{"id":881,"date":"2016-04-17T11:42:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T11:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/rescuing-bpo-future_041716\/"},"modified":"2016-04-17T11:42:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T11:42:00","slug":"rescuing-bpo-future_041716","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/rescuing-bpo-future_041716\/","title":{"rendered":"Rescuing BPO from its trough of directionless boredom: Make jobs challenging and creative"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-19714\" src=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Bored-BPO-Cat.png\" alt=\"Bored BPO Cat\" width=\"573\" height=\"347\" \/>When your enterprise is increasingly dependent on hiring\u00a0&#8220;Millennials&#8221; with digital skills and lower wage needs, you&#8217;d better figure out a plan for creating exciting, challenging career paths, or you&#8217;re pretty much already doomed.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, our Talent in BPO study from last year tells a very depressing tale when you ask BPO delivery executives what they think of their BPO career:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_19706\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/BPO-Career-Path-1.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-19706\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-19706\" src=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/BPO-Career-Path-1-e1460825795461.jpg\" alt=\"Click to Enlarge\" width=\"578\" height=\"434\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>What&#8217;s alarming is the failure of enterprises to create and communicate a viable BPO career path for seven-out-of-eight professionals with under two years&#8217; experience. \u00a0And &#8211; while 63% of newbies strongly agree their job is vital to business performance, a depressing one-in-eight are actually\u00a0<em>excited<\/em> by their career choice. \u00a0When people get past the first couple of years, their experience clearly\u00a0improves, but the concern here is how can we attract top (or even middling) talent into BPO careers, when there is such a negative perception of the potential of the job. \u00a0If we can&#8217;t attract the talent, the industry will never progress beyond a cost\/efficiency play.<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600; font-size: 14pt;\">What can we do to attract the &#8220;Digital Generation&#8221; into the BPO business?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Start new hires on activities that require creativity and critical thinking.<\/strong> Working in BPO has to be about delivering capabilities beyond rote, operational processes. \u00a0Today&#8217;s college graduates are simply not coming out of school willing to perform mundane routine work. \u00a0Just look at the new WEF jobs report to see how skills requirements are quickly shifting, as business needs evolve &#8211; especially the need for creative skills, going from number ten to number three in merely five years:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_19709\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Skills-2020.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-19709\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-19709\" src=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Skills-2020-e1460834149658.jpg\" alt=\"Click to Enlarge\" width=\"578\" height=\"434\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>In the past, for example, an accountant would often earn his\/her chops processing accounts and doing routine GL work, before progressing to controllership activities, such as budgeting, quality audits, FP&amp;A, forecasting and risk assessment work. \u00a0With much better technology and offshoring<!-- pagebreak --> available, the days of people doing highly-automatable \/ offshorable processes are fast dying. Everyone knows they will be irrelevant in the future if that is all they do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Operations staff proactively need to support the fast-shifting needs of the front office. \u00a0<\/strong>So the focus needs to shift towards creating a work culture\u00a0where individuals are encouraged to spend more time interpreting data, understanding the needs of the front end of the business and ensuring the back\/middle office can keep pace with the front office. \u00a0This is especially the case in industries that are more dependent than ever on real time data, using multiple channels to reach their customers and being able to think out-of-the-box with disruptive business models. Sure, we all need to make sure we can keep the operations functioning by paying the bills, responding to customers, processing the claims etc, but\u00a0if we can&#8217;t be <em>proactive<\/em> and look at how we can create a better customer experience using digital channels, or\u00a0challenging the logic of running a process a certain way, we&#8217;ll never create work cultures that will attract the bright minds to take us forward.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Driven managers, multidisciplinary teams and flat structures essential to drive collaboration and Design Thinking.<\/strong>\u00a0People want to feel a part of something and that their work matters &#8211; and the best way to do this is to move away from rigid corporate structures of the past, with too many management layers and departments run siloed like mini-empires. Both buyers and service providers need to invest in driven managers which understand how to motivate and collaborate across business functions. Sales, marketing, customer service, IT, finance, HR and supply chain are functions that all depend on each other to be effective. \u00a0Smart enterprises are already breaking down the silos and creating multidisciplinary teams, using collaborative tools and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/design-thinking-save-outsourcing_070215\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Design Thinking methods<\/a> across\u00a0delivery centers to help their staff be more motivated, creative and challenge the old way of doing things.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">The Bottom-line: Enterprises need to create broader &#8220;business manager&#8221; roles to challenge\u00a0the Digital Generation<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Beyond just moving up the ranks, there is a certain clout attached to becoming some kind of subject matter expert, taking pride in the ownership of a certain area of expertise. \u00a0In my viewpoint, there should be two roles for BPO staff in their first two years: \u00a0associate business manager leading to business manager. \u00a0This individual needs to oversee a process, or set of processes, with the task of constantly seeking out ways to do things better by\u00a0interpreting data, collaborating with colleagues and service partners, delighting customers and understanding the business. The onus in on the operations leaders to appoint and train team leaders to inspire junior staff to take ownership of their areas and not feel like &#8220;back office&#8221; process jockeys.<\/p>\n<p>This blog could have been the start of a very long book about how <em>&#8220;Businesses should be Designed for the Digital Generation&#8221;<\/em> but instead is a starting point for how we can rethink operations jobs to attract better talent and deliver much more value beyond merely keeping the lights on. These may be early days, but if today&#8217;s business are not already thinking this way, they could already be doomed&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When your enterprise is increasingly dependent on hiring\u00a0&#8220;Millennials&#8221; with digital skills and lower wage needs, you&#8217;d better figure out a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":882,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,48,50,54,55,56,57,835,63,64,78,79,80,838,831,93,832,830,97,98,837],"tags":[559],"ppma_author":[19],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Rescuing BPO from its trough of directionless boredom: Make jobs challenging and creative - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/rescuing-bpo-future_041716\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rescuing BPO from its trough of directionless boredom: Make jobs challenging and creative - 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