Unhappy call centre workers talk themselves hoarse

It’s unlikely that when you get cold-called during dinner you will stop to wonder how happy the telemarketer is in their job, however a new study has found strong evidence linking vocal health with overall health and well-being.
The study of 600 call agents in 13 international call centres found employees’ actual and perceived health impacted on their voices, in some cases affecting their performance.
With the call centre industry employing over 220,000 Australians and worth $13.7 billion to the economy, the cost of ignoring employees’ psychological and physiological well-being is too large to ignore.
In Australia to present the findings at Speech Pathology Australia’s ‘Participation 2010’ national conference, Head of Communication at the University of Ulster, Dr Diane Hazlett, believes the research has serious ramifications for the occupational health and safety provisions of this much maligned industry.
“More than 70 per cent of the people we surveyed reported voice trouble of some kind – either a diagnosed problem or more general symptoms like difficulty talking over background noise, needing to cough or clear their throat, a dry or croaky voice or people were finding it difficult to hear them,” Dr Hazlett said.
“Functional and emotional factors within the call centre, like call targets and noise levels   also contribute to an employee’s perceived health, which could have an impact on the quality of the individual’s voice.
The prevention – vocal training for new recruits by speech pathologists – not only teaches employees to correctly warm up their voice and better understand its limits, but also advise on centre-wide changes that benefit everyone, like the background noise and hydration levels.”
“Even though we found that most call centre managers understood that vocal training significantly reduces the risk of workers developing problems, there was a large gap between best and actual practice,” Dr Hazlett said.
Voice expert and head of LaTrobe University’s School of Human Communication Science, Dr Jenni Oates, said that although vocal training programs had been developed for call centre workers in the past, few have been put into place and none were available commercially.
“Even though vocal training programs have been developed with great results for staff when they were implemented, it is not the industry standard so the people that suffer the most are the call centre workers themselves,” Dr Oates said.
For more information on Speech Pathology Australia’s national conference, visit www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au.