Two fired for sexual harassment
By Bala Shah

Teleperformance (TP) is one of the biggest BPO’s in the world.  It has about 100,000 employees and revenue of 2058 mill pounds last year. Established in 1978, its core business spans the full spectrum of CRM/BPO contact center solutions. Teleperformance has a large global footprint in the industry with 276 contact centers, presence in 51 countries, servicing over 75 markets.

Teleperformance India supports a number of clients including Adobe, San Disk, Alliance One, Telus and Microsoft.

Regular readers of Techgoss are well aware that a large number of our articles are crowd sourced.  People send in tips, photos, story ideas and even articles. Many of our contributors have full times jobs in IT - ITES, and so prefer using a pseudonym. 

Over the years, a number of Tipsters have contacted Techgoss complaining about sexual harassment at their IT or BPO companies.  But few have been able to provide the evidence to back up such serious charges.

In 2010,  Techgoss received a very detailed Tip about India’s No. 1 BPO Genpact sacking a Hyderabad based AVP after a young female employee, who had been with the company for only 5 days, complained of sexual harassment.  The Techgoss story can be read at this link.

In Nov 22, 2011, we published a detailed Tip about how BPO Teleperformance (TP) sacked a Gurgaon based Account Manager who had a meteoric rise in the organization after he was found to have sexually harassed a new Joinee.  That article can be read at this link.

Since our article on Nov 22, 2011, we have received another detailed Tip, backed up with evidence, about how BPO Teleperformance has sacked an Assistant Manager for sexual harassment following the complaint by a Subject Matter Expert (SME) at the Adobe Process.

Assistant Manager AY*, who was handling the Install Queue at the Adobe Process in Teleperformance Gurgaon, was fired in November, 2011 when his victim R* produced substantial evidence against him to the Management.  The evidence showed that not only was AY harassing this young woman within the Office premises but also outside work.

The sexual harassment complaint was raised in the form of Employee Care ticket. As Teleperformance (TP) has a zero tolerance policy towards harassment of any kind, Managing Director Mr. Mehta and Jyoti quickly initiated an investigation following which the sexual harasser was sacked.  The victim had been wise enough to save all the sexual harassment messages and call logs to back up her claims.

To BPO TP’s credit, they quickly sacked two key managers from their Adobe Process as soon as the charges were proved.

R* - At the request of our Tipster, we are not publishing the full names of harasser or the victim.

Know of any such incidents in the IT / BPO sector?  Email us with the details.

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