Dial 'B' for Burnout? The Experience of Job Burnout in a Telephone Call Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High rates of labour turnover in the call centre sector are, in the view of some commentators, indicative of widespread employee 'burnout'. However, few studies have formally investigated the frequency or antecedents of job burnout for this particular group of workers. This paper presents the results of a case study, undertaken within the call centre of a large Australian public-sector utility firm, which explores workers' experiences of job burnout using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Our results support earlier claims that call centre workers are at least as susceptible to burnout as workers in other occupations that have previously been considered the most 'burnout-prone'. We argue that the experience of job burnout for call centre workers can be largely attributed to the repetitive nature of the work itself, the variability of customer demands, the pervasiveness of managerial surveillance, the remoteness (that is, telephone-based delivery) of customer-employee exchanges, and the performance of 'emotional labour' by workers in the call centre. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on job burnout and the future of call centre research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".