth, 13 call centre case studies. This paper draws primarily on the qualitative evidence gathered during the case studies. Of the 13 call centre case studies that were carried out, five were in the financial services sector, three were in computer services, and a further five were outsourced firms. Three of the case study organisations were located in Ireland, four in the Netherlands and six in the UK. Each of the 13 call centre case studies involved semistructured, face-to-face interviews with call centre managers and/or Human Resources managers and at least two female supervisors or team leaders, as well as individual and group interviews with female call centre agents. Group interviews were selected as a method for interviewing agents where possible because of the well documented advantages of this approach when collecting data on experiences, beliefs and attitudes, and its emphasis on group interaction (Morgan, 1997). Given that the interviews were conducted inside the workplaces, it was also felt that the group interviewing technique might be more likely to set the agents at ease and generate dialogue than the more traditional one-to-one approach. In total, 60 oneto-one interviews and seven group interviews each involving six to 10 participants were carried out. A mixture of part-time and full-time, temporary and permanent, sales and customer service staff were interviewed. The management interviews were the most structured of those carried out and focused on the following themes: employee profile, organisational structure, work organisation and technology, recruitment, selection, training, skill requirements, 22 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

4 career progression, workplace culture, management practices and equal opportunities. Specific questions about women s position in the organisation were raised under each of these headings. The interviews conducted with the female team leaders and agents were less structured than those carried out with the managers. The main aim here was to keep the interview focused on a few key themes whilst allowing respondents the space to raise their own issues relating to their own work experiences. The central themes raised centred on the nature of the work performed and the specific skills involved, as well as women s experiences of training and their attitudes towards their jobs and their employers. Women s employment in call centres Unfortunately, official and reliable data on the composition of the call centre workforce in Europe does not yet exist. However, research on call centres in the UK has indicated that women make up the majority of call centre workers, reportedly accounting for around 70 per cent of employees (Austin Knight/Calcom, 1997; IDS, 1997; Mitial, 1998; Belt et al., 1999). Table 1 summarises the gender composition of the workforces in each of our 13 case study call centres. As the table demonstrates, women made up the majority of call centre employees in all but one of the organisations. It is important to note, however, that the proportion of female employees varied considerably between the different sectors studied. Women were best represented in the financial services call centres, where they made up between 70 and 91 per cent of employees. In the outsourced call centres women were slightly less dominant and constituted between 62 and 82 per cent of employees, whilst the gender composition of the workforce in the computer services call centres was on the whole more evenly balanced. Indeed, in one of the computer services organisations women were actually in a minority, making up just 46 per cent of employees. There Table 1: Employee Profiles of the Case Study Call Centres Centre Country Total Number of Proportion of Females Number Employees (%) Financial Services Call Centres 1 UK 1, UK UK 1, IR NL Computer Services Call Centres 6 UK IR 1, NL Outsourced Call Centres 9 UK UK IR NL NL Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 23

5 were also other significant differences in labour force composition between the different sectors in terms of age and educational background. Employees in the outsourced and computer services call centres tended to be younger than those in the financial services organisations. The outsourced call centres were particularly heavily weighted towards students and recent graduates. There were also some differences in terms of gender profiles between countries, with women most strongly represented in the Dutch call centres, where the proportion of part-time employees was the highest. In addition, there were marked gender differences across task and product areas within the case study call centres. Men vastly outnumbered women in the specialised technical support roles in the computer services call centres such as on software help-desks, and women tended to be concentrated on the whole in the customer service roles. It is important to make the point, therefore, when discussing the gender composition of the call centre workforce that although women make up the majority of employees in general, they do not dominate employment in all sectors and across all task areas. Despite these variations, women s labour power is clearly central to the call centre industry, and women make up a sizeable majority of the workforce. Little attention has been paid, however, to the significance of the gender composition of the workforce in the growing body of academic research on call centres (for exceptions see Belt et al., 1999, 2000; Buchanan and Koch-Schulte, 1999; Taylor and Tyler, 2000). This general neglect of gender issues is perhaps surprising given that feminist theorists have long argued that gender is important in organisational settings. Employers do not view women and men workers as undifferentiated and substitutable groups (Liff, 1986), and, as Bradley (1986) has asserted, male and female labour is both viewed differently and used differently by employers and managers. The remainder of this paper explores the ways in which call centre employers in particular perceive and utilise women workers. Women, call centre work and social skill As McDowell has argued, it is at recruitment stage that the particular characteristics and attributes sought in potential employees are made most clear and that the gender biases in selection procedures may become evident (McDowell, 1997: ). On the issue of the attributes sought by the organisations we studied, our interviews revealed that the managers in all of the case study call centres had very clear ideas about the kind of recruits that they were looking for. Importantly, these recruitment requirements were remarkably consistent between the case study organisations, and were shared (although there were variations in terms of emphasis) across both sectoral and geographical boundaries. Indeed, each of the companies had spent a substantial amount of time and money on developing highly specialised recruitment and selection procedures in order to ensure that they recruited the right sorts of people. Typically, these recruitment processes consisted of a number of key stages for candidates: the completion of an application form, a telephone interview, and attendance at an assessment centre and/or a face-to-face interview (usually involving some form of role-playing exercise). In addition, some organisations used personality testing to select suitable candidates. Sometimes the recruitment procedures used by organisations were even more stringent. For example, one of our case study call centres required potential recruits to attend a week-long training session during which their suitability for employment was assessed, and at the end of which candidates received a job offer or rejection. In addition, in some of the organisations the induction training course was used as a kind of trial period at the end of which those candidates perceived to be unsuitable could be dismissed. As Thompson et al. (2000) have rightly observed, the widespread use of such intensive and thorough recruitment processes reflects the centrality of social skills and competencies in call centre work. The recruitment and selection procedures used in call centres are specifically designed in order to correctly identify people who possess 24 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

6 the personal characteristics which enable them to perform the job role successfully, or as Taylor and Tyler have argued, to select personalities who will naturally deliver quality service (2000: 83). As one of the managers we interviewed explained, the rigorous recruitment processes used in call centres attempt to scientifically measure a set of social skills and attributes that are extremely difficult to distinguish and assess. In all of the case study organisations (apart from those in the computer services sector) these social skills were valued far more highly than the possession of formal qualifications, or on any other relevant factors such as computing skills and technical or industry knowledge and experience. The particular social competencies that were sought by employers can be categorised under two broad headings: communications skills, and people skills. It is argued here that managers (and also team leaders and agents) held gendered assumptions and expectations about the differential abilities of men and women to perform these skills. We now move on to discuss these two sets of skills in more detail. Communications skills The people here are very strong people, and they are communicators. They need to be I live for communication! Female Manager, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 10) When asked to specify the kinds of skills that they sought when recruiting employees, managers in all of the case study organisations stressed that the possession of good communications skills was absolutely crucial. This rather general term was used in order to refer to a set of competencies relating to the way in which the employee interacts with the customer or client over the telephone. In particular, employers claimed that they actively sought staff who possessed what was termed as customer focus. This term is used to refer to an employee s attitude towards customers as well as their ability to empathise with them. Managers stressed that the intensive and interactive nature of call centre work means that it is of vital importance that well-motivated individuals with a caring attitude are recruited, as one interviewee explained: We focus on the customer side during the interview, because if they are not interested in talking to customers then it s a big issue for us because that s what they do all day long. You ve got to want to help people. Male Manager, Computer Services Call Centre (Centre 6) In addition, managers frequently claimed that their priority in terms of recruitment was to identify workers with high levels of self-confidence and bubbly or lively personalities with, as one manager put it, a natural ability to talk, or to build rapport with customers. In this context, authors have observed that call centre employees are required to carry out emotional labour at a distance (Marshall and Richardson, 1996). Emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) has been identified as a key element in many interactive service occupations. It refers to the way in which employees are expected to publicly display an emotion that they may not necessarily feel as a routine, everyday part of their work (Wharton, 1993: 208). In most cases this means that workers are required to smile in a pleasant, friendly and involved way to customers (Lash and Urry, 1994: 200). In the case of call centre work, due to the absence of face-to-face contact, agents are expected to convey this smile to customers over the telephone. The agents we interviewed were clearly well aware of the importance of this aspect of their work, as one interviewee explained: We are the first point of contact into the company and it is very, very important that people feel welcomed into the company. The tone of voice that you take when speaking with customers is very important. You have to have the welcome in your voice. Female Agent, Computer Services Call Centre (Centre 7) It is important to note at this point, however, that these particular types of communications skills were less valued in the technical support call centre jobs in the computer Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 25

7 services call centres where, as we have already outlined, men made up the bulk of the workforce. In these roles, technical knowledge, qualifications and experience, as well as an interest in computers were deemed more important. Where communications skills were specified for these jobs, the term was used to refer to problemsolving abilities in particular. Employers rarely prioritised the need for customer focus or bubbly personalities when recruiting for staff for these positions, despite the fact that these employees, like other call centre workers, spend their working day in constant contact with customers over the telephone. In fact, it was admitted by some managers that people filling these roles were unlikely to possess these types of social skills because they were generally techies, and it was assumed that technically-minded people did not usually possess good communications skills. Although the managers interviewed were very keen to point out that they did not discriminate when recruiting employees, it was generally acknowledged that outside of the technical support roles, women were more likely than men to hold the types of communications skills required in the call centre environment. Indeed, this perception was also shared by most of the agents and team leaders. Women were seen as better able to handle the interactive aspects of the job. They were generally perceived to be more lively and chatty with the customers, as well as more highly skilled at building rapport over the telephone, as two interviewees explained: Girls are just more bright and bubbly on the phone and it definitely works in this job the brighter and bubblier you are. Female Team Leader, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 11) Women on the phone are much more conversational, there s generally more of a rapport. Generally men are much more to the point, they just want to get the job done. Female Team Leader, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 11) In addition, women were perceived to be more comfortable with the ethos of customer service, and particularly skilled at listening to and empathising with customers. They were also deemed to be more tolerant with the more difficult customers and less likely to react aggressively to irate callers. It was frequently stated by interviewees that these kinds of communications skills came naturally to women, as the following two quotations illustrate: I think that most of the call centre industry started in terms of customer service, and traditionally women are better at listening, they re better at empathising, they re better I mean our brains function in such a way that we can take a much more holistic overview of a situation. Female HR Manager, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 10) I don t want to seem sexist but I think women seem to have a lot more patience, we are able to talk people down, maybe it s the tone of our voice. I m not really sure, and I know that some of the guys can calm down difficult customers as well, but women seem to do it more and they are more natural at it. Agent, Computer Services Call Centre (Centre 11) Some of the women we interviewed were clearly aware of the fact that they sometimes deliberately enacted conventional gender stereotypes whilst at work, consciously using their femininity in order to calm down angry customers, or even persuade male customers into buying products. One team leader for example stated that she felt that some of the women had purposely developed a flirty way of selling, and another agent claimed: I know that particularly if I m calling to America and I get a man, then I will use my feminine Irish accent. We do think for ourselves and think what would these people like, and then use our different skills You know if you get a man, you will actually bring your voice down and hypnotise them into taking what you want them to take. There is a key difference between the sexes in that way, and the women would act differently to some callers. Female Agent, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 11) In summary, our research findings indicate that women are recruited by employers in part because they are deemed to naturally possess the kinds of communications skills required. Call centre employers expect women to perform emotional labour 26 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

8 over the phone, and they actively use femininity in order to secure competitive advantage. In addition, women workers are themselves also aware of the ways in which they can manipulate customers by using their femininity at work. People skills The second of the two main sets of social skills sought by employers was described by the interviewees as people skills. As Knights et al. (1999) and others have argued, the interactive, or social nature of call centre work, like many other areas of frontline service work demands new, subtler approaches to management. Call centre employers clearly centrally rely on the commitment and motivation of their employees, and one way in which companies have aimed to ensure that they achieve this is through the use of teamworking strategies. It is important to emphasise that, generally speaking, in the call centre environment teamworking does not involve employees working collectively on a range of tasks and sharing decision-making with other group members. Rather, call centre agents spend the vast majority of their day working in isolation from their fellow employees. However, they do tend to be grouped into teams, usually of around people, and work towards shared call targets. A strong emphasis is also placed on building a sense of collectivity amongst employees. Indeed, many of the agents we interviewed commented on the strength of the team spirit and the sociable culture found in their call centres. The following comment was typical in this respect: When I came here the first thing I noticed was the atmosphere, and I think it s to do with because there are so many people in the call centre all interacting with each other. I mean the atmosphere out here is electric at times, it s unbelievable. People are very supportive of each other. Female Team Leader, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) Although call centres are often portrayed as highly controlled working environments in which any social contact with fellow employees is difficult, it was clear from our interviews that agents did find the time and space to talk to their colleagues both inside and outside of the workplace, as one team leader explained: A lot of chat goes on. People get on very well, there s a lot of socialising that goes on after work. Again I suppose it s the nature of the thing a lot of young people together it s a very good atmosphere% people have to do their work but there s usually a bit of bantering that goes on. Female Team Leader, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 11) There was considerable evidence that employers actively encouraged this interaction between colleagues not only by deliberately recruiting individuals that they considered to be sociable, but also by paying for regular team-based nights out, building a supportive coaching culture, and encouraging some form of friendly competition between teams within the workplace. The benefits of this were apparent when numerous agents we interviewed admitted that the main reason that they had remained working in their organisation rather than leaving to go elsewhere was due to the sociable nature of their workplaces. The responsibility for developing and maintaining the sense of team spirit in the call centre environment usually falls primarily upon the shoulders of the team leader. Indeed, the team leaders we interviewed were keen to stress that the main part of their job involved motivating people, and the key way in which this was achieved was by ensuring that agents were integrated into the team. In order to do this they were expected to develop strong personal relationships with their team members, as one team leader explained: I think one of the main things in my position is to kind of get to know people really. It s not just listening into calls you know, you re doing all right here, you re doing it wrong here and all that. It s really getting to know the person as an individual. Female Team Leader, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 27

9 It was widely agreed that it was a vital requirement that team leaders possess strong people skills, particularly the ability to understand, communicate with, motivate, coach and provide support to others, in order to perform in their jobs effectively. Women were well represented in team leader roles in all of the case study call centres, making up at the lowest 47 per cent, and at the highest 80 per cent of team leaders. Indeed, in five of the call centres women were more highly represented in team leader positions than they were in agent roles. It was clear from our interviews that managers, team leaders and agents felt that women were more likely than men to possess the sorts of people skills required for the team leader roles. Two interviewees explained: I do think there s advantages in being in this business if you re female, because in general females are better at communicating, and its all about communicating, making people feel part of the team and making them feel like they belong. Female Team Leader, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) Women have got more understanding, more empathy and they can understand people, and they are the kind of skills that you need in a call centre with the coaching and all that. Maybe that s just a traditional thing, but with managing the staff, the women seem to just get on with it. Male Manager, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) By contrast, male employees were on the whole said to be too competitive and individualistic to be successful in most team leader positions, with the exception of some sales-focused jobs. Women s aptitude for people skills was viewed by many interviewees as natural, and was closely related to their traditional caring role in the family. One team leader claimed: It s a natural instinct for women looking after people, men are more aggressive, more likely to take people to task first rather than encourage them. Female Team Leader, Computer Services Call Centre (Centre 7) Our interviews indicate that women, especially more mature women returning to the workforce after bringing up families, are being specifically targeted by call centre employers for their perceived informal team building and leadership skills, a practice which has also been observed in other areas of service work (Kerfoot and Knights, 1994). Managers explicitly stated their preference for older women employees on a number of occasions, claiming that what was repeatedly termed as their greater life experience was invaluable in the call centre environment. Opportunities for skill enhancement As we have shown, the pressurised and interactive character of call centre work means that employers place considerable emphasis on recruiting individuals with the right combination of social skills and personality characteristics. Women are deemed particularly likely to possess these social skills. We now go on to focus on the question of the extent to which these skills are being further developed and enhanced. Our findings in this area indicate overwhelmingly that the nature of work organisation used in call centres acts to constrain skill development. One of the key aspects of call centre work organisation, acknowledged by call centre employers as well as by commentators and consultants in the industry, is the predominance of uniform tasks. In fact, the very purpose of establishing a call centre in the first place is to create an environment in which work can be standardised to create relatively uniform and repetitious activities so as to achieve economies of scale and consistent quality of customer service. As we have already noted, a range of ICTs, chiefly ACD systems, are used in call centres in order to achieve this goal. It has been well documented elsewhere (see for example Richardson, 1994; Baldry et al., 1998; Taylor and Bain, 1999; Bain and Taylor, 2000; Callaghan and Thompson, 2001) that in addition to intensifying the workflow, the technologies used in call centres also allow for the extensive surveillance and monitoring of employees. Information is routinely collected for example on the length of each agent s calls, breaks and wrap-up times 28 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

10 (the amount of time it takes to carry out any necessary data input after a call has finished). In most call centres, managers and team leaders also record or remotely listen in to calls in order to regulate the quality of the service provided by the agents. There were remarkable similarities between our case study call centres in terms of the approach taken to work organisation across both sectors and national contexts. The monitoring and control practices described above were widespread, and agents in the case study call centres spent all of their working hours on the telephone dealing with a narrow range of tasks and products. It is notable, however, that the work was least routinised, and monitoring and control practices least stringently used in the technical support roles in the computer services call centres, where, as we have already noted, males made up the majority of employees. When asked about their experiences of working in the call centre environment, many agents claimed that they found working on the phones all day extremely repetitive, stressful and tiring. This was particularly pronounced amongst those working in the financial services call centres, where the work was the most standardised (and women were most highly represented). However, agents in all of the organisations we studied talked of the lack of stimulation in their jobs and the robotic nature of the work, and some identified similarities between the call centre environment and the factory assembly-line. The restrictive nature of the work was commented upon by most agents. The interviewee quoted below for example emphasised the lack of opportunity available to demonstrate a broad range of skills due to the routinisation of the work process: I think it s hard to show your skills. Your job is to be logged in for seven hours. It s hard to show what else you can do when you are only dealing with calls. You have to make a supreme effort to do anything that s not your job. Female Agent, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 1) Further, agents were particularly frustrated because despite the fact that many had applied for the job in part because they felt that they possessed the necessary social skills, it was felt that they could not fully use these competencies because of the emphasis placed upon the speed and timing of the calls. Giving good quality customer service, resolving complex enquiries and helping with customers, emerged as key sources of job satisfaction for agents, but many felt the system of work organisation used made it extremely difficult for them to do this. Further, some agents actually doubted whether their employers were in fact interested in delivering high quality customer service at all: You don t give customer service I don t think. You can t deal with the problems properly that s not what they want. They are just interested in the statistics. Female Agent, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 3) The managers we interviewed were aware of the presence of these sentiments amongst agents. At the same time, however, they also openly acknowledged that recruitment and selection processes were not only designed in order to identify people with customer focus, but also to select people with the ability to deal with repetitive and highly pressurised work. In our case study organisations managers admitted that workers were actively sought for their ability to maintain a positive attitude with customers despite the pressures placed upon them by the near constant flow of calls and repetitive nature of the work, as two interviewees explained: What they are doing on the phone, it s not rocket science, and at the end of the day it can become repetitive over time, so we have to make sure that they ve got the right personalities to cope with that. Male Manager, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) We always look for people who have excellent telephone skills and who are bubbly and enthusiastic. But we need people who won t get fed up being on the phones all day as well. You know, not everybody is suited to working on the telephone and you have to watch out for that as well. Female Personnel Assistant, Computer Services Call Centre (Centre 7) Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 29

11 When this issue was pursued during the interviews, it became clear that most managers, team leaders and agents assumed that women were especially likely to have the kind of personality suited to the repetitive, yet highly pressurised work that characterises call centres. A number of interviewees claimed for example that women were generally more able than men to handle the routine work, and stick at the job for longer: I find that the girls do the work better, they stay on-line and like what they are meant to do... whereas I think the men are constantly coming off-line to try and do other things. Female Team Leader, Computer Services Sector (Centre 6) You do find that the men are more likely to be doing things that they shouldn t be doing, whereas women stick to the procedure and the way it should be done. Male Manager, Financial Services Call Centre (Centre 4) Some interviewees claimed that men did not tend to cope as well as women with the pressure involved in the work. The following manager (who had been responsible for recruiting call centre staff for a number of years) claimed that: The people I ve employed before, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that I ve literally recruited and trained myself, a very, very small percentage probably less than 10 per cent have been males. And that s not because I haven t given them the opportunities, because I have. In actual fact, in a short space of time it s the males that tend to come to me saying that they just can t hack it at the end of the day. Female Manager, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 9) Our findings indicate, therefore, that call centre managers hold gendered assumptions about the abilities of women and men to perform highly controlled, repetitive and routine job tasks, tending to conform to a long-held view that women are more suited that men to working as machine operators (Cockburn, 1985). Clearly, the persistence of this perception raises doubts regarding the extent to which female call centre agents can actually further develop and enhance their social skills in the workplace. Nevertheless, there was limited evidence of skill development amongst the call centre agents in the case study organisations. Each of the companies had invested considerable amounts of money and time in training their front-line staff. It was not unusual for induction training programmes to last for six weeks, and agents repeatedly described the induction training period as very intensive, stressing that the training that they had received had been far more thorough than any that they had received in previous jobs. They were especially positive about the skills that they had developed in manipulating and managing conversations with customers. As Thompson et al. have observed, call centre agents have to develop a consciousness of their social skills and an awareness of when and where to deploy these (2000: 128), and it appeared that many of the agents we interviewed had indeed done this. Although many interviewees clearly found this somewhat empowering, and were positive about the transferability of these skills to other work contexts, they were doubtful about whether they had actually developed any new skills whilst working in the call centre environment: I don t really think I ve picked up many new skills. I ve just developed a lot on what was already there. Yes, I ve built on what was already there rather than picking up new things. Female Agent, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 9) Whilst call centre agents have some (albeit limited) scope for skill development, the situation appears to be less positive for team leaders. It is widely recognised that supervisory level staff play a pivotal role in the call centre environment, particularly in terms of training and motivating agents. Nevertheless, four of the case study companies provided no induction training at all to their team leaders or supervisors. Further, in the remaining organisations the induction training was considered by supervisors and team leaders to be poorly structured, and too reliant upon them picking up skills on the job. Although they were responsible for directly overseeing considerable numbers of staff in a highly stressful work environment, very few had received any sort of management training. This is in spite of the fact that most of 30 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

12 the team leaders we interviewed had been promoted internally and had little other management experience. The intensive nature of call centre work left them little time to further develop their people skills beyond those immediately necessary to carry out their day to day work. This situation is likely to create serious barriers for those wishing to progress their careers both within and beyond the call centre. Invisible skills? Skill recognition in call centres As Woodfield (1998) and others have argued, female social skill contributions in the workplace have in the past been ignored and undervalued, and because they are viewed as natural feminine characteristics, viewed as neither recognisable nor remunerable. Our research findings on the issue of skill recognition in the specific context of call centre work give a somewhat mixed picture in this respect. Whilst on the one hand there was a general perception that women naturally possess the social skills deemed essential for call centre work, at the same time women workers were keen to emphasise that they had worked extremely hard at learning, developing and refining these skills. Further, it was frequently claimed that call centre jobs were difficult to perform well, and there was evidence of a widespread conviction that call centre jobs were indeed skilled jobs. These views were expressed not only by agents themselves, but also by team leaders and managers. Overall, there was little evidence that women s social skills were undervalued within the case study call centres, despite the fact that these skills were understood by many to be naturally held. However, there was a widely held view that the expertise involved in the work is somewhat invisible to those outside the call centre setting, both within wider society and elsewhere within parent organisations. Managers spoke of the separation between the call centre and the rest of the organisation (a division which was sometimes exacerbated by geographical distance). The relatively low status of call centres in general is also reflected in wage levels in the industry. Information on the levels of pay and rewards received by call centre employees in the three countries studied is somewhat limited, although reasonably detailed information is available for the UK. Here, in spite of the demands of call centre employers in terms of skill requirements, and the rigorous selection processes used, average salaries for call centre employees fall well below national averages (TUC, 2001), with the average starting salary for customer service advisors in 2000 at 11,150 (IDS, 2000). It should be stressed, however, that pay levels varied considerably between sectors. In our case study call centres, salaries were significantly higher in the computer services call centres (for the sales and technical support roles) where the proportion of male workers was the highest in all three countries. The differences in this respect were not inconsiderable, with pay levels for technical support staff around a third higher than for those in the female-dominated customer service roles. Despite the fact that women s social skills are in demand and recognised as central in call centre work, they continue to be poorly rewarded in financial terms. A number of authors have observed that if women s social skills are to become more visible, widely recognised and better compensated they must be formally identified and recognised as skills (OECD, 1998; Woodfield, 1998). Our findings are more hopeful here as there is some evidence that the social competencies involved in call centre work are now being more clearly categorised and formalised in vocational qualifications and competency frameworks in the three countries in our study. Clearly, formal qualifications may provide one way of recognising the competencies and skills involved in call centre work as well as providing employees with improved labour market opportunities. However, although these developments are clearly encouraging, our research findings indicate that awareness and take-up of these qualifications at present remains low. Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 31

13 Conclusions To reiterate, the main aim of this paper has been to address two broad questions: are call centre employers recruiting women for their social skills, and to what extent are these skills being developed and recognised? In exploring these questions, the paper has tackled a problematic that has long preoccupied feminist researchers: how and why women become concentrated in particular occupations, and the consequences of this segregation for the way in which the work is perceived, organised and rewarded. These questions, although explored by feminists since the 1970s, continue to retain their relevance today as women continue to enter the labour market in growing numbers, taking a significant proportion of the new jobs being created in the service industries. In theory, the rise of the service economy could lead to the re-valuation of those social skills traditionally associated with women s work, disrupting the long established pattern in which women s work has repeatedly been undervalued as well as poorly recognised and rewarded. In this paper we have attempted to examine whether there are any indications that this is taking place in the particular case of call centre work. We have shown that feminine social skills do play a central role in call centre work, and that as a consequence, women are deemed to be particularly suited to it. At the same time, however, we have shown that women are also recruited to call centre work because they are perceived to be more capable of dealing with the monotony of the work and the regimented work environment. The highly standardised and controlled nature of work organisation used in call centres constrains the extent to which women s social skills can be used and further enhanced. This creates a situation in which thousands of women are being recruited to call centres for their perceived social skills and competencies, and then only allowed to use them to a very limited extent. Further, women are also most heavily concentrated in those areas of call centre work, particularly in customer service roles, that attract the lowest financial rewards. These trends were found in all three of the countries in our study. However, our research also points to the emergence of a more optimistic picture on the issue of skill recognition rather than just the continuation of these wellestablished trends in the sexual division of labour. Although women were often deemed to naturally possess the social competencies required for call centre work, there was little indication in our interviews that this meant that these skills were ignored or undervalued within the call centre setting. Rather, it was repeatedly emphasised by staff of all levels that call centre work was indeed skilled work. Agents were particularly keen to talk about the social skills that they had developed, particularly in handling difficult customers, building rapport and controlling conversations. Indeed, call centre employers themselves encourage agents to recognise the skills involved in their work by providing training programmes specifically designed in order to raise personal awareness and self-confidence amongst employees, as this interviewee explained: They are given training which has a bias towards communication, they re given the various techniques and are taught to be more perceptive and aware of other people s communication with them... it just builds a confident team of people, people that are not inhibited. Female HR Director, Outsourced Call Centre (Centre 10) An interesting question for future research would focus on whether call centre employees are able to use this sense of self-confidence in their social and communications skills positively in order to improve their working lives and position in the labour market. 32 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

14 References Adkins, L. (1995), Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and The Labour Market (Buckingham: University Press). Austin Knight/Calcom (1997), Call Centre Practice Not Theory: The First National Survey of Call Centre Management and Staff Attitudes (London: Austin Knight UK Ltd.). Bain, P. and P. Taylor (1999), Employee relations, worker attitudes and trade union representation in call centres, paper presented at the 17th Annual Labour Process Conference, Royal Holloway College, University of London, March. Bain, P. and P. Taylor (2000), Entrapped by the electronic panopticon? Worker resistance in the call centre, New Technology, Work and Employment, 15, 1, Baldry, C., P. Bain and P. Taylor (1998), Bright satanic offices : Intensification, control and team Taylorism, in C. Warhurst and P. Thompson (eds.), The New Workplace (London: Macmillan). Belt, V., R. Richardson, J. Webster, K. Tijdens, and M. van Klaveren (1999), Work opportunities for women in the information society: call centre teleworking, final report for the Information Society Project Office (DGIII and DGXIII), European Commission, Brussels. Belt, V., R. Richardson, J. Webster (2000), Women s work in the information economy: The case of telephone call centres, Information, Communication and Society, 3, 3, Bradley, H. (1986), Technological change, management strategies, and the development of gender-based job segregation in the labour process, in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds.) Gender and the Labour Process (Aldershot: Gower Publishing), Bradley, H. (1989), Men s Work, Women s Work (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bradley, H., M. Erickson, C. Stephenson and S. Williams (2000), Myths at Work (Cambridge: Polity Press). Buchanan, R. and S. Koch-Schulte (1999), Gender on the Line: Technology, Restructuring and the Reorganisation of Work in the Call Centre Industry, report to Status of Women Canada, August. Callaghan, G. and P. Thompson (2001), Edwards revisited: Technical control and call centres, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 22, 1, Cockburn, C. (1985), Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technological Know-how (London: Pluto). Datamonitor (1998), Call Centres in Europe (London: Datamonitor). Fernie, S. and D. Metcalf (1997), (Not) hanging on the telephone: Payment systems in the new sweatshops, Working Paper 891, London School of Economics. Frenkel, S., M. Tam, M. Korczynski and K. Shire (1998), Beyond bureaucracy Work organisation in call centres, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 9, 6, Game, A. and R. Pringle (1984), Gender at Work (London: Pluto). Hochschild, A. (1983), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press). Incomes Data Services (1997), Pay and Conditions in Call Centres 1997 (London: Incomes Data Services). Incomes Data Services (2000), Pay and Conditions in Call Centres 2000 (London: Incomes Data Services). Kerfoot, D. and D. Knights (1994), The gendered terrains of paternalism, in S. Wright (ed.) Anthropology of Organizations (London: Routledge). Knights, D. and D. McCabe (1998), What happens when the phone goes wild : Staff, stress and spaces for escape in a BPR telephone banking work regime, Journal of Management Studies, 35, 2, Knights, D., D. Calvey and P. Odih (1999), Social managerialism and the time-discplined subject: Quality-quantity conflicts in a call centre, paper presented at the 17th Annual International Labour Process Conference, Royal Holloway College, University of London, March. Lash, S. and J. Urry (1994), Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage). Leidner, R. (1991), Selling hamburgers, selling insurance: Gender, work and identity, Gender and Society, 5, Liff, S. (1986), Technical change and occupational sex-typing, in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds.) Gender and the Labour Process (Aldershot: Gower Publishing) Macdonald, C.L. and C. Sirianni (1996), The service society and the changing experience of work, in C.L. Macdonald and C. Sirianni (eds.) Working in the Service Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) Marshall, J.N. and P. Wood (1995), Services and Space (London: Longman). Marshall, J.N. and R. Richardson (1996), The impact of telemediated services on corporate structures: The example of branchless retail banking in Britain, Environment and Planning A, 28, McDowell, L. (1997), Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford: Blackwell). Blackwell Publishers Ltd Women in telephone call centres 33

15 McDowell, L. and G. Court (1994), Gender divisions of labour in the post-fordist economy: the maintenance of occupational sex segregation in the financial services sector, Environment and Planning A, 26, 9, Mitial (1998), European Location Study: Call Centres in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands (Wrexham: Mitial). Morgan, D. (1997), Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications). Office for National Statistics (2001), Labour Market Trends, 109, 2, February. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1998), The Future of Female- Dominated Occupations (Paris: OECD Publications). Phillips, A. and B. Taylor (1980), Sex and skill: Notes towards feminist economics, Feminist Review, 6, Poynter, G. (2000), Restructuring in the Service Industries: Management Reform and Workplace Relations in the UK Service Sector (London: Mansell). Richardson, R. (1994), Organisational and locational implications of new telemediated services, in R. Mansell (ed.) Information, Control and Technical Change (London: Aslib) Stanworth, S. (2000), Women and work in the information age, Gender, Work and Organization, 7, 1, Taylor, S. (1998), Emotional labour and the new workplace, in P. Thompson and C. Warhurst (eds.), Workplaces of the Future (London: Macmillan). Taylor, P. and P. Bain (1999), An assembly line in the head : Work and employee relations in the call centre, Industrial Relations Journal, 30, 2, Taylor, S. and M. Tyler (2000), Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry, Work, Employment and Society, 14, Taylor, P., G. Mulvey, J. Hyman and P. Bain (2000), Work organisation, control and the experience of work in call centres, paper presented at the 15th Annual Employment Research Unit Conference, Cardiff Business School, 6 7 September. Thompson, P., C. Warhurst, and G. Callaghan (2000), Human capital or humanity? Knowledge, skills and competencies in interactive service work, in C. Prichard et al. (eds.) Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning, Trades Union Congress (2001), It s your call: TUC call centres campaign report, February 2001 (London: TUC). Wharton, A. (1993), The affective consequences of service work: Managing emotions on the job, Work and Occupations, 20, 2, Woodfield, R. (1998), Working women and social labour, RUSEL Working Paper No. 33, Department of Politics, University of Exeter. 34 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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