Discovery prephase of an intervention to decrease burnout in call center agents

While the COVID-19 pandemic and the change it brought increased mental health problems, it also exacerbated the stress factors and thus the risk of experiencing burnout in the call center sector. Considering the severe negative consequences of burnout for employees and institutions, the need for intervention programs that aim to reduce burnout and its impact on individuals' lives is also increased. Since the interventions that take into account the basic needs, risk factors and protective factors of the target group, and actively involve the participants in the preparation process are found to be more effective, this thesis study aims to obtain data on call center employees' basic psychosocial needs, stressors, current mental well-being levels, personal resources and mechanisms open to change by intervention through the semi-structured interviews and the scales applied. Moreover, to create a potential burnout intervention program content list by synthesizing the existing study contents in the literature for the detected change mechanisms within the scope of the discovery phase of an intervention program to reduce burnout. Within the scope of the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 call center employees and socio-demographic data and scale data were collected from 135 call center employees. Brief Psychological Resilience Scale, Maslach Burnout Scale, Warvick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale, DASS 21, Job Demands Scale and Fear of Coronavirus Scale were applied. According to the results of the study, the low level of psychological resilience and high level of stress, job demands and fear of coronavirus increases the levels of burnout along with the risk of experiencing depression and anxiety and negatively affect well-being. According to these results, reducing the stress caused by job demands and increasing psychological resilience will be more effective in reducing burnout. Although not predominantly, the fear of coronavirus can be addressed along with these factors.