‘We’re driving Uberisation in BPO services space’

Startek, a Us-headquartered business process management (BPM) services company with a sizeable presence in India, says over 90 per cent of its employees in the country have resumed work with salaries fully restored. After lockdown, the Nyse-listed firm, which mostly caters to domestic businesses in India, had put close to 45 per cent of its employees under furlough. In an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, company President RAJIV AHUJA talks about the company’s strategy in India during the lockdown and how successful it has been. Edited excerpts:

Are you back to pre-covid levels as far as your operations in India are concerned?

No, we are not back to pre-covid levels as yet. A number of industries got hit owing to the lockdown. They include retail, automobiles, travel and hospitality. There is a pickup in demand post the lockdown but it has not happened in these industries. But it was balanced owing to a surge in demand from e-commerce, BFSI, healthcare and food delivery.

You could have retrained your existing employees working for clients in sectors like travel and hospitality. Why did you prefer to hire fresh people then?

In many cases, clients decide which place they want the workforce to be located out of. Let’s assume, I have a thousand people in Bengaluru working for clients belonging to a particular sector. If they are all on the bench, I can redeploy them if the client wants to build a team to work out of Gurugram. Secondly, if I lift and shift this workforce to a new process, tomorrow, when there is a pickup in these industries, I will have to go out and hire a fresh batch and train it all over again.

How are you managing the people who are not working on any project?

We’ve gone for a no-work-no-pay model. Around March 26-27, when the lockdown was imposed (in

India), we anticipated that the health crisis is not going away in a few weeks. We knew, any decision we take, will set a precedent in the times to come. We had to decide if we can afford to carry on the bench for the next 8-12 months (without any works) or put it on ‘no-work-no-pay’ mode. We choose the second option.

What per cent of these furloughed employees are back at work now?

In the peak of the lockdown, we just had around 55 per cent of our workforce that was working for various clients which has now touched 90 per cent. Around a third of our global workforce is located in India and 70 per cent of the works is for domestic clients. Around 55 per cent of our employees are working from home now and 36 per cent from brick and mortar centres.

Did your India headcount go up in the past few months owing to a surge in demand?

Yes. In the past two months, we’ve almost hired about 1,500, largely to cater to demand from industries such as e-commerce, food delivery, financial services and insurance. In fact, Startek is the first BPM company in India to Uberise this industry. In the last couple of months, over 800 have joined our workforce with their own laptops, especially from smaller cities.

Is it basically BYOD (bring your own device)? What is the rationale behind this?

Uber taught us that one can also run one of the large cab companies without owing a single cab, that is, being asset light. The reason why we did this is because we had to conserve cash and also needed to change the way this business is run.

Has your employee productivity gone up due to work from home?

There is impact from a productivity standpoint while there is no adverse impact in the quality of works. In fact, attrition numbers have dropped by more than a half.