Longer talktimes, lower incentives: edtech turns up the heat on its employees
BENGALURU : The brunt of the slowdown in India’s once highly vaunted edtech sector has fallen on its foot soldiers. As online tutoring startups struggle with falling revenues and reduced investor funding, they are cracking the whip on their salespeople, thrusting on them higher targets and longer hours while saving on incentives. Mint’s conversations with about two dozen sales executives across edtech firms including upGrad, Unacademy and Scaler suggest the situation may be heading from bad to worse, not only for the employees but also for the sector.
These executives spoke on condition of anonymity. The edtech industry already has been under the scanner for extreme examples of mis-selling and unethical sales practices. Byju’s, once India’s most-valuable startup, especially has been under scrutiny for its sales practices, which forced it to alter its approach.
Late last year, Scaler, which offers upskilling courses, introduced a policy requiring sales executives to complete two hours of ‘talktime’ every day, failing which it would dock their day’s pay, according to the company’s sales executives. Talktime refers to the duration sales executives spend engaged in conversation with potential customers over phone calls. “Imagine working for 9-11 hours but you end up having 110 minutes of talktime (10 minutes short of two hours), and you don’t get paid for that day," said a sales executive at Scaler.
Scaler tweaked the policy last month, and now mandates two hours of talktime only for employees under probation, according to company executives. “As with any other organisation, we at Scaler occasionally change and experiment with our internal work policies across teams. To ensure these changes do not adversely impact morale and
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