58% of BPO employees now work at home

The IT and Business Process Management sector managed to sustain their operations by allowing most of their employees to work at home during the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon.

The sector was able to continue operations and increase capacity throughout the ECQ period with the help of the Trade Department, the Philippine Economic Zone Authority and the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Interventions helped the sector improve productivity rate, with 58 percent of employees working from home and another 15 percent delivering work as part of the skeleton staff housed on-site or in nearby hotels. 

These figures were only at 40 percent and 10 percent, respectively two weeks ago.

Recent findings also showed that while travel and tourism sector continued to face challenges, sectors like healthcare, telecommunications, financial services and e-commerce saw an uptick in demand.

The sector said that a couple of weeks into the ECQ, a framework towards a gradual exit was developed, discussed and shared with industry stakeholders. This guideline is a set of recommendations which individual IT-BPM companies could tailor-fit to their own transition plans as they exit towards a “new normal”.

The dialog on rebalancing, reshaping and re-solutioning the future of the sector is another critical and expected next step, and one that requires multi-agency, multi-industry and multi-sectoral cooperation to ensure the country’s continuing relevance in the global marketplace despite and amid the challenges.

The IT-BPM sector sustained its growth momentum in 2019 even through global and domestic challenges. Data showed that the number of full-time employees in the country increased by 71,000 in 2019, bringing the total industry headcount to 1.3 million.

Revenues also grew 7.1 percent last year to $26.3 billion, driven by large incumbents that continued to expand not only in Metro Manila but also in strategic delivery locations such as Bacolod, Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, Laguna and Pampanga.