Jane Lockwood

Are We Getting the Right People for the Job? A Study of English Language Recruitment Assessment Practices in the Business Processing Outsourcing Sector India and the Philippines

Although the business processing outsourcing (BPO) industry in India and the Philippines is keen to employ good English language communicators, especially to work in call centers dealing with native speaker customers, it is by no means certain that the investments they are making into their language recruitment assessment processes are paying off. Many call centers are reporting recruitment conversion rates as low as 1%. It is further reported that the lack of English language skills is the main reason for rejection. But how exactly are the call centers carrying out their English language recruitment assessments? How effective are the BPO industry’s recruitment assessment tools and practices? This article will report on a study of English language recruitment assessment practices carried out in two multinational companies (MNCs) that have BPO sites in India and the Philippines. One of these MNC sites offers IT and back office support and the other operates a global network of call centers. Research access was granted to their human resource departments to shadow their recruitment language assessment practices, to interview key stakeholders, and to collect and analyze relevant documentation. The study revealed a problematic stakeholder understanding of what to look for in language ability when recruiting staff; it also revealed the problematic use of language assessment tools and practices in terms of validity, reliability, practicality, and fairness. It will be argued in this article that this unfortunate combination may be resulting in unreasonable language assessment “gatekeeping” to BPO industry employment and that the problems being experienced by the BPO industry to recruit enough good speakers of English may reside more in their own practices than in the levels of English of their graduate applicants.

Virtual team management: what is causing communication breakdown?

The combined effects of business offshoring, of flexible work practices and of rapid improvements in technology have resulted in workplace virtual communication becoming increasingly prevalent for business meetings. However, business leaders report them to be more challenging than face-to-face ones. Most global teams are located where diverse offshored work teams are using English as a lingua franca, and despite common business complaints that they are fraught with communication breakdown, the precise causes appear to be highly complex. This paper reports on a training needs analysis carried out in a large globalized workplace for a programme entitled ‘Communicating in Virtual Teams’. Multiple sources such as surveys, interviews, document reviews and meeting observations were used to better understand the causes of virtual team communication breakdown. Whilst the analyses revealed different kinds of language and cultural misunderstandings, deeper problems of marginalization and identity confusion within global teams were also reported. This paper argues that without addressing the underlying struggles caused by offshoring, a training programme runs the risk of only addressing the surface communication problems of technology, leadership and meeting skills and even language and culture issues, which can arguably be seen as ‘masking’ deeper employee concerns and struggles.

THE WORKPLACE, THE SOCIETY AND THE WIDER WORLD: THE OFFSHORING AND OUTSOURCING INDUSTRY

Workplace language assessment poses special issues for language testers, but also, when it becomes very large scale, it poses issues for language policy. This article looks at these issues, focusing on the offshore and outsourcing (O&O) industry as it is transitioning from native-speaking (NS) countries into nonnative-speaking (NNS) destinations such as India and the Philippines. This is obviously most impacted in call centers, where the ability of customer service representatives (CSRs) to communicate with ease with their native-English speaking customers is central to business success and can be key to a nations economy. Having reviewed the (limited) research in this area, we take the Philippines as our example to explore how government, academe, and the business sector are dealing with the language proficiency and personnel-training issues caused by the exponential growth in this industry. Appropriate language assessments that are practical, while also being valid and reliable, are critical if the Philippines is to retain its position in this emerging market. Currently, call centers in Philippines complain of very poor recruitment rates due to poor language ability, and of poor quality communication outcomes measures: But how do they assess these key areas? We describe and evaluate the current situation in call center language assessment in the Philippines and discuss possible ways forward, for the Philippines and for the O&O industry more broadly.

Discursive control and power in virtual meetings

Ways of communicating effectively in spoken English, using technology, in a virtual globalized context have received little attention from applied linguists. The role of language in synchronous computer-mediated discourse (CMD) used in virtual teamwork is now emerging as a key area of research concern in business management and information technology disciplines. This article uses linguistic frameworks, most particularly critical discourse analysis (CDA) and systemic functional linguistics (SFL), in particular appraisal analysis, to demonstrate how interpersonal meanings may create dominance, power and solidarity within a sample of a virtual team management meetings. Focusing on one manager case study, we investigate how language is used, consciously or unconsciously, to dominate and close down discussion with his colleagues. We first present the key findings from a turn-taking analysis and then present, through the application of appraisal analysis, how this manager opens or contracts the space available for others to participate. By revealing how power and control unfold through this analysis, the findings may lead to an enhanced self-awareness among all members in virtual teams and reveal how language plays a crucial role in engaging members during a meeting, or in this case, disengaging them.

“Scripts Are Beautiful”: Managers’ and Agents’ Views of Script Use in Call Centers

Some recent studies have reported how call centers employ low-skilled workers and how agents work robotically using scripts when assisting customers on the phone; other studies have focused on how ...

Dealing with Angry Western Customers in Asian Call Centres: A Cultural Divide?

Call centres have been offshored from countries such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (USA) to Asian destinations such as the Philippines and India where the customer services representatives (CSRs) do not speak English as their mother tongue and are not acculturated to Western norms of doing customer service. This is further complicated by the fact that call centre work is carried out on the phone; therefore, the CSRs do not have the affordance of face-to-face exchange. Using in-depth authentic exchanges from a specialized corpus of call centre interactions, this chapter reports on angry and frustrated exchanges between US and UK customers and Filipino CSRs. We argue that despite the high English proficiency levels of the CSRs, dealing with angry and sarcastic native speaker callers is extraordinarily difficult , not only from a language point of view but also from a cultural standpoint. We explore how culture is crystallized in these exchanges. By doing so, we hope to gain a better understanding of how CSRs may ultimately benefit from further language and intercultural training and support.

Understanding each other: strategies for accommodation in a virtual business team project based in China

The use of accommodation strategies between native and nonnative interlocutors of English in the rapidly increased virtual and global work contexts remains underresearched. Contextualized in a Chinese IT outsourcing company where English is used as a lingua franca, this study focuses on how accommodation strategies are used by both on- and offshore team project members in their virtual meeting exchanges. The article argues that the actual linguistic exchange appears to be scaffolded and facilitated by a series of what the authors call “extratextual accommodation strategies” such as the use of detailed minutes of tasks set and completed, and an agreed meeting format. While “intratextual accommodation strategies,” that is, those relating to specific linguistic behaviors in English in the exchanges are also used by interlocutors to accommodate to each other’s speech; the article argues, therefore, that both extra- and intratextual accommodation strategies appear to work in a symbiotic way to ensure successful exchange in business virtual meeting contexts.