A call center company in Oregon wanted to make its workforce more diverse, but being based in small rural towns that are 90% white, it seemed impossible.
The pandemic spurred a change in thinking.
“Too many of our call centers kept getting compromised,” said Matthew Achak, president and co-founder of FCR, which provides outsourcing services to about 80 clients through call centers in rural Oregon and Montana.
“We had to pull everybody out of the sites, we had to deep clean the site, we had to quarantine everyone and then you’d bring people back in.”
FCR had its employees start working from home. It was largely successful, Achak said.
If employees can work from home, it doesn’t really matter where home is, Achak said. That meant the company could hire workers anywhere in the country.
“Much of business can be accomplished without having to force people into hour-long commute to and from their offices and to pack people into buildings,” Achak said.
The company still wanted some workers to live near each other, so they could meet up if needed. After some research, FCR targeted Metro Detroit communities Romulus and Southfield as their next hiring spots. They never visited Michigan before making the decision.
“We started looking at states that would allow us to really tap into a completely new demographic and really help us be a part of the movement toward hiring more people of color,” Achak said. “Michigan just checked every box.”
The company, which provides outsourced tech support and customer service, connected with local governments and chambers of commerce to find workers and used targeted postings on Indeed.com and Facebook.
FCR hired 327 workers in Metro Detroit last fall, including 179 Black employees.
Not dancing around the issue
Brendolyn Russ, of Detroit, one of the new hires, works in human relations. She’s never met any of her coworkers.
The biggest challenge with the company’s shift to remote work is keeping employees engaged, Russ said.
“You can’t meet up in the break room, you can’t have a picnic or a big welcome party for new hires or anything like that,” Russ said. “So they’ve really been striving to do a lot of fun things online.”
Employees meet after hours for virtual dinner parties and the company recently held a Black History Month-themed drawing contest for its employees, with coworkers voting on which drawing was their favorite.
When the pandemic subsides, FCR will likely adopt a hybrid work model, Achak said. About 60% of FCR’s employees are introverted and prefer working from home, he said.
“I’m an extrovert. I want to get back in the office,” Achak said. “But not everybody’s built like me.”
In Michigan, working from an office might not be a choice. FCR doesn’t have any office space in the state. But Achak hopes to eventually have a location for coworkers to meet up occasionally for trainings and celebrations. Russ likes the idea.
“It changes when you can actually see someone in person,” Russ said. “It makes you feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself.”
FCR’s commitment to diversity prove to its customers and employees that it takes its principles seriously, and it helps the company tackle challenges through new lenses with the different viewpoints brought to the table, Russ said.
It was refreshing to see a company admit its diversity shortcomings and make a plan to fix it, Russ said.
“You don’t hear that kind of forthrightness about the diversity (other places),” Russ said. “They literally said, ‘We don’t have enough diversity in Oregon. We have to come to Michigan.’ Like, they said it out loud. I was just like, ‘Wow. That is brave.’”
Other companies Russ has worked for “dance around the issue,” she said.
The work isn’t done, though – both in becoming more diverse and keeping remote workers engaged.
While employee turnover is often an issue for companies like call centers, it’s been particularly notable with the new FCR hires in Michigan. While FCR hired 179 Black employees in Michigan this fall, the entire company of 2,180 workers now only has 99 Black workers, said HR director Christopher Martin.
There’s been some attrition, but it’s “settling down,” Russ said.
“I cannot discriminate in any way on hiring,” Achak said. “But my hope is, by going into places that are very diverse like Romulus and Southfield, that the natural progression is to hire more people of color.”
Breaking the geographic ties of work
Companies have slowly become more willing to hire workers who don’t live near the office, said Brad Hershbein, senior economist with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo.
And the pandemic has only sped up the trend – especially for large- and mid-sized businesses, he said. For select industries, hiring away from the office could increase diversity and bring opportunities to areas in need.
But stories like FCR hiring hundreds of workers on the other side of the country are still rare, Hershbein said. Some types of business are still done best in person.
Call centers require less collaboration, making remote work less complicated. Also, because of the turnover in the industry, it’s not as much of a risk to test the idea out. Hiring the wrong person has wider implications in fields like engineering or software development, he said.
Internet service is another key to the equation, as such opportunities won’t be possible in some rural areas with poor service, Hershbein said.
“In terms of dynamically changing the structure of giving better job opportunities to people who need them … I’m kind of skeptical we’ll see any sea change in opportunities for them,” Hershbein said.
For now, the majority of remote workers are people with college degrees and white-collar jobs. But that could change as more industries experiment with the idea, Hershbein said.
Here’s a look at who was working from home in February across the country, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Can’t see the chart? Click here)
If FCR is successful, its new approach to hiring could be emulated.
“If we catch ourselves thinking, ‘Well, we used to do it this way,’ I think we’re in trouble,” Achak said. “We’ve got to rethink every way that we work, operationally. Because the old way of thinking is gone.”
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