I came accross the following article and thought it might make an interesting point for discussion... Contact centres are a unique work environment, where more focus is put on "fun & games" for motivation and morale than in most work places. There is also a higher percentage of practical joking, and managerial piss-taking than in most office environments. The article explores some of the possible sub context behind the smiles. I have added a link to the full documentation if you want.(please note this is not an expression of my own opinions - just a topic for debate)
Humour and the Erosion of Team Leader Authority
Ackroyd and Thompson argue that workplace struggle is also ‘concerned with the matter of identity’ (1999: 101). Management, at least rhetorically, has an interest in obtaining greater levels of commitment from its workforce, an objective which may allow employees to express opinions. Of course, such encouragement to openness has sharply defined boundaries, and is permitted insofar as it benefits the organisation. Since the promise, suggested by cultures of openness, may clash with the unchanged reality of routine task performance, workers exploit these limited spaces, inserting expressions of their interests which conflict with management aims. Under these conditions, joking, which is excused from the normal conventions of serious discourse, becomes a means of conducting a satirical attack on management:
‘Joking is…perfectly appropriate when a group with power is espousing a willingness to be intimate, but is still incapable of admitting equality. It is in this sort of situation that joking becomes a useful tool.’ (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 102).
The joking practices of agents at ‘T’ confirm these insights, most pointedly in the way that humour was directed at undermining team leaders’ authority. Formally, team leaders were responsible for ensuring that the quantity and quality of an agent’s call-handling were satisfactory. Unacceptable performance levels ostensibly were to be improved through coaching, although exhortation or chastisement were equally common responses. Most team leaders, recently promoted from the ranks, were encouraged by senior management to maintain informal social contact with erstwhile colleagues. It is the contradiction between team leaders’ conventional and directive roles, and the compulsion to act as if they were still ‘one of the gang’, which gives a distinct edge to the banter directed towards them. Three examples follow.
Taking the Piss: When call volumes were low, gossip quickly filled the gaps. On this occasion, the stimulus was the previous Friday’s company ‘do’. The main topic, inevitably, was employees’ ill-behaviour; how drunk so-and-so had been, who had felt which part of whose anatomy, and who had got off with whom. Although risque, the language was never sexist or offensive, with both sexes participating as protagonists and ‘victims’. Sanction was given by Monica, the team leader, who having excelled in the consumption of alcohol, was herself the butt of much verbal sparring. For example, ‘That dress must have been cheap, you’d only have to pay for half of it, it had no back’. Although two agents, Linda and Mark, came in for ‘a proper slagging’, the sharpest barbs were directed at Monica. The greatest hilarity occurred when an on-call team member re-entered the conversation and, in trying to catch up, would ask deliberately naïve questions, pretending not to know who was being discussed. This kept the joke going and enabled agents to replay their attacks on Monica.
The Limits to Tolerance: A humorous ‘questionnaire’ was designed and distributed by Hughie, following management permission, on the grounds that it was a pre-Christmas ‘bit of fun’. Everyone was polled on questions like ‘Who is the sexiest? The grumpiest? The scariest?’ As questionnaires circulated, jokes proliferated as workers considered nominations for various categories. Once again, the principal targets were team leaders, with the unpopular nominated for unwelcome categories; ‘Nurse Ratched’ won the ‘grumpiest’ award. Evidently, the questionnaire almost crossed the line of unacceptability as defined by management, as this snatch of conversation reveals.
Hughie: ‘We had a question in the first version “Who is going to get the sack before Christmas?” but we had to take it out because they were cracking up.’
Al: ‘Who was cracking up?’
Hughie: ‘They [management] were cracking up because of what’s happening to them (nodding over to campaigns team)’.
Clare: ‘That’s because they’re getting f*cked. All temps in campaigns are to be laid off by December 19th .’
Team leaders were ambivalent. Although approving the questionnaire, to the extent that some joined in discussing nominations, a line was drawn when it strayed from what was defined as harmless fun and touched on sensitive issues. Team leaders even attempted to stifle spontaneity by insisting that completed questionnaires were returned to Monica so that she could compile the results. Such an approach tacitly acknowledges that creative joking in a workplace regime of this kind can never be purely harmless. Completed questionnaires revealed how workers enthusiastically seized the opportunity to deride both team leaders and those agents regarded as ‘yes men’.
Je ne parle pas Francais: Astonishingly, the manager of a French language section was unable to speak the native tongue of the majority of team members. Inevitably, this generated operating problems and undermined supervisory authority. On one celebrated occasion, the manager sat beside an agent in order to monitor calls, asking him to translate customer queries and his responses. Months later, the memory of this farcical incident induced wholesale derision of both the hapless manager and the company (Observation, 19.3.00). Two agents, Diane and Saul, described how, after the failure of this monitoring exercise, the manager continued to hover near the French team, clearly within earshot of agents’ conversations. Saul recollected that after a call had ended and the customer had hung up, he continued talking, pretending it was still live. He finished by saying, in French, ‘Thank you very much for calling. We will send someone round to kill your wife and family.’ Agents at adjacent workstations were scarcely able to contain their laughter. The manager’s humiliation was complete when Saul reported, in English, how successful the call had been. It matters little that this story was embellished in the retelling. What is significant is that it continued, months afterwards, to be a source of great amusement and had come to symbolise managerial incompetence. The French speakers constituted a work group with a high degree of self-organisation, and their scathing humour served to widen the gap between themselves and the company.
These examples reveal a deep undercurrent of distrust of management motives, and the medium of humour conveyed a subtle, but frequently overt, criticism of supervisory authority. Such evidence challenges Noon and Blyton’s (1997) claim that joking always obscures the social relations of production. Management’s attempts to close the gap between team leaders and agents, through encouraging familiarity, proved largely unsuccessful. Agents used humour in order to clarify exactly where the boundaries of authority lay, subverting the attempt to humanize supervisors through an ‘all pals together’ culture. Supervisors’ efforts to sponsor fun, or control banter, tended to be counterproductive. Out of earshot, agents would share their minor triumphs in what was certainly a battle for identity, but was much more besides. Their actions invoked an older tradition of not letting the foreman away with anything.
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Full citation:
Taylor, P. and Bain, P. (2004) 'Humour and Subversion in Two Call Centres' in Ackroyd, S. and Fleetwood, S. (eds) 'Realist Perspectives on Management and Organization', London: Routledge, ISBN 0- 415-34509-X
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