Hungary’s role in the Central and Eastern European market remains significant, being home to more than 200 service centers with 75,000 employees as of the end of 2020. That equates to 1.3% of the country’s total employment and still increasing. The sector has grown by 10% every year, based on the average of the last five years’ data.
Service centers are well known as multicultural work environments, with new joiners coming from very diverse backgrounds. With career changers as well as fresh graduates increasingly choosing BSCs, experience levels also vary greatly.
Hence, learning about one’s position, and becoming part of the community, does not happen at the same pace for everyone. Onboarding processes can be optimized to facilitate more effective learning, turning diversity in the workplace into an obvious advantage early on.
Several successful onboarding strategies exist. Before remote working gained popularity, entry-level employees were welcomed with a series of in-person events at the office, some of which were educational, and others team building.
A downside to this is that experienced colleagues have to forgo other duties while teaching the new joiners, but their knowledge exchange is often heavily focused on their field of expertise. This can make it difficult for some new employees to tell specific details apart from the necessary information about the whole sector, which increases communication difficulties during collaborations with higher-level colleagues.
Today, when the focus has dramatically shifted to online solutions in the workplace, foreshadowed by the already outstanding digital compliance of the sector, onboarding is the next process on the list.
Knowledge sharing, a vital element of the process, can be executed much more effectively using online platforms because they allow more information to be shared with a broader audience.
This demand is being met with a new initiative created by KnowledgePyramid. The program’s name, KeyStone, alludes to the stability that an overview of the BSS can offer. This is precisely what the platform does: modules address the various core topics in the field, each led by a professional with decades of experience.
The program is being launched initially in collaboration with the University of Pécs, with the Metropolitan University of Budapest planned as the next partner. Among the module leaders are Emese Pataki, Ismail Ahmed, Balázs Egri, Krisztina Molnár, Ferenc Sitkei, Timea Varga, and Miklós Manasziev. The courses are held online: students, graduates, and even entire teams or divisions of companies can apply.
The benefits of outsourced knowledge sharing are not new to leaders of business services centers: investing in an external program instead of in-house solutions allows for better resource management, while work based on the same knowledge and values creates more employee satisfaction.
KeyStone’s founder, Monika Slomska, has highlighted that the platform is “not just getting the new workforce ready for the future;” the program’s goal is to “help them be the future.”
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of October 8, 2021.
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