Call Centres Are 'Like A Petri Dish' As Staff Hotdesk And Managers Lean Over Workers
Updated: See the latest stories on the coronavirus outbreak.
Call centre workers have described being “terrified” to go to work amid claims of coronavirus social-distancing guidelines being ignored and staff being encouraged to car share to avoid being late into the office.
Despite being identified as key workers, essential in order to keep the country connected both via phone and internet, workers are continuing to take “non-essential” calls throughout the crisis about matters such as upgrading entertainment packages for broadband customers.
One employee at Sky’s call centre said they were “terrified” to go into work, describing the process of entering the building as “like walking into a petri dish”.
They added: “The thought of sitting on the bus with so many other people and then being stuck with hundreds of others in an office for hours on end, knowing that anyone could have picked the virus up from anywhere, is just horrible.
“The work I do could be done from home. It feels as though it’s profit over the wellbeing of employees at the moment – some additional measures have been brought in but I don’t think it’s being taken seriously enough.”
As well as barely sitting the government-mandated two metres from their colleagues, the call centre worker also raised concerns that promised deep cleans had not been completed thoroughly enough and said that managers often had to manually lean over employees to enter passwords on their keyboard, contradicting the two-metre guidelines.
In addition, the employee reported that, as recognition of their work throughout the crisis, staff had been given vouchers to spend in the workplace canteen – leading to concerns that it could encourage even more people than usual to use communal areas and flout social distancing rules.
“At a time like this I wouldn’t touch the canteen food, but encouraging people to use that facility more than they would just seems so short-sighted,” they...