If you’ve ever called an offshore call center that sounds like
a busy street market, ringing with the sounds of a foreign language, you can
bet your Tuesday lunch there is a tight lipped ex-pat in the background, making
throat-slashing gestures at the offenders in vain.
3 and a half years ago, I landed in the Philippines in a
semi-provincial area to work in a call center creating training materials,
coaching, and training front line reps on communications, soft skills, and
language. The job was extremely challenging, the support pretty nonexistent,
and the hours were hell. My desk was in the middle of the production floor, an
area we semi-affectionately called “the Dungeon”. All of these challenges paled
in comparison to the looming obelisk that blotted out the sun: EOP.
EOP was the acronym for “English Only Policy”. It makes
sense to ask and require reps to speak only English at work and on the production
floor. What was next to impossible was getting them to do it.
I tried email reminders. I tried bribes. I tried “catching
people doing the right thing.” We created slogans and had a contest. We printed
tee shirts. I created a campaign of emails with illustrations (beloved, yet
completely lacking in impact) called “EOP Stars” which featured people of
Filipino extraction or origin who made their careers on English—people like
Bruno Mars, Apple d.App, and Josie Natori.
The communications
team as a whole tried meetings -one of which was held with the entire 200
person production team- where I held up ominous bar graphs showing a decline in
our customer satisfaction score with an increase in our floor size (meaning our
floor walkers couldn’t physically get to all of our agents and remind them to
zip it). We tried threats, keeping score, and as a last resort, embarrassing
the offenders in front of everyone. We
created reminders called “Background noise K.O.” that explained we would grade any call in which background noise was
captured a “0” in Quality. We wrote people up and reported offenders to the
powers that be.
Nothing could budge people from their desire to speak in what
we (wrongly) called “vernacular” no. matter.what.
I spent a HUGE amount of time trying to understand this.
English is the accepted language of worldwide business, most likely closely
followed by French, Chinese languages, Hindi, and Arabic. Filipino (and the
local dialects) doesn’t even make the top ten! For ambitious young
professionals, accent- free or “neutral” English was a marker of success and
class. So why were our reps so resistant to speaking in English?
After more than 3 years living with and working with
Filipinos, I have only guesses.
My first guess would be
the intense, almost maniacal national pride that Filipinos have for their people
and heritage. With few natural resources, a history of occupation and
struggles, and widespread poverty, national pride in the people themselves as a kind of living museum is
a must. Tee shirts with the slogan “The Filipino is worth dying for”/ “100%
Filipino” and other such lines that celebrate the people of the islands (rather
than, say amber waves of grain, or purple mountains majesty) were very popular.
Language is a part of culture and heritage, which I (humbly) submit was ignored
or bulldozed for many years (first by the Spanish, then by the Americans, now
by the business world at large).
My second guess is that it’s a combination of a) never
really finding the right motivator and b) the transient nature of front line
call center work means that the talent pool tends to be young, carefree, and
not super serious. Having fun with friends and finding romance were reasons people
came to work, rather than “career advancement” or “financial independence.”
My third guess hinges on something that I will most likely
never understand fully: culture. The bonds of interdependence and connection
between family and friends are so tightly woven that for some, speaking English
instead of the local dialect feels like a kind of betrayal, a kind of show of
arrogance. And when it came time to choose between a seatmate who loaned them
money, showed them sympathy when they were down, hooked them up with a cutie
they knew, and was just generally there for them and speaking English: no
contest. Speaking English could at best mark you as an upstart, at worst get
you a freeze out. The “cool kids” in the account actually put on a heavy accent
to speak English, and you can imagine the trickle-down effect this kind of
thing had!
I left that town never really knowing what I could have done
to make a lasting difference, and wondering if maybe the initiative itself was
somehow beside the point. Was EOP just another misguided effort to standardize something
that should not be standardized—akin to what happened to the U.S’s indigenous
peoples in the 1800’s? Or was it really ‘for their own good’?
I leave it to you to ponder.
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