Tough Calls

Tough Calls

Reporter: Quentin McDermott

Broadcast: 18/06/2007

"We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to drive this transformation and deliver results… If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice… then you just shoot ‘em and get them out of the way… " - Telstra Chief Operations Officer Greg Winn (at a May business meeting)

Once derided as fat and featherbedded, Telstra is trimming down. Applauded by an eager crowd of mum and dad shareholders, the lumbering giant is shedding costs and boosting productivity under trainer Sol Trujillo’s tough regimen.

But increasingly Telstra’s 40,000-plus workers say they are feeling the pain. Some angrily accuse the company of forcing cultural change too far, too fast and with scant regard to their welfare and dignity.

When Sally Sandic, a young Melbourne woman who worked at a Telstra call centre, took her life early this year, the spotlight shifted briefly onto Telstra’s management practices. No one knows exactly what caused her death, but friends and family claim her work put her under severe and unnecessary stress.

Sally Sandic’s case is part of a Four Corners exploration of crunch workplace issues inside Telstra: the impact on staff of a shift from a customer service to a sales culture, the setting of ever-increasing performance targets and rigorous monitoring of individuals’ time and movements.

In call centres, machines and managers closely track how much product each employee sells, what is said to the customer, how long it takes and how soon they can move on to the next call. Each computer keystroke is measured; "unproductive time", like toilet breaks, gets logged.

Team leaders go to courses to be imbued with jargon that disparages workmates. One former team leader tells Four Corners how she quit in distress after realising she had begun to hate and bully her staff. "If I wasn’t doing it I’d be getting it from up above from my boss," she says.

Out on the road,...