An ergonomic study on the morningness and eveningness of call center agents and its effect on cognitive performance

• Main Authors: Arga, Satrina R., Cruz, Kea S., Jison, Beatrice J.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2014
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/12149
• Institution: De La Salle University

Globalization has been widely spread across several countries for the past decades. In the economic perspective, this can be referred to as the interaction of different organization or establishments in doing business activities with the help of information technology. The concept of globalization had given countries business opportunities and economic growth. It had also provided several jobs for individuals to alleviate employment rate. The success of globalization had paved the way to adaptation of different working practices that help increase competency of organization and one of which is shiftwork. Shiftwork can be described as a working schedule by organizations outside the traditional working time. Traditionally, work starts at 7:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Shiftwork on the other hand takes a step farther and assign employees usually work on teams wherein they are divided into different shift schedules. In the Philippines, several organizations had also been adapting shiftwork and mostly belonged to the service sector. One of the biggest portions of the service sector adapting to shiftwork is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). It comprises of several groups like the call center, health care, media, etc. Among the entire group, the call center had the highest workforce of 164, 897 out 212,990 shift workers and is expected to increase for the coming years. Shiftwork has indeed made call center activities possible. However, the irregularity of shiftwork schedule has been of the stressors of employees (Barton et. al., 1994 Vitale, 1999 Bambra et. al., 2008). Companies also are facing challenges about inconsistencies of worker wherein his performance differs when assigned on different schedules. Even if workers had been used to the job activity, his performance in a particular shift is sometimes not in the same level as his performance in another shift. At the same time, job deterioration was evident to workers but at different times of the day. This may be due to the individual characteristics of sleep and wake timing wherein a particular person has a specific time where he can be active the most. This can be referred as the circadian behavior or mostly known as the body clock of individuals. Circadian behavior being defined as the individual preference of sleep and wake timing (Duffy & Roepke, 2010) also can indicate at what time of the day an individual can be active the most. In relation with issue of job performance of shiftworkers, circadian behavior of individuals can be incorporated with shiftwork to assess if there are relationships between the two, on whether it has an effect on the job performance of a worker when assigned on a particular shift. In this study, the circadian behavior or circadian clock of individuals was incorporated with shiftwork among call center agents of Allied International Credit. Agents handle inbound calls of their customers regarding bank transaction which was used to identify a circadian clock of an individual. This identified whether the subjects belonged to the morning type or evening type which were the two mental health, physical fatigue, and work-life balance. After which, the subjects were grouped according to what circadian clock they belonged to. The chosen subjects in each group were then asked to participate on the experiment proper of the study. To determine the experiment setting, the Design Expert 9 was used for the design of experiment. A split-plot multilevel categoric design was chosen as this is a type of design is used for situations where factors have different number of levels of independent variables. The hard-to-change factor were the shift schedule which had three shift times. The times were the current shift schedule of AIC were 12:00 A.M., 3:00 P.M.-11:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M.- 4:00 A.M. After obtaining the optimal design, the runs were divided into six weeks, assigning the two groups (morning and evening types) at 12:00 A.M. for the first two weeks, 3:00 P.M. for the second two weeks, and at 8:00 P.M. for the last two weeks following a forwarded rotation with intermediate speed change of schedule of every two weeks. The experiment was designed to measure the level of deterioration of each circadian clock in each shift schedule. The level of deterioration was measure in terms of three cognitive abilities: speech, reaction time, and short-term memory. In a call center set-up, it is important that agent is able to communicate well with the caller, be alert on work despite of being assigned on odd times, and is able to retain information and details given by the callers. Speech measures are not just about the manner of speaking by agents but also about the voice quality in terms of pitch, intensity, and harmonic-to-noise. Praat software was used to measure these three among the agents. The short-term memory was in terms of audio memory which represents a caller interacting with the agent, while the reaction time test represents how alert the agents were in a given time. The subjects participated in the test during the start and end of their each shift for a particular week. This was to be able to measure the level of deterioration that they experience when assigned on different shifts, in terms of voice quality, reaction time, and short-term memory. Results showed that morning types and evening types had different levels of job deterioration at a given schedule and that the other type can perform better than the other at a particular time. In this study, it was also found out speech ability (pitch, intensity, harmonics-to-noise) and reaction time responses were significant and have relationship on both circadian clock and shiftwork schedule. To further analyze the results, performances were measured in terms of consistency and best performance. Through these, appropriate solutions were made in terms of the average best performance of each circadian and consistent performance. Rubrics for consistency and for best performance were made. Trade-off matrices were also made for the consistent and best performance to measure the approximate percentage of job deterioration can happen when a particular employee transfers to another schedule. These solutions aim to improve overall performance of the organization which also considers employees capability and welfare. Through this, organizations can make trade-offs on what they want to prioritize – on whether have all consistent employees, average best performance, or a combination on both to improve productivity of the terms and the organization as a whole.