The BPO mayhem: Hiring Freeze, Salary cuts and job layoffs, the industry stands disoriented due to Coronavirus in India

The Indian BPO Industry is under severe chaos. Due to extended lockdown and major restrictions, the business of BPO and ITES companies stands disrupted. Bar healthcare, the virus has also killed hundreds of jobs and the threat continues to increase. According to the NASSCOM, the IT and BPO trade body in India, a total of 1.1 million people worked in the Indian BPO industry in 2017. Further, according to ICCM, the size of the industry is nearly 40 billion dollars.

When such an industry comes down to its knees, jobs and the people connected to it are bound to be affected. A look at the current layoffs inside the tech industry reveals that BPO and ITES don't stand unaffected. Companies are asking employees to go on unpaid leaves or are fired. While job losses are mounting, a few companies have outright refused to pay pending salaries. One such case includes that of Hexaware Technologies. They have fired over 800 employees and said that they won’t pay the employees for May, June, and July. These cases are a violation of labour laws, but the companies have no answer as of now.

And now, as the lockdown opens, companies are asking the leftover employees to start working in the offices. While this is risking their health, it is also unclear how these companies expect to bring people back from their hometowns. And there have been several instances where the companies have laid-off the employees who were not able to make to the office. This is brutal at its best.

Major IT firms have resorted to creating an alumnus dictionary of sorts but we have no idea how these BPO forms will make-do of the laid-off employees. The CG also asked companies to pay salaries to workers without any pay cuts. This was as early as March 29. , issued strict orders to all employers to pay wages to workers without any deduction for the period when their establishment was closed down due to the lockdown. But when establishments closed down due to lockdown, the companies were nowhere to be questioned.

The Work From Home Situation for BPO workers

The BPO industry is auxiliary to the IT industry. When techies started working from home- the calls, the nature of outsourcing died down and that gave rise to the issue of non-payment of salaries.

For examples, the IT industry has largely been both affected and unaffected by the lockdown. Some firms have even registered an increase in productivity. But owing to fewer consumers, most of these companies have enabled work-from-home. So when it comes to problems that usually BPOs would handle, the IT companies are making cost cuts.

For example, business houses that needed services from the BPO industry to support their retail operations do not need it anymore. Since the entire retail market and distribution channel is shut, BPO services suffer. This has, thus, led to the loss of business for such BPO companies, that were supporting these kinds of business verticals.

The telemarketing business has halted down too. Either people don't have enough resources to work-from-home or they lack proper training. In both cases, BPO companies did not perceive the future of these jobs. These problems persist, especially, where cyber-security or data breach is possible. So, they face the harsh side of the situation.

Poor Infrastructure will have greater future consequences

A lot of employees working for BPOs need to be monitored. The Indian IT infrastructure, though, has several issues. For example, there are weak links, no means of using laptops/desktops, poor internet connectivity at the agents’ houses etc. The location from the worker is working and the data points are two different places too. This will only lead to data transportation problems. Further, Internet Dongles’ non-availability, desktops not working on WIFI/Smartphone hotspot have added to the chaos.

Like said earlier, in work-from-home methodologies, there is no proper monitoring. Thus, the quality of work has declined.

Not working from home

Many companies are now allowed to open offices. This has also added t the problem. First. the industry was at risk, now it is the health of the people who have built the industry. The government allowed office opening to essential services and BPOs could work under 33% staff. But people are not turning up for work due to the Coronavirus fear. People are maintaining social-distancing, taking hygiene precautions but the question of "what if" always looms over their heads.

Not just employees, employers too are worried about the safety of their employees. But if they don't come out, essential services like Data sensitive process will suffer.