When I joined Convergys I was very curious towards corporate culture. The first day when I entered in the building my experience was “Wow! It is a very nice place. It must be a very good experience working here”. I could see employees in the premises, pretty young girls holding cigarettes between their fingers walking along with cool dudes who have fashioned beard and long hair talking fluently in English. Some of them were very serious having earphone and enjoying the music. There were some people who are middle aged look unfit with the environment trying to soothe their feeling of being unfit.
When I was sent to the training room I found 26 employees in that room, they all were newly recruited like me. There were all kind of people mixed, I could say by their faces they were from south to north, east to west representing the all India culture. they looked at each-other faces, few of them were introduced sitting in small groups chatting and laughing this was how they tried to remove their nervousness. I as an observer looked at their faces one by one. Some of them were chatty, some of them were calm.
There were employees who looked at me and showed their tough faces, it gave me a feel like they want to show me that ‘I had no need of job I am here just to make myself busy, and you poor guy have to survive here somehow I don’t care’.
A person walked in with full of confidence had some fear but he succeeded to hide that. “Are you all in Martin’s team?” “Yes” two or three of them responded. That was a dark skinny guy with goatee beard had a big smile on his face. Introduced him and trained the employees for almost fourteen days. In these fourteen days the group made out of those people who smoke. I was perhaps the only Muslim boy I that group but never felt left-out. In this fourteen days time I made some friends and some enemies. I could say who are my friends but I could not say who my enemies are.
In this period we had to go through many cultural activities, language classes, typing trainings, some time singing and dancing also. We did not feel that in this short period we were attached so much with the trainer Martin. It was very hard to think about switching into someone else’s class but we had. As a result many of us were unhappy and had the same expectation as we had with martin but expectation left thirsty and there was a lot of chaos.
In this journey many of the employees left the job some left it for the personal reason some left because of trainer was changed, some left because they were preplanned to work for a month or two and some of them could not pass the validation criteria. In total we were 16 in our program training. But when we hit the floor we were 10. “Hit the floor” is the common jargon of the call centers that means completed the training and begun the on job training.
Before joining the call center I had many misconceptions that I did not find true initially. My team got split after a month or two I don’t remember when it was. I was sent into a team that was led by a lady team leader. I thought it will be tough to deal with a lady team leader, but it was not. I met many girls in my new team who were very moralistic. After a certain period of time when I come closure to them my perception changed and I thought my judgment was not true.
When I completed my six months with the call center some one incident occurred, there were two employees terminated because of the bad conduct of behavior. When I dug into the mater I got to know that one of the security guards saw both of them (a boy and a girl) were kissing each other in the premises and that was not allowed. After three months of this incident two more employees were asked to leave. And that was because of they were doing sex in the hidden place but they were caught with the help of cctv camera more over one of them was a team leader.
It was hard to believe sometime but I thought when young men and women work together in night shifts it is hard to avoid sometime. I saw young girls boozing and behaving like a prostitute in the parties and boys behaving like animals. There was my first experience sitting with drinkers while they drink alcohol, was also in convergys.
Finally I was put in the last semester of my two years job in convergys into a north eastern team leader and the experience was horrendous and pathetic. She was a childlike team leader, shouting all the time at everyone. I could not bear that tried to complain. But no body was there to listen to me.
Overall there were many colleagues I can never forget their good behaviors with me and they were Deepak, Sunil, Kanchan, Manisha, Tola, Gaurav, Karan, and the most beautiful of them Neha although I was very closed to Sunil and Deepak.
They are part of my good memoir.
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