President of the Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ), Anand Biradar has numerous plans to improve the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector this year.
In an interview with the Western Mirror, Biradar said this year “the primary focus will be on formally having ‘work from home’ incorporated in the special economic zones legislation. So, starting January 2024, Jamaica will have a fully comprehensive work from home policy for the special economic zone sector.”
Subsequently, he will be working with the Global Services Sector (GSS) and other parties to a wider network for attracting more talent and also working on developing persons leaving school to make work more people enjoyable.
This network will seek to include more skilled customer service workers in the sector. Biradar said these workers will have to know when to be empathic, as well as being very emotionally caring to approximately 40 customers daily. They will continue to train individuals to have an “I want to solve their problem attitude” so both the customers and the employees are satisfied.
Additionally, employees will acquire transferable skills to other sectors, such as critical thinking, problem solving, traffic orientation and data analytics skills.
Biradar said the BPO sector trains “very well and they will give persons the knowledge they need to do the job. You can start from a 100,000 salary a month, to a 1 million salary a month in less than 10 year (which)… doesn’t happen as fast in other industries.” Notwithstanding these new skills, they will also be securing their data in the industry.
“With the new data privacy act and importance of cyber security… we will put a lot in educating all the industry stakeholders on the data privy act. (This will) make everyone more compliant with the police to make sure they are keeping watch on all security aspects,” said Biradar.
The GSAJ president said if the sector does not increase and have a good data security measures it will become an issue. He said “all these have been problems in the past and I think we have done well to solve them to some degree and we need to continue this focus and move forward.”
EXPAND IN THE WEST
At the same time, the BPO sector plans to expand its market in western Jamaica which includes 500,000 sq foot of space being used to build in multiple places to accommodate growth in the entire sector. In addition to the expansion initiatives, the BPO sector plans to retain more staff and reduce their attrition rates.
The attrition rate is the pace at which people leave a company. The business process outsourcing sector plans is to invest in its employees’ education and incorporate more recreational activities. However, the GSAJ president affirmed that each office has their own way of incorporating recreational activities.
In spite of this, Biradar stated that the GSAJ will be launching an island football league involving several BPO teams for the first time. It will begin on February 6th, with plans to improve it in 2024.
