It’s a myth that call center or BPO jobs are relatively less stressful. I have met quite a few people, sadly some of them even close to me, who feel that BPO jobs are easy. In fact, I’ve been subconsciously thinking about this ever since one of my engineer friends commented, ‘Oh, you don’t know how much stress I have to deal with at work! After all, you only work in a BPO! ‘

I was not offended because I understand that she certainly does not mean to offend me. In my country, comments like these are often not assumed to be offensive, but rather an expression of frustration. But then I decided to write this article to share some of the stress-related occupational hazards.

Health-related risks

Any business process outsourcing professional can have some relief in the form of free transportation and meals. But the various time zones we work in really affect us. The fact is that many of us do not have the routine that is so much needed for the health and effective management of families. In fact, many of us end up with irregular sleeping patterns and insomnia-related problems.

Personal life

I have seen couples who have never ended up together except for those occasional weekends, because they work different shifts and on different days. In fact, if you look at executive-level employees, it is quite possible that spouses have different days off, which means they won’t even have weekends together. Imagine the plight of mothers who cannot take care of their children because they work odd hours.

Work stress

Like all other industries, we also have our professional causes of stress in our line of work. Like all other domains in business, we multitask, we don’t have enough staff, we have deadlines, we have more time, and we have extra shifts to work. We have managers to evaluate us, we have clients to keep happy, we have clients to make happy and then at the same time we have reports to generate and then managers and junior team members to deal with.

No substantial work experience

Most BPO employees who continue to work as callers or at the associate / executive level do nothing else in terms of other work. This is not so true for employees who manage to reach the manager level. However, you need to understand that given the type of numbers that are recruited in such organizations, the corporate ladder is not as easy as many people think. The competition is just as tough here too and in case the business goes bust, there is no bright future.

Instability

Mastery itself is not as stable as it was in its peak years. Unless you’re lucky enough to get into a captive unit, you never know how long a process takes with offshore operations or when it might be retired. In other words, many of the employees in the outsourcing industry have no idea how long they are going to be in a job.

However, the world is not as bleak as you think. There are organizations that specialize and operate slowly and steadily on a constant basis. These organizations are stable and so are their employees.

There are other forms of outsourcing that are slowly making their way into the market such as knowledge processing, recruitment, human resources, design and development, etc. They have fewer risks than typical outsourcing. But they need a better skill set and a better ability to perform high-level services.