In conducting a review of the September 2012 and September 2013 TBI inventory data, I have found myself becoming very frustrated. Some of the terms are not understood by me, the response requires self-reporting, and I do not count myself as a reliable witness.

This morning I had the realization that for 12 years I worked in an environment recognized to be among the most stressful of workplaces. All call centre operations are closely monitored and employee performance is constantly checked. Every agent action is subject to scrutiny, all events are timed, each customer interaction is recorded. This recording includes screen grabs of the agent’s computer desktop in addition to a voice recording of all customer interaction. When I worked as a call centre QA assessor, I was able to pull up the agent’s entire record of past calls to determine when a performance deficit had commenced.

In addition to Quality Assurance monitoring of each agent’s work, the call centre technical support staff were required to spend two hours each day monitoring and scoring random agent calls. Each call centre manager was also required to spend two hours each day listening to the work of those agents under his / her supervision.

Each customer was requested to score his / her satisfaction with the agent’s performance at the end of the call. An outside 3rd party was employed to conduct random telephone surveys of recent customers and obtain a detailed response in regard to their satisfaction with call centre agent performance. The outcomes of these various surveys were reviewed with each agent on a regular basis.

Most employees found this work environment extremely stressful. If you were unable to deliver the expected standard of performance, you were subject to dismissal. The agent had no ability to control customer behaviour, or attitude, and was expected to respond in a polite manner to customer hostility and belligerence.

The agent had to accept any request placed by the customer. It did not matter if the issue fell outside the agent’s scope of responsibility, product knowledge, or skills training. I worked for the same global enterprise for over 12 years and, at the end of this time, I was still fielding calls in regard to products, and company operating units, that I had no idea even existed. I was required to handle the caller’s request in a manner satisfactory to the caller even when I had no understanding of the topic raised by the customer.

The IT industry is known for constant, rapid change. Over the course of 12 years with the same firm, I changed physical location more than 8 times. Each move meant a different physical location, often a different province. This movement does not reflect all of the regular internal changes in seating arrangements, in managers, colleagues, contacts, policies, hardware, desktop tools and interfaces. I handled all of these manifold changes without complaint, or problem.

I have encountered case studies in both the management literature, and in occupational psychology, which address call centre employment and describe it as the full realization of Bentham’s Panopticon. A consistent high level of employee stress arises due to the ongoing observation and micro-management of every aspect of employee behaviour and work performance. And within this environment, I delivered performance unequalled by any in my work group.

I have worked in a wide variety of occupational settings. These include the Federal government, the marine industry, creative industry (film), the engineering industry, and the oil industry. I also performed small business consultancy work while in Nova Scotia. In all this experience I have never encountered another work environment that is subject to such extreme constraints on employee task performance, to such narrowly defined productivity and performance requirements, or a workplace subject to such exhaustive monitoring and continual micro management. Yet I performed superlatively in this environment (largely because I did not care about the external monitoring; I was my own harshest critic and taskmaster).

I believe that any survey of the extant scientific literature on workplace environments would support the above description. I know that when I started employment in the call centre it was understood that call centre employment was one of the few occupations that would not result in a refusal of unemployment benefits if the employee were to quit. Even the Federal government recognized the difficult demands of the call centre work place.

In view of the above, I have undertaken to re-score the September 2012 TBI inventory. The scores are based on my memory of my behaviours during a period of employment which commenced in November 1999 and continued until the accident of March 06th 2011 without interruption.

I believe this analysis sheds considerable light on the changes which have become manifest since the accident of March 06th 2011.