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The rise in compensation claims for damaged voices in other industries is alerting call centres to how their staff's speech habits have far-reaching health as well as sales implications. By Richenda Wilson
Teachers have long understood that it is essential to look after your voice. Keeping control of 30 boisterous six-year-olds is no mean feat and often involves raising your voice to make yourself heard. As a result many teachers find they suffer from voice damage, ranging from croakiness to coughs, breathing difficulties and pain.
In the UK, compensation claims have already been won by teachers who have damaged their voices and had to retire early; now, cases are starting to emerge in other industries. The California Workers Compensation System has said that although claims for voice damage so far make up a small fraction of work-related compensation cases, it expects them to grow "exponentially over the next decade" as more people use their voices to do their jobs and work with voice- activated computers and the like.
As early as 1997, the UK banking union Bifu (now Unifi) in its report Occupational Voice Loss: A Negotiator's Guide described voice loss as "an issue that cannot be ignored...it could become a massive problem in years to come".
The telemarketing industry needs to watch this area closely, warns Sue Froggatt, director of training company Voice Value. "It's an area that nobody has really thought of," she says, adding that generally people use voice training as a way to make their sales pitches more effective, though she is increasingly hearing from health and safety managers of call centres who are keen to learn how to avoid damage.
Froggatt points out that voice damage is most likely to occur when people are speaking outside their natural range. Women, for example, tend to lower their voices in an effort to sound more authoritative and this is where problems can start to occur. These can be exacerbated when operators are working in an environment where poor sound-proofing means they have to strain to be heard.
However, there are simple steps that can be taken to minimise the risk of damage. These include self-help steps such as breathing and warm-up exercises, similar to those used by professional singers and actors...