Remote Working In The BPO Sector: Rewards And Pitfalls

As the COVID-19 induced pandemic raged around the world, organisations across industries made a massive shift towards a remote working model. Companies in the BPO sector also followed suit in the early-2020 itself, which helped them provide uninterrupted service to their clients throughout the year.

Only in the recent past, many BPO firms were sceptical about switching to work-from-home, while now, they have all embraced it as a “new normal,” wherein millions of BPO executives are working remotely worldwide. That said, remote work comes with its own set of pitfalls. For example, BPO leaders are concerned about the issues like – How to maintain seamless and smooth communication with the remote-work model? And how to ensure security for employees working remotely?

These challenges, however, have proved to be minor hurdles in the larger picture. For instance, team meetings that previously used to happen in-person are now being conducted across video conferencing services like Zoom, WebEX, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc.

Home office job postings were quite unusual for this industry until even a year ago. Therefore, most outsourcing service providers lacked the equipment, infrastructure, and management tools to help their employees work remotely.

While the BPO industry is gearing towards remote work, it is still concerned about issues like data security and disruption in its employees’ work due to poor infrastructure and other issues. Industry leaders have realised that work-from-home is not a cakewalk for many employees. We, at VOLANS, are also cognizant of this fact and we are working towards making it easier for our employees to work from home.

Coming to rewards, BPO companies are utilising remote work to find talent, boost productivity, and improve employees’ well-being. Many employees enjoy a feeling of autonomy through remote work, which eventually leads to increased job satisfaction in those cases.

Besides, remote working has opened avenues for BPO companies to reach out to the workforce in other locations/countries where the quality of labour is high.

With remote agents, not only the financial investment but carbon footprint is minimised. This situation has encouraged many companies to embrace the digitalisation and automation of work processes.

Even though the pandemic has affected the outsourcing industry at some level, experts are saying that outsourcing will witness steady growth in future. Also, the industry will recover from the crisis and take measure for increased relevance.

VOLANS is also adapting its working processes according to the demand of time. We aim to emerge stronger as an organisation in the post-COVID world.