"First thing to look at is really the cross cultural challenge"

In a keynote address, Lonnie Sapp, COO, Office Tiger said that "when the opportunity to talk about human resources came, I jumped at it because it is an area that is very near and dear to my heart. I have been in the outsourcing industry for about 15 years. Prior to venturing into outsourcing, I was a former US coast guard officer,- chasing drug smugglers."

"Prior to coming to India I was national director of operations for a large company in the US focused on onsite outsourcing for professional services firms. This included taking over their captive units and transforming them to third party vendors and ensuring process re-engineering to increase productivity, efficiency and seamless service delivery," he said.

In 2000, a friend of mine called me and asked if I had ever been to India/ I said "No". And she said: "Do you want to go to India?", and I said "I don't think so!". At that point, I really knew nothing about India. But then I started thinking about it from an Industry perspective.

When you think about 2000, and what occurred in 2000 - this was when we saw the dot com bubble burst. The professional services firms started looking at their onsite onshore providers and started squeezing them for cost In my view, this resulted in the birth of third party offshore services that had the ability to provide support to professional services firm - a need/demand that Joe and Randy, the co-founders, were one of the first to see, resulting in the birth of the phenomenon OfficeTiger in December 1999.

So, at that time I thought it made sense to take my own career offshore and then replicate the onsite experience offshore in India.

That was four years ago. When I joined OfficeTiger, the firm was very small. We were about a 100 people. Today we are over 3,000 people and I have been in Chennai for just over four years throughout. So from a human resource perspective I have seen it all.

One of the things that stand out is the maturity of the industry today versus five years ago.

When I came out I did not have a vast pool of human resources that I could depend on. Like in the US, I could not pick up the phone and call a temporary agency. I could not call manpower. I could not call tele-services. In the US if I need 500 desktop publishers or someone who is in the area of research I can just pick up the phone, call a service provider and have those people in my operation the next day. For India, five years ago that just did not exist. So what did we have to do?

We as an organization, went in and established demographics of individuals who had the best skill-set to meet our requirements that we could build upon. How do we get this fresh clay? We knew that they were highly educated. We knew that they were English speaking. We knew that they were highly motivated - but we needed to define and be clear on what are the demographics that were best-suited to build on this clay. In other words, we had to focus on human resource challenges.

I think the first thing to look at is really the cross-cultural challenge. This is because you are servicing a market that has expectations from a human resource pool that is in its infancy of maturity. So how do you match that very raw immature human resource with a global expectation - this demands training, global exposure, and, in our case, what worked really well was our on-the-ground western management who worked alongside our professionals to help them not only reach but exceed the global standards.

The second thing I want to talk about is qualifications because I think that is key. What are the qualifications to get into this industry. How do we attract the freshers coming out of college? How do we attract existing professionals from other industries? How do we really gain awareness of the qualifications that are required to get into this business? I say this, because if you look at the statistics, if you follow the media, everyone has positioned India as being the greatest recipient of global market share for offshore business. But when you think about that strategically and when you think about what that means in terms of human resources - yes, India may be number 2 in the world in terms of overall population - but of that population how many of those people are really employable in this market? How many of them are qualified to compete in this market at both an entry level, mid-level, and an advanced level?

I think it is the duty or the responsibility of the industry stakeholders, all of us to come together and to work on identifying those qualifications, of linking up with the universities and helping them develop different curriculums that aims at filling these gaps. This is especially so as demand is right now trending to really outweigh or grow much farther than the existing capacity. So lets think about the qualifications and lets think about linking up with the existing colleges and universities.

The third thing we need to think about is certification programs. Now that we have identified the human resource at varying levels, now that we have told them what are the qualifications - how do we certify those qualifications? What makes you certified to work in this industry as a professional? There are varying degrees of skills required in the multi-faceted BPO industry.

And this again takes me to the comment that I made about maturity of the industry. When you hear business process outsourcing today, it subsumes voice and non-voice categories, including IT Services segment. Lately I have come across two new acronyms KPO and LPO. Ultimately I believe that there are basically three segments: First, Call Centers (voice-based), and in the non-voice category, the IT Services and finally the BPO segment that has back-office high volume transaction services and high-end professional services that go beyond the realm of mere execution of processes to one that requires judgment and industry knowledge. These high-end services support the front-line professionals in real time - At OfficeTiger, one-third of our jobs are under an hour.

To get back, I think a certification program would go a long way, from a human resource perspective, into helping all of us classify the 'right' professionals for the 'right' category based upon their qualifications. .

Finally, on the issue of capacity, how do we attract the college kids, how do we attract people into the industry and keep attrition low? I can tell you it is through career development. Today operations at all different levels are just looking at how employees can fulfill client demand - what is equally important, if not more, is to align the business demands with employee perspective. It is imperative that we build on those career development elements that will help take people to the next level - one that will become easier as this industry gains maturity.

Also, what is imperative is to instill a strong sense of responsibility and accountability within your organization. I can tell you again, as an American businessman, when I first came out, my number one charter was to replicate the onsite experience offshore. And I saw English speaking, highly educated, highly motivated individuals, but they lacked exposure to global standards. They had not been exposed to a temperamental investment banker who is going in to do a pitch at 9 am and has been working for 48 hours straight. They had to understand what it means to deliver a quality product, what it means to ensure timeliness - if a project comes in and is due in three hours, three hours means three hours. Three hours does not mean 30 hours. So teaching quality, teaching timeliness, teaching accountability, teaching responsibility, these are all the things that you really have to get into the mindsets of your employee base.

Just wrapping up, I think India has huge opportunity to continue to lead the market and capturing as much market share as possible in the globalization of offshoring. This is a huge, huge phenomenon. I can tell you, you hear many reporters, you read many articles about offshoring, going away, about US banning outsourcing, I can tell you that is simply not going to happen.

So think long-term about this industry, because it is not going anywhere. Build on your human resources - your people are your power - attract the right people, train them and provide opportunities for them to grow in their careers. Don't t think short term, think strategically - think long term about your people and you will be a success in this industry.

Lonnie F Sapp, Chief Operating Officer, OfficeTiger

Sanjeev Misra, co-founder and VP, global operations, Secova eServices
said, "Are we creating a highly motivated, challenging environment and do
we have a career path for our people that will take care of long-term attrition,
are we creating processes that deliver to us highly challenged motivated people
with the right cultural sensitivity so that we deliver quality at the end of the
day."

Daniel Jebasingh, director, human resources, Ajuba
Solutions said, it is simple things or little things that make a big
difference. So we said probably the challenge is to do little things but do with
utmost passion and make sure it creates a major impact on the organization.
First challenge is getting into a new process as if you are an expert even
though you many not have the required bandwidth or quality people. The second,
challenge is the ramp up that is required and the challenge is to get the right
kind of people.

Jay Kumar, member, executive leadership team, Lason India
said we should have empowered employees. So he doesn't have to wait for
instructions; he should have the empowerment to carry on with his work with what
needs to be done on a day to day basis and for that we need to enable him with
all the analytical tools and any other skills that are required. He added
"The challenge is actually to keep our employees completely engaged on a
day-to-day basis, and I think that is when we will have our employees remaining
with us, because what does an employee look at actually, to start with when he
comes into a company he looks for opportunities."

Panelists at the session on Manpower

R Shantaram, performance support consultant said
"The challenge is always to say what are we doing at an aggregate level as
an organization looking at the entire workforce versus what am I doing at the
individual level." At the individual level, nobody says that they are not
talented. We talk about being absolutely ruthless as an organization when it
comes to performance and in some sense. We would really like to be ruthless as
an organization, but that has to be at the aggregate level. At the individual
level, it has to have that amount of compassion to be able to say, "Hey!
Maybe you are the best round peg ever made, let me try and see if I can find
some holes within this organization that you could be able to fill in."

Manish Aggarwal, general manager, India operations
support, SPI Technologies said "We have been carried away a lot by the
fact that the perceived attrition in the industry has been very high. We have to
make an attempt in order to align the individual aspiration to the
organizational needs and when that doesn't happen, people will leave and it's
only fair that it happens because some of those people would get a better career
opportunities somewhere else. " I classify attrition between desirable
attrition or undesirable attrition. If the employee aspiration is something,
which as an organization I do not expect that I will be able to meet in a
reasonable period of time, then it's better to let that employee go rather
than retain him and create problem for the rest of the workforce," he
added. The other part you have to again match out is apart from the aspirations
again, aspirations differ from individual to individual. There are people in the
workforce who are very content to do a typical eight hour shift which is very
repetitive but they want to do it year on year, probably after a few years they
may want to move to another process and they are very content doing that.

Transcript of the BPO Summit held in Chennai