Dial ‘B’ for Burnout? The Experience of Job Burnout in a Telephone Call Centre

Abstract

High rates of labour turnover in the call centre sector are, in the view of some commentators, indicative of widespread employee ‘burnout’. However, few studies have formally investigated the frequency or antecedents of job burnout for this particular group of workers. This paper presents the results of a case study, undertaken within the call centre of a large Australian public-sector utility firm, which explores workers’ experiences of job burnout using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Our results support earlier claims that call centre workers are at least as susceptible to burnout as workers in other occupations that have previously been considered the most ‘burnout-prone’. We argue that the experience of job burnout for call centre workers can be largely attributed to the repetitive nature of the work itself, the variability of customer demands, the pervasiveness of managerial surveillance, the remoteness (that is, telephone-based delivery) of customer-employee exchanges, and the performance of ‘emotional labour’ by workers in the call centre. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on job burnout and the future of call centre research.