If this is how your head of security locks up his bike, maybe you need a new head of security.
If this is how your head of security locks up his bike, maybe you need a new head of security.
Repair Cat might be taking a snooze.
Well, not really. But you can now run call centers at parity in the UK when compared to the costs associated with running a third party call center in India. As per this recent article over in Global Services on how a UK company reverts outsourced work from costly India, New Call Telecom is opening a new call center in Burnley, England (a borough of Lancashire) because operational costs are on par with what they’d pay in Mumbai and New Delhi. Furthermore, since the average handling time of a call in the UK is 25% less, they will cut headcount costs as well. And the headcount they do hire will be “sticky”, unlike the Indian employees who leave for lunch and don’t come back when the call center across the street makes them a better offer.
So, now that it’s cheaper to open new call centers in the US and the UK, and now that Indian companies are hiring American citizens on American soil to fulfill the outsourcing contracts granted to them by American companies, is there really any reason to go to India? Maybe. But it is still getting more expensive by the day and will never offer home-soil advantages, especially in services.
Now, there is the problem that, because many companies outsourced all of their services, they no longer know how to even run a call center, but there is a solution for that. Insource some Indian experts to do it for you. And if you insource to Arkansas and set up some cameras, you can have the next great reality series. While NBC airs Outsourced, about ex-pat Americans shipped off to India to run call centers, FX will be airing Insourced about the life of an Indian call-center manager, who never left the country, who is shipped off to live with some hillbillies in the Ozarks.
A recent article over on the CPO Agenda on Fresh Thinking, which noted that Procurement must be bolder in bringing about wholesale change that delivers effective results for the business, highlighted a number of areas that could be ripe for change. These areas need to be looked at carefully because their current state could actually be holding the Supply Management organization back. In order to advance, Supply Management cannot accept the status quo when the status quo is an outdated, ineffective, and or costly way of running the business.
The following five areas are ripe starting grounds for a Supply Management organization that wants to take its operations to the next level.
A recent article in Industry Week on putting brain science to work in your company that reviews Daniel Goleman’s The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, which addresses the question of how you get the most from your people, is right when it notes that disengaged and frazzled employees aren’t really contributing to your organization.
Disengagement, where an employee is in a low-motivation state where they are distracted and inattentive to the task at hand, occurs when an employee is not inspired, motivated or engaged in the work they do. A disengaged employee performs well enough to keep his job, but no better.
Frazzled, where an employee is flooded with a cascade of stress hormones that causes the employee to focus on the problem bothering him rather than his job, occurs when the employee is upset with something. A frazzled employee can only address the problem, not the solution.
Only an employee in the flow, a state of neural harmony, where only what is relevant to the task at hand is what is activated, can be truly productive. The flow maximizes cognitive abilities and puts people are at their best. An employee in the “flow” isn’t the problem.
Moreover, not only will disengaged or frazzled employees not be productive, but their disengagement and frazzledness can spread to their coworkers. It’s hard to give a cr@p when no one around you does. And if everyone is stressed out, chances are you will get stressed out to.
Thus, if an organization wants to be productive, and take it to the next level, the first thing it should do is identify those employees who are disengaged or frazzled and figure out why. If an employee is disengaged because tasks, in an effort to become lean or efficient, have been broken up to the point where they are monotonous, then the organization should address its processes and procedures. Sometimes assembly-lining tasks is a good idea, sometimes it isn’t. If all a person does is check totals on reports, that’s not a good procedure. And if a group of employees who are always frazzled have the same boss, chances are that the boss is the problem. Shape him up (with training) or ship him out (with a pink slip). Next level requires productivity, productivity requires engagement, and engagement requires being in the flow. Make sure your employees are there before trying to knock it up a notch.