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News that a subsidiary of Bell Canada was coming to the rescue following a mass layoff at TeleTech appeared to arrive out of the blue last week.
Behind the scenes, however, officials with both companies, as well as the city, had been working for months to forge an agreement that promises to return hundreds of lost call-centre jobs to the city.
“People don’t realize how much goes on in the background to make something like this happen,” said Dan Landry, Orillia’s manager of economic development.
Even as city officials were announcing that Nordia Inc. would assume TeleTech’s lease for for the call centre at the city-owned building on Hunter Valley Road, 120 ex-TeleTech employees were undergoing orientation at the very same facility where their jobs had disappeared just weeks before.
“We had already met these folks before they left, because their last day was Sept. 20,” said Nordia spokesperson Philip van Leeuwen “We gave them conditional offers of employment. We were in discussions with TeleTech. We said, ‘If this works out, we want you to come back’.”
After learning in early July of TeleTech’s looming layoffs, the company immediately began exploring the site’s potential.
“The seed was planted and we got together and started discussions,” van Leeuwen says.
Officials were working against the clock, hoping to have the deal inked before TeleTech’s layoff took effect in late September for a seamless transition.
“If we had had our druthers, we would have been in in the beginning of September,” van Leeuwen said.
But the complexity of the situation, which involved real estate, recruitment and training, among other issues, meant it wouldn’t happen that soon.
It was during the third week of September that Nordia spoke with TeleTech staff regarding potential job offers.
“Once they had left TeleTech it would be much, much harder to reach them,” van Leeuwen says. “TeleTech allowed us to come in and they facilitated these meetings.
“It was very tight in terms of the timing, but I think we had a good sense this was going to go through one way or the other,” he said. “It is a phenomenal achievement to do this in the space of about three months.”
The city-owned turnkey operation was a definite consideration in the decision to locate in Orillia, he added.
“If you think of the cost involved in starting from scratch – building out the centre, setting up the IT, the network, starting from scratch in hiring as well – you get a huge, huge leg up compared to starting from scratch,” he said.
Multiple city departments were involved on the city side alone.
“We’ve had a number of people on our team, from the property manager, our clerk’s department, our legal team, communications, working hard over the last month,” said Landry, noting the city fielded enquiries on the site from at least three other companies.
“We just kept referring everybody to TeleTech,” he said. “As it turns out, (Nordia) must have been one of the only ones that went direct and made a call to them.”
TeleTech, which earlier this year announced it would lay off the majority of its staff due to the loss of a major customer, will maintain a presence in the building, servicing its remaining client.
“We’ve certainly been there with TeleTech in the past where we know that it’s an up-and-down, ebb-and-tide kind of situation,” Landry said. “Our team has been closely working with them since they made the announcement in June.”
Nordia’s local workforce will climb to more than 400 within six months, van Leeuwen added.
“We have had nothing but co-operation from all parties involved,” he said. “I think it’s a situation that’s beneficial to all parties.”
TeleTech’s lease includes provisions allowing another company to assume the lease so long as it is a call centre.
“TeleTech just renewed (a five-year) lease a year ago last August,” said Landry. “By Nordia assuming this lease, it gives Nordia some security, it gives us some security. What happens when that lease comes up, we will deal with that when it happens.”
