Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives - Madeleine Bunting

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with a glance at her computer screen what everyone is doing. A CSR’s name flashes into red the second he or she is late back from a break. Everything is monitored: the length of calls, the time spent on ‘off-call work’ and the number of calls put on hold. All the figures are collated and sent back to CSRs – those that fall below the targets are highlighted as ‘NI’(needs improvement), while those which exceed the target are ‘HE’ (highly effective). Every second of their time is accounted for.

      There are sweatshop call centres where the profit margins are so tight that operators are under continual pressure to meet tight deadlines, forced to stick to strictly scripted interactions, and yet still to manage some cheerfulness and good humour. What all call centres drill into their employees is to ‘speak as if you are smiling’, and ‘as if you have been waiting for this particular call’. This is a job where you’re not allowed an off day – or even an off moment. If a customer is difficult or rude, the call handler must not respond aggressively. He or she certainly can’t betray any irritation or frustration during the next call which is instantly routed through to them. While call handlers are expected to provide the customer with a certain pleasurable emotional exchange, they must also continually repress their own emotions to ensure a standardised service. The equation of providing empathy to another while denying it to oneself is complex. A five-minute call to a call centre represents a profoundly unbalanced human relationship. It is an interaction in which the possibility of reciprocity has been shrunk – by technology and the tyranny of efficient time-use – to the smallest possible component, perhaps no more than a ‘thank you’.

      Empathy has become big business, according to consultants Harding & Yorke, who specialise in what they describe as an ‘empathy audit’. They claim to be able to measure every aspect of the emotional interaction between customer and company. If a company wants its employees to sound warmer or more natural, they turn to the likes of Bob Hughes at Harding & Yorke.

      I’m intrigued by the idea that something as subjective and spontaneous as human communication can be measured so minutely and then prescribed for employees, and Hughes offers to explain why his company has been called in by the likes of Toyota, Standard Life and Vodafone. He has snippets of recorded call-handler interactions which he plays on his laptop. In one, the handler is confused and uncertain, and the customer ends up hanging up. That could cost the company a customer, points out Hughes, adding that customer loyalty is the biggest predictor of profitability. Delight your customers and they’ll be back; empathy makes money, he argues.

      The taped clips are the kind of raw material which Harding & Yorke analyse; they put as many as five hundred questions to the call-centre client about every aspect of the call handler. The client is asked to analyse exhaustively their own emotional response to each part of the interaction, answering questions such as: How much confidence did the call handler inspire in me? How personalised does their language feel? How sincere are they, or did they sound perfunctory? How well did I feel they were listening to me? On the basis of the answers to these questions the call handler is given a score.

      Quality emotional interactions are the hardest things to short-circuit, claims Hughes. People are extraordinarily sensitive at recognising emotional cues, so ‘Sincerity is a big thing for us,’ he adds, claiming, ‘If one person has been told to smile and a second person has been made – by a joke, for example – to smile, we could measure the difference.’

      The call handler’s voice is minutely analysed for pace, volume and timbre to ensure the right ‘mood’. Timbre is a function of breathing, and if there is any anxiety the ensuing adrenaline surge can constrict the diaphragm, which raises the timbre. So Harding & Yorke train people to breathe properly. The final aim is to achieve ‘emotional resolution’ as well as practical resolution of the customer’s call, and that, explains Bob, is about ‘making the customer feel great’. He quotes management guru Tom Peters: ‘It doesn’t matter how good you are, the only tiling which matters is how good does your customer think you are.’ Bob believes it’s instinctive to be empathetic, so his consultancy’s job is to ‘liberate people’s natural behaviour’. To top it all, Bob claims empathy is efficient: it’s a win-win formula, because empathy means the employee works out more quickly what the customer really wants.

      Empathy, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the power of identifying oneself mentally with (and so fully comprehending) a person’, has become an important skill in the labour market, and it is changing the employability status of individuals. This intrigues social theorist Andre Gorz, who argues that while the assembly line represented ‘the total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality’, what is now required is the ‘total mobilisation of that personality’. He writes that ‘technical knowledge and professional skills are only of value when combined with a particular state of mind, an unlimited openness to adjustment, change, the unforeseen’.2

      At the Orange call centre in North Shields, the manager told me they never recruited someone for their technical skills. What they were looking for was a particular personality: cheerful, outgoing, flexible, good-natured, adaptable – because these were the characteristics which they couldn’t train. It is an approach shared by B&Q, the DIY retail chain which uses an automated telephone personality test to recruit employees with the right kind of emotional characteristics; applicants have to press their telephone keypad to answer questions such as, ‘I prefer to have my closest relationships outside work rather than with a colleague.’ In December 2002 B&Q’s Human Resources Director explained to the Financial Times that ‘We wanted a psychological underpinning to the entire culture – the same description of cultural fit across the entire population [of the company] – including management.’3 Identifying the right personalities has become a big industry, with a turnover of £20 million a year; over 70 per cent of companies in the FTSE 100 now use psychometric testing. In this labour market women and young people are favoured, while the shy, the reserved and those who find it hard to adapt to change are disadvantaged.

      Gorz goes on to claim: ‘What this represents is an end to the impersonal relationship in which the employee sold labour to the employer regardless of personality, a return to the pre-capitalist relations of personal submission as described by Marx.’ That submission does not depend on rules and coercion – you can’t force someone to be ‘warm’ and ‘natural’ on the telephone. The required attributes derive from the worker’s ‘entire ability to think and act’. The ‘power battle’ is no longer played out in the workplace, says Gorz, but shifts ‘upstream’: ‘The battle lines of that conflict will be everywhere where information, language, modes of life, tastes and fashions are produced…in other words, everywhere the subjectivity and “identity” of individuals, their values, their images of themselves and the world are being continually structured, manufactured and shaped.’4 In other words, the conflicts over power and autonomy which always characterise working lives now no longer take place in the factory, call centre or office, but in the wider cultural life of the country, which promotes the required norms for the twenty-first-century workplace. For example, when a human resources director gives out instructions that staff are to ‘be themselves and be natural’ with customers, the staff’s understanding of self or naturalness can be drawn from a disparate range of pop psychology, television, magazines and friends.

      These required emotional characteristics are in continual conflict with the pressure to be efficient; a conflict which is symptomatic of many forms of service work with low profit margins. There’s an inherent contradiction in this, because contrary to Bob Hughes’ claim, empathy is not always efficient: the confused old lady who can’t use her mobile might take up twenty minutes if a call handler is too empathetic. The old lady may even get canny and try to reach the same call handler every evening, in a bid to alleviate her loneliness – it happens – and just how empathetic should the response be? The empathetic employee is caught in a tension between the organisation’s drive to be efficient and competitive, and meeting the consumer’s desire for satisfaction. Balancing the two is no mean feat, given the often unrealisable promise of consumer culture that ‘we can

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