Teleperformance SE (TEP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Teleperformance Information Meeting. My name is Riyan, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. [Operator Instructions] For now, I'll hand you over to your host, Daniel Julien, Chairman and CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining this meeting. We are following up our last Thursday call and our intention is to provide you updates on the specific steps that Teleperformance has initiated following last Thursday. So first, I would say that we have been able to understand that all of you are thinking an answer to 2 key equations, 2 fundamental questions that have been raised in some media over the last months. First key question, is Teleperformance in the U.S., respecting the U.S. laws and is U.S. content moderation business? Are we compliant with all our obligations to our employees? And I can tell you for this question, the answer is, yes. We respect the U.S. law, and we respect our obligations to our employees as it has been evidenced both by internal and external audits, plus key people metrics. The second question is TP Colombia respecting labor laws in Colombia and is TP Colombia ready to engage positive constructive dialogue with the new government from Colombia and the union is in Colombia. And the response is, yes, absolutely. So on this basis, what concrete actions have been taken over the last few days. First, the TP global operational management team, I mean Agustin Grisanti, Global COO; Juan Carlos Hincapié, President of LATAM on the ground in Bogotá with the CEO of Teleperformance Bogota to start the discussions with the Vice Minister of Labor of TP Colombia, and they have already an appointment scheduled this coming Wednesday and of course, with the unions. And the mindset is to be extremely open transparent to find constructive set of relationship. Second, to address the different concerns that have been expressed by the different stakeholders, Bhupender Singh who is next to me and who is the Global President of The Global Business Transformation at Teleperformance, leads and coordinates all the actions and the communication to address all these concerns, whether it's the actions towards Colombia, the Minister of Labor and the unions, the investors, Teleperformance investors and the financial community, the clients in the market and of course, our employees. Third point, Teleperformance employee representative at the Teleperformance Board volunteered to answer your question on the relevant topic. And really, it will be an extraordinary moment of choice for you to listen to the voice of Teleperformance Employee Representative. This will happen tomorrow. And by the way, this is what we see on the screen. And by the way, you will see that both employees of Teleperformance for many years. So they know well the group. And specifically, I'm going to mention Vangelis Papadopoulos, who has been -- he is member of the European -- Employee of the European Working Council, he is member of the Bureau of the Working Council. He has been elected to represent the employees to the Board of Teleperformance. So he knows very well from inside how the management deal with a different aspect of managing the business and managing the relationship with the employees and what are the values that guide our management decisions. And by the way, it is specifically relevant because he launched the first trust and safety, understand content moderation project in Athens in 2018. So he will be able to concretely in a very tangible way, address your questions about what is the reality of the content moderation. Thank you. Finally, I want to tell you something. It's, yes, content moderation may be perceived very differently. But it is today widely recognized essential service to keep the digital world safe. And when I say digital world safe, it's business integrity, fight against the scams, it's fake news, it's intellectual property protection, it's protecting against hate speech, and it's also protecting the large public and our families against egregious content. Only a few companies in the world can do that at scale. One company is Accenture, for example, another one is Teleperformance, and there are a few others, but only a few can do this job that is an essential first responder services. So right now, our government and lawmakers are already discussing whether it's in Singapore, in France, in the U.S. to define global standards. But it takes time. And the digital world goes very fast. And we know something because I would say, a tweet created a kind of crisis, goes very fast and there is a need right now for content moderation, of course, respecting all the laws, all the interest of our employees. So having said that, I'm going now to ask Bhupender Singh, who is leading and coordinating the executive task force and is going to explain you in details the sets of actions that we have implemented and that we continue to implement.

Thank you, Daniel, and hello, everyone, once more. Let's go through each of the topics and the actions that we are taking in these topics. So the first topic is obviously Colombia. And in Colombia, as Daniel mentioned, we already have a senior team on the ground. We've got Agustin Grisanti, our Chief Operating Officer for the group. We've got Juan Carlos Hincapié, who is the President of our Latin America business. And we've got Andres Bernal, who is the CEO of TP Colombia. So they are on the ground, and they have got full mandate from the ex com and the Board to discuss and come to a mutual understanding agreement with the government and the unions. And as you know, a contact has already been established. The dialogue is underway, and we'll update you as we progress. Other thing I think it's important to understand that in our industry, it's not uncommon to have inspections, audits, visits from government entities. It's a fairly routine affair given the scale and size of operations. These visits could be for civil works, could be for health and safety, could be for labor relations. For example, just in Colombia, over the past 3 years, we've had 18 visits already, and there has not been any material findings that we need to be worried about. So we are fairly confident that there will not be anything in this these visits also. In fact, we welcome these visits. And we are going to request the Vice Minister to visit personally so that he gets a first-hand impression and touch and feel of our operations there. And the reason why we are confident is because as we touched upon in our last Thursday call, TP Colombia is one of the benchmarks within the TP Group, and it constantly measures itself and benchmarks against external metrics. And so in the past 2 years, it has had multiple certifications. And the 3 that I want to touch upon, which are relevant, one ISO 45001, which is the accepted international standard for occupational health and safety management. Second, Verego for CSR and sustainability and SGS for social responsibility. The fact that they've been certified by independent third-party bodies on a consistent basis gives us the confidence that there is nothing that we need to be overly worried about. The other question is about unions and that we are possibly for some reason not keen on forming unions. So again, I do want to clarify that we do respect the right of our employees for collective bargaining and forming unions. We already have within TP at the end of last year, and we've reported this number. We have unions in -- we have recognized unions in 19 countries, which account for more than 40% of TP's global workforce. And at our scale, that 40% implies something around 165,000 people. Now we've not been able to get data on this. But if there was to be a Fortune 100 equivalent for companies globally -- nongovernment companies globally in terms of by head count, which is unionized, TP will either be part of that Fortune 100 or it will be very close. In fact, as many of you are large institutions with much superior research capabilities, I'll encourage everyone to actually get that metric. So I think that's kind of a myth that TP doesn't have unions. Even within the other thing on unions is actually TP recognizes ECWC, which is the European Council for -- European Workers Council and that covers about 22 countries in Europe. And even within Colombia, we have had discussions with union, ongoing discussions with the unions for the past 1 year and we are committed to come to a mutual understanding when this process concludes. Moving on, we also want to confirm, as of now, we have not received any official notification from the government of Colombia. This was the case when we had the call last Thursday. Even today, we've not received any official communication and notification for any investigation from the government of Colombia. But we're not waiting for that. What we have done is, we have already initiated an internal audit, which is as per the IIA standards and is being conducted by qualified auditors from TP Group and any findings of this either way, if you find something that we need to improve, we will put that in place immediately. We'll not wait for a big report or anything like that. In addition to that, we are in discussions with 2 globally reputed standards and compliance audit firms, and we intend to select one of these firms in short order to do a more detailed audit of our content moderation operations across the globe, not only in Colombia, but across the globe. Obviously, we'll start with Colombia, but we will do it across the globe. And our endeavor is to make the findings of this -- these audits -- these external audits public. The time line at the moment that we're looking for this audit is about 2 months. Moving to the second topic, which is around social media content moderation. Now we have discussed in detail and also Daniel touched it earlier, too. This is an essential first responder service to protect the wider society. And it's increasingly becoming even more relevant. All of us have been privy to whole Twitter debate free for all versus what should be moderated. Even in France, President Macron has gone out publicly talking about balancing the need between freedom of speech and what is being put in social media and the effects of that. And in Singapore, they've gone one step ahead. They've actually made a law mandating the social media firms to moderate the content and take out any harmful content. So in that way, the need for this service is actually increasing and that's, in a way, validates for us -- someone like us to be able to do the service. At the same time, it is a complex and sensitive topic, has some ethical dimensions and the jury is still out in terms of what we do and what we do not do. So what we thought the only way to address the concerns of many of you is to invite people from our investment community, whether it's our investors or financial analysts to some of our sites. And we've already set that process in the works by seeking permission from our clients, and we are targeting to do the first of these visits in Colombia by the end of this month. And depending upon the demand and the need we will organize subsequent visits, but the first of these visits we are targeting to do within November in Colombia. Slightly more longer term, we Intend to also invite some reputed journalists and other media for them also to get a first-hand feel of what we do because unless they also touch and feel, they will not get the comfort that we are talking about. I must confess this one is somewhat more difficult at the moment in terms of getting client permission. So but we will keep working on it. The institutional investors and financial analysts, we have had in principal approval. We do need to get final approval, but we have in principle approval for the visits. For the media and journalists at the moment, we do not have any approval from our clients, but we are working on that. The next topic is TP's people practices and our whole approach towards ESG. Now I'm sure you've heard this before that we are a people company. Now for us, it's not a lip service, and I'll tell you why. In fact, not only for TP for the entire BPO industry, it's not a lip service. It's not a lip service because banks, how do you measure their size? You measure their size by the size of the balance sheet. A real estate company, you measure the size of that by their land bank. Technology and social media companies, you measure the size of those by the number of users. How does TP report its size? We have a 420,000 people company. This is the only real tangible asset that we have. And so if you don't take care of them, we know that we will not be in business for long. So that's why we strongly believe, and it's not -- it's a necessity for us to take care of our people. And that's why we have been involved in both making sure that our people are taken care of and also the communities that we work in actually are taken care of. To give you an example, TP started the program Citizen of the World, which was to support the least privileged children in the areas that we work in, in Philippines, India, Mexico, other places. Back in 2006, we started the Citizen Of the Planet initiative, which is to support the planet -- to educate people and support the planet, the climate change and a lot of those issues. Back in 2008, I hope it's not lost on people that these initiatives have started 14 to 16 years back before the whole ESG became a frontline corporate and investor relations topic. So we're not doing it only for lip service or a tick in the box, these things have been embedded in our system for a long period of time. And we have invited Clémentine Gauthier, who is our Group ESG head. She will be presenting shortly about a few of the initiatives that we have done in ESG. Now Coming back specifically to the content moderation staff after the -- some of the media reports in the U.S., we did not restrict ourselves to the U.S. We actually conducted focus groups with more than 1,000 content moderators across the globe. And they also -- we did not find anything remiss; they are proud of what they do. And so the stats that we gave to you last time around whether around employee satisfaction, whether around attrition are another testimony of that. We have Alan Winters, who is our Chief People Officer. He will be presenting some of the people KPIs later on because numbers tell better truth than words. But having said that, we are always keen to learn and improve. So as an ex com, what we have decided is that we will commission with a recognized HR firm, focus groups across the globe of our content moderation business and any findings of that in any improvement areas, we'll implement it immediately. And our intent is to have this completed before February. So when we announced our 2022 numbers in February, we actually give results of this research also. The fourth topic that I want to touch upon is our client temperature and wider business prospects. So our Global Chief Client Officer, Miranda Collard; and Eric Dupuy, who is our Global Business Development Officer and their teams have been in constant touch with our clients. Proactively, they reached out after Thursday to our top 200 clients, and we can confirm that there's no change in their attitude and partnership towards TP. In fact, they have expressed support and full trusting TP. And if I can go one step further, the business dynamics actually continue to be strong, even -- on Friday, we actually won some more business. So we've not seen any impact on our trading or business because of what has happened in the stock market. And before I request Clémentine and Alan to talk about their respective areas, I did want to make 2 final points. As senior leaders, senior managers and Board, we strongly believe that this is a -- what has happened in the stock market is a hugely disproportionate reaction because we measure everything in TP. And we have a fairly good understanding of all our key metrics, whether it's people metrics, whether it's operational metrics, whether its client metrics, whether it's financial metrics. And basis that, we can assure you that nothing is remised TP, but more than words, action speaks better. So since Thursday, the senior leaders and the Board of TP have bought more than 15,000 shares. Second, I want to give my personal commitment that I'll continue to update all of you in due course on all the initiatives and actions that I mentioned. And personally, I have bought 3,000 shares. So I hope that's an indicator of my own conviction and commitment. Now I'm going to request Alan Winters, who is our Chief People Officer, to present some of the key people KPIs, starting with the group, but then getting into Colombia and content moderation. Alan?

Thank you, Bhupe, and good afternoon, good evening to everybody. I'm very happy to be here to share some of our approach on how we listen to our people. If you could go to the next slide, please. So this is a continuous learning approach slide, and I really just wanted to share the process in our approach, and then I'll speak in a few minutes to some numbers. And the way to look at this slide is we have a set of internal measures and then we have a set of benchmark external measures to make sure we're monitoring and paying attention to our people are thinking and feeling every day. And the approach simply is we have processes to measure how a person is thinking and feeling in the moment during the day, at the end of the day, week, month, quarter and all the way to our annual process. And we are taking actions based on what we see in here from our people every single day and week to drive better or more positive employee experience and journey. And you've heard both Daniel and Bhupe talk about the number of people we have, 420,000 people globally. Year-to-date, we've had these contacts with our people 2.2 million times. So we are continually talking with our people, from getting their feedback and then taking appropriate action to drive a positive experience. We measure this again internally. We do our annual ESAT survey, Great Place to Work activity, but we also look at social media boards like Glassdoor, Indeed and Comparably. These are just 3. We operate in 80-plus countries, and every country has their own version of these boards and we monitor those as well, but these 3 are the large global boards. And you'll -- I'll show you some information on our performance there. But this is key because we can look at what are our people saying externally the job board to compare to what we're hearing internally, and it is the same information, which means we're doing our job from a culture and action plan perspective. If you go to the next slide, please. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about some numbers. So at a global perspective, if I look at Great Place to Work, Our Fortune's World's or World's Best Workplaces, which is derived from the number of countries that are certified countries that are certified for Great Place to Work as well as the Trust Index Scores that come directly from our people, we've been ranked 2 years in a row globally as the World's Best Workplace. Last year, we were in #25. This year, we rose significantly to 11th place globally. Our Net Happiness score, which is that real-time survey I mentioned a moment ago, our people are telling us 1.7 million times so far this year that they're happy with a plus 55% score. From a Great Place to Work certification perspective, we increased 4 countries certified from last year to this year. So we have 64 of our total company certified, which covers 97.3% of our employee base globally with a Trust Index score of 79 compared to the Great Place to Work global average across every country of 58.8. So we are significantly higher globally from an index score perspective compared to our peers. Glassdoor, we monitor on a monthly basis. Our score is 4.2, and I'm going to show you some details on that in a moment, so I'll hold off on further explanation on this slide. Our annual employee satisfaction survey score, which measures NPS, Net Promoter Score, this year, we hit a 50. And you can see '19, '20 and '21, continuous improvement with our Net Promoter Score, again, direct feedback from our people. Now if you go to the next slide, please. And I wanted to share this with you because it shows you the level of detail and tracking that we do externally. So Teleperformance is the purple bar at a score of 4.2. But we not only measure ourselves and compare ourselves against our competitors, but across every large organized -- global organization. And you can see we are very, very strong from a Glassdoor rating perspective. Again, this is the scores that our people apply on Glassdoor outside of our control. And if you look at on the far right, the Glassdoor global average is 3.7. So we are significantly above what the Glassdoor group average is. If you go to the next slide, please. Now I'm going to move a little bit to Colombia, and this is some pretty interesting information. So from a Columbia perspective, pink is the Columbia numbers and in purple, are specific numbers from our content moderators in Colombia. I mentioned a minute ago that our Net Happiness Score globally was 55. Colombia is higher than our group average at 60. Even higher than that, our content moderators are even happier at 89.7% in Colombia. Attrition in our global number is 7.5. In Colombia, 2.9% monthly average attrition significantly improved from what the group number is. Our Great Place to Work Trust Index score group level of 69. Colombia is significantly higher at 85 and even again, higher our content moderators at 90, benchmark best-in-class scores, across the group. Our Glassdoor rating is 4.2 globally, is 3.9 in Colombia, so right on target. And again, our ESAT scores, again, I mentioned it was 50 for the group, 63 for Columbia overall. And again, content moderators even happier at 64.7. So very, very strong numbers from both Colombia and our content moderators. If you go to the next slide, please. We took a further analysis and said, what does our content moderation score look like globally? Again, 50 NPS for ESAT for the group. Overall, for every country we operate in, our content moderators are scoring us at 61, again, significantly higher than the group average. And if you compare on the right-hand side, the other LOBs we have higher from an LOB perspective given our content moderators feedback. And the last thing I would say here is, in conversations with our content moderators, they understand the significance and the importance of the role they play as first responders. And they take personal pride in the work that we do because it's protecting the communities in which they live and work in every day, which is a fundamental part of what we do at Teleperformance. So with that, I will turn that over to the next slide to Clémentine.

Thank You, Alan, and thanks, everyone, for joining today's call. So I'm going to walk you through our CSR road map. And if we can go to the next slide, please. As Bhupender was reminding at the beginning, our CSR commitment has started a very long time ago. And one of the key milestones was in 2011 when we first signed the UN Global Compact. Since then, we have been fully committed in promoting its 10 principles and contributing to the U.S. sustainable development goals. We have structured our CSR approach towards 4 main commitments that are embedded truly in TP cultures, values and D&E. And as you've seen from the beginning of the call, our first and foremost commitment is, of course, for our people. And our first commitment is to be a preferred employer in every market where we allocated. That's a sense of the great place to work environment that Alan was just describing by reporting the best HR and social practices in every country. Our second commitment is closely linked and is how we can promote diversity, equality and inclusion. And we are one of the most diverse groups in the world with 420,000 employees across the globe in 80 countries, spanning 100 nationalities and speaking collectively 265 languages. So that reflects the true diversity of the group. We have a robust diversity, equality and inclusion that I won't describe today, but around several pillars, including gender, disabilities, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ and some local priorities. We are also engaged for the planet through the Citizen of the Planet initiative. And again, we have made ambitious commitments, validated carbon reduction targets, and we will talk about that in a few minutes. And last but not least, we truly believe that we are a force of good, and that's very important at Teleperformance to give back to communities. One way to give back is how we can support local economy and local employment. And I think that's something very key to understand from Teleperformance business model. We get away to employment for many thousands of people. Last year only, for example, we provided a first job opportunity to 125,000 employees in the world. And we truly believe that by providing this stable, long-term employment with, of course, best-in-class working conditions is a very effective way to provide and give back to the local communities to create wealth locally. And the second aspect, very clear as well is how we give back to communities through our charity initiatives Citizen of the World. If we go to the next slide, please. We have been consistently present in the major ESG ratings, including MSCI, Vigeo Euronext, CAC40 Index as well. And we have also been certified for 8 times now Verego for CSR practices. This includes a full assessment, not only at corporate level, but also site level, including Colombia. If we go to the next slide. So regarding well-being and diversity, as I was mentioning, there is a lot to tell about our diversity and inclusion approach. I focus quickly on the TP Women and the equality initiative. We are a pretty balanced company already with a lot in place, including a mentoring scheme, dashboards, the full TP network to raise awareness on equality and we have made a public commitment to reach at least 30% of women in executive committee by next year. Next. We have also been very strongly committed to inclusion through impact sourcing that we have embraced for over a decade now. What is Impact Sourcing? Impact Sourcing is an initiative where we try to hire people coming from disadvantaged groups or minority and to build a truly inclusive workplace. We estimate that roughly 15% of our global workforce are today Impact workers. And by the way, one of our strongest programs is in TP Colombia, where so far, we have been able to hire more than 2,000 Venezuelan refugees, and we have received the award for outstanding leadership in integrating refugees from Tent Partnership for Refugees for this exact same program. Next slide, please. Regarding the Citizen Of the Planet, as I was saying, we took ambitious carbon reduction targets, which have been validated by the renowned science-based target initiative last year. We have also made a public commitment to become carbon neutral by 2040 that's 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. We have been able to decrease consistently our carbon footprint for the past 4 years and are well positioned to achieve our 2026 targets ahead of time. We can see that on the next slide, please. We have been decreasing by 15% per FTE, for example, in last year alone and have been able to duplicate the share of renewable energy we are sourcing in our site. Next slide, please. Last but not least, our citizen of the world charity initiative is extremely key to the Teleperformance culture. That's an essential part as well of our -- bond of our employees with the company. The program was established back in 2006 to seek to generate a positive impact on local communities. We focus on 2 main courses, which are providing education to underprivileged children as well as supporting global disasters. Through that program, we have numerous partnerships with global and local NGOs. I will give you a few examples, but really, we have programs everywhere in the world. In India, for example, we support schools and nongovernmental organizations specialize in education. So far, since the beginning of the program, we have contributed to the schooling of 15,000 children. In Colombia, I'll give also a sense of the importance of the program. Out of 42,000 people, more than 12,000 are currently volunteer in the Citizen of the World initiative. So that's also a reflection of the engagement that our employees have with the company. In 2020, in the mid of the pandemic, TP Columbia volunteered to handle the city of the Medellín's COVID-19 lines, and we received the official thanks for the Medellín mayor's office. Another example we've been in 2022, where we have been able to raise $1.6 million in support to Ukraine. So last year alone, more than 60,000 volunteer hours have been provided by our employees across the globe for these causes. Next slide, please. And another very important milestone in terms of our Citizen of the World initiative, the global partnership with UNICEF that we engaged earlier this year. So we have a global 3-year, $6 million partnership with UNICEF focusing primarily on funding some education programs in India and Philippines, our 2 largest countries of operations as well as providing energy response and disaster relief across the globe. That was, in a nutshell, our ESG road map and our main priorities. I encourage if you want to know more to read our integrated report, for example, or all of the publications we have on that. Thank you.

Yes Olivier, you're unmute now. So...

So -- thank you. Good evening, everyone. I'm going to be -- to give you some highlights on 2 -- I'm going to go cover 2 points. Maybe next slide, please. Which are the buyback program and the liquidity of the group. Buyback program, I'm sure that you have noticed that we have announced last week that a launch of a share buy program -- share buyback program of EUR 150 million following the disproportional drop of our share price. The net performance management and Board of Director has been said that strongly emphasis, again, are highly confident in the future growth of the company. We believe that stock price is significantly under valuated. Therefore, we launched an initial program that start last Friday and will last at least for the next 3 months. We will assess at that time in the next potential step if needed. This is a strong signal of confidence and reassurance that we want to give to our shareholders, both institutional and individuals, many of whom have been a strong believer in TP for. We move now to the financial situation of the group. Teleperformance continued to benefit from a very solid situation with a strong, recurring free cash flow generation. Again, in 2022, we are absolutely convinced that we are going to deliver a significant growth in our cash flow generation. However, the group enjoyed a very good liquidity with EUR 756 million in current and cash equivalents at the end of June last -- this year and more than EUR 1 billion of undrawn credit line. On liquidity, I want to remind everyone that Teleperformance has lengthened this debt maturity to 2029 by issuing a EUR 750 million bond on the market last Friday. I have also been in content touch with banks over the past few days, and we continue to have access to the market easily if we need to any strategic core protection. As a whole, as you have understood that Teleperformance is solid and have access to cash and have no [indiscernible]. Now I will leave the floor to questions on the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] So our first question comes from the line of Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs. .

I have couple, please. You mentioned in your remarks that in Colombia, it has been taking more than a year to, I think form a union. I just want to compare how does the time line basically compare to, let's say, other countries where unions have been formed? Is 1 year, more than a typical time frame which a union can get formed? Or is it too long? .

I'm going to start to answer and then I'm going to pass our TP Columbia management team the answer. Clearly, it has been a long process because I think that there were some procedures issue and much more technical procedure issue than anything else. But please, the TP Columbia team, Agustin can you answer specifically.

Yes, I can answer. In fact, the union has been already created, and it's a union that already existed in the country for more than 15 years. This union is Utraclaro and many employees of Teleperformance affiliated to the union and it's the law, mandate, but they are free to the soul, of course. The problem with the unions is to reach an agreement with that because there were many formalities of that process when that comes with their petitions and negotiations start that they need to fix before we can progress with this process. Having said that, we are having conversations with them. It's not that we are not talking to them, and we are positive that we will reach a mutual understanding in the coming months.

One follow-up -- one more question, please. I think it's very helpful to have the detail and the color on your employees, your CSR details, ESG details, et cetera, in this presentation. I think the one question that is still investors' minds is that despite having all of these initiatives, something has come out in the press. So is there something missing? Do you need to maybe review your processes to make sure that such a thing doesn't happen again in the future? Or are you simply saying that the press articles are wrong? .

It's a very sensitive question. We think that we have very ethical and solid management structure at Teleperformance. Yes, there have been some articles in the press, very one sided, by the way, because none of these articles really gave a fair chance to Teleperformance management to answer or even to come to visit the facilities. I'm not speaking about facilities that need an agreement from the client. But we have many facilities where we are very, very open. So my perception is that this article did not come just by chance. There have been somehow orchestrated and we understand that a company like Teleperformance that become so large. 420,000 people last year, probably 440,000 people this year becoming depending on the list, but I think the 16 largest private employer of the group gets a lot of visibility. And so when things do not advance as smoothly as a different social partner would prefer, it can create some kind of misunderstanding or issues. But for us, not only our values are very clear. And the first one is integrity. I say what I do, and I do what I say. Second, its process. We have strong process. And third, we do not have any kind of hubris. So when we see such event, of course, it raise a question. And that's the reason why at the global level, we decided to run concurrently and at the same time, internal audits according to the IIS and external audit. Unfortunately, and under the pressure, the external audit in the U.S.A. due to the sensitive nature of the topic, we -- the request of the external auditor, which is one of the top largest audit companies of the world, was that none of the elements of the results of the external audit would be made public. This external audit was for the benefit of Teleperformance management and for the government in case of any kind of investigation. In the second wave, that we are initiating under the lead of Bhupender, we are making sure that the global external auditor that we are contracted -- we are making a contract with, is going to give us the authorization at least to give and fairly representative, maybe edited for the confidential content of their recommendation. So yes, madam, each time there is an event, it raised a question, and we take the event even when we suffer, we take the event as a positive sign to improve the current status, standing of the management of the different components of the group.

Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Jousseaume from Societe Generale.

Thank you for this conference call. My first question is about your staffing tables that we can find in your annual report. I was looking at them since -- for the period 2017 to 2021. And when I look at the layoffs departure divided by total staff at the start of the year ratio, it's always around 80%. So from 85% to 95%. So it seems that despite whatever you can do, people revision that we are quite difficult for people to stay 1 year, not more. So could you explain a bit what is your feeling about that?

I may want to start the answer, and it's going to be completed by Bhupender. First, these ratios are the ratios of the BPO, the global BPO industry. We can find these ratios in the standards of the industry that are established by an organization called COPC. And these ratios have deteriorated, of course over the last 18 months due to the macro-socioeconomic environment that we all know. Do we do like this ration? No. Do we do everything to improve this ratio? Yes. But what is the objective component. In fact, in our largest piece of business, which is the customer service world, our frontline employees, typically, answer to dissatisfied customer. And to answer to dissatisfied customer, you learn a lot. But also, you don't want to do that all your life. That's the reason why this industry in this front line is typically an entry job in the professional life. And I can tell you that the vast majority of our employees after passing through the Teleperformance school find jobs and develop a very positive career. Some of them love the jobs and get promoted within Teleperformance. I would give you just an anecdote. The number of people in the financial community, including in the financial analyst community that I had the opportunity to meet over the decades who told me "Oh, you know Daniel. I started at Teleperformance when I was a student or just when I finished. And it's where I am". And for most of them, it was a school, real school, tough, but a very good survey. So I think that it's not an accurate point to make a correlation between the satisfaction of the employee and the turnover of the front line. And then to finish on the specific topic that we are talking about, which is trust and safety content moderation. This level of attrition is at least reduced by 2x, which shows the sense of purpose of the employee who work in content moderation versus just working in customer service and having to deal with all the customer venting their frustration. That's my point. Maybe Bhupender, you have something to add. Oh, yes, 1 point, of course, this average last year, reflected really different situation. If you are in the Philippines, for example, this ratio, you divide it by 2. Even if our employees work in 9 shift, which is demanding because the work environment, because their level of compensation is so much better and higher than the environment. In U.S.A. last year and over the year because of the fact that it's a very hot job market, very low unemployment, support of the government during the COVID time, not only Teleperformance, but all the companies in the U.S.A. have suffered an increase of the attrition. I hope I've been exhaustive.

Yes. And if I can add to that, leaving aside some of the external factors, which -- because of which they may be short term up or down, the steady state turnover is actually a function of industry, the level within that industry and country. So even within TP and what the numbers that we report out actually are only the front-line staff. And unfortunately, that's the intrinsic attrition level, turnover level of that staff that business. Patrick, you work with the big bank. There are many other people who are from banks, big banks who run large captive -- who have not outsourced Teleperformance as yet but run their own large captive contact centers. What I would sincerely request everyone is to look at the attrition rates of those contact centers that will be vastly different from the, let's say, this community. The same thing in TP, the frontline contact center agents, there is a high attrition. At manager levels and other things, it's similar to what you would expect 15% to 20% per annum. That's what it is in that. And then the country factor comes in. It's typically lower in our countries like Philippines and other things, lower in Europe, higher in U.S., higher in the U.K. and that's across companies in this sector.

I continue now with 2 questions, which are more -- I would say, which are more, let's say, precise. You mentioned that TP content moderators are exposed to less than one highly egregious content per 1 million items reviewed. How many items that the human moderator review per day or per month or per year at TP.

So you know what, Patrick, I don't have the precise statistic, and I don't think Bhupender has it right now. Maybe Akash Pugalia, who is the President of Content moderation has it. And if has it, he can answer. Otherwise, you are going to have a first-hand answer from our employee representative at the Board of Teleperformance, who, by the way, is call center manager in Greece for content moderation. .

My next question was more to know if 1 content moderator is confronted to one egregious content per day, per month, per year, per 10 years. I mean, is that something I do not understand? .

Maybe Akash, if you can join. Yes, please. I am sure you are going to be more precise than we can.

Okay. Can you guys hear me? .

Yes.

Okay. So on an average, when a content moderator has between 20 and 30 seconds to moderate a piece of content, this piece of content is generally already has gone through the AI interface of the platform that the content moderator is working for. So if you look at the man, the content moderator does not actually come into contact for highly egregious content for a very long period of time. Yes, sometimes it gets trickled in through the AI. But just because of the nature of the job and the time it takes to moderate the content, which is around 30 seconds average, a moderator does not look certain egregious content for more than a month to 2 months to 3 months at times.

I think you have the -- and thank you for the answer. It's a great answer. I mean, between once a month to once every 3 months or even more.

That was exactly what I wanted to know. And my third question is about this question of unions in Colombia. There is something that I do not understand very well. I think that you mentioned that the union was unable find 60 people at Teleperformance who are willing to, let's say, [indiscernible], if I understand well. So you mentioned also that you have 41,000 people in Colombia, but 15% of them are not satisfied based on Great Place to Work Criteria. So it means that 6,000 people at Teleperformance Colombia are not satisfied. So to what an extent, it is really -- it is really possible for union to not find 50 people among this 6,000.

I think that maybe there is a misunderstanding. And we are going to let the people from Teleperformance Colombia answer. But first, when we show net score and its net score positive score. It doesn't mean that the other are negative score. It means that it can be neutral. Let me continue, please. Because you are going -- of course, you are going yourself to be invited to come to join and visit Colombia. I had this experience, Bhupender had this experience a lot, he had the experience. This is a very vibrant company. And in fact, this is a company where there is a strong feeling of belonging. And the way it has been portrayed is really far from the reality. Now I'm going to let whether it's Juan Carlos, Agustin or Andres to answer because this is their territory.

Okay. Thank you. Daniel. Thanks for the question. Today, we have 63 people that are affiliated to a union in Teleperformance Colombia. This union is Utraclaro. This is -- there were more people before, I mean, but they made a petition to start a negotiation that has some issues -- formality issue that they need to fix in order to continue with this. But this is the actual status. In parallel to this, we continue to have meetings and conversations with the leadership of the unions and the representatives of the employees for this initiative.

Okay. can I just clarify? I just did the math. I was not -- I've not done the math correctly. It's actually you will see one egregious content in over 5 years, not in 1 to 3 months.

Yes.

Excuse me, but it's a very important correction.

But with such a low number, how can it be an issue?

You know what, Patrick, take any large company of the world and take just TP Columbia with this 42,000 people and try to get testimony from employee or employees who have something negative to say about this 42,000 company. You are always going to find 4, 5 people who are going to be ready to testify. And if you do not have the intellectual fairness, honesty, to by the way, double check the vast majority of the way the employees of the company feel or the way the real data coming from a specific activity, you can write something that looks like more like tabloid than serious investigation journals.

Our next question comes from the line of Ben Wild at Deutsche Bank.

Two questions from me. The first is just referring to the press release that you put out this morning. On the U.S. audit that you did. I just wanted to know any details that you could provide on the scope of the required operational improvements that your audit firm in the U.S.A. And then a second question on content moderation more generally. Revenues are concentrated in content moderation around a small pool of clients and volumes seem vulnerable to additional automation going forward. I just wanted to know if your view on the medium-term attraction of content moderation has evolved over the last few days.

Yes. Let me take those 2. so the first question was some color on the improvement opportunities for the audit that was done in our operations in the U.S. They were largely procedural. And let me give you 2, 3 examples to give you a feel of what they were. One, as we mentioned, we do background verification checks, criminal checks on all our employees there. This was done consistently for all the new employees that have been hired over the past 3 years. This whole -- that site started only in 2019. But we also had a few people transferred in from other sites who are doing other things, but we've found something. So we had 6 employees who had joined Teleperformance in 2014, they were part of this team, and we did not have background verification for them. But they have been with TP for since 2014. So that was 1 example. The other was the wellness care programs that we're talking about in content moderation. Again, it was available to everyone. But what we found was that the usage was only by the frontline content moderation people. Some of the support staff, whether it is the back-end MIS, workforce management, et cetera. While there was no kind of as policy procedure, there's nothing restricting them, but no one was using it. When we did the focus group with them also, they kind of assume that it was only available for them because they were to some extent, not in the frontline staff. So that was another one that we found. And the third one was around Internet access, if I can. So again, we have depending upon requirements, we have restricted Internet access to our staff, and that's the way it was set up. There was a software update for one part of the team. And when that update happened, a few additional sites got opened up, and those were needed to be closed. But that was, again, 1 small part of the team, not the entire team, and it was not kind of the sites that got opened up or sites that are, let's say, sites that one should not be visiting professionally. It was just normal access that people had got. So these are the kind of examples that we have. There's nothing kind of as such fundamental or ethically wrong that we found in the audit. So that's the first part. . Regarding the second question, which is content moderation as a business as a service line and whether you've had any change of thought on that over the past few days. As we alluded to earlier today. The need for this service actually is only increasing with all the content that is being generated. And yes, A large chunk of it is even today being handled by AI, and the AI is becoming intelligent day by day, so which is a good thing from one perspective. But still, given the amount of data that is being generated. And given the amount of sensitivities different government bodies and everyone are coming up with, the need for this service is only increasing. It's not going down. At the moment, it's increasing, and Daniel touched upon it also. A few companies may do it at a small scale, but when you're talking about doing this kind of operation at a global scale, we -- TP, which is a master of managing interactions at billions of interaction scale, we are one of the best companies positioned to do it. So if there's a need for the service line, the need for service line is increasing, and we have the best -- one of the best capabilities in the world to do it. We do not see any reason why we should have a change of heart on this.

I would like to add that as Bhupender was mentioning when he was speaking about the U.S., France, Singapore, I think that what we do for our clients goes in the sense of what the lawmaker want. I remember several years ago when Mark Zuckerberg was giving a testimony to the U.S. Congress and when he committed to hire dozens of thousands of content moderator. And this is something that was very much approved. And by the way, this is exactly what we are talking about today. Going one step further with the global warming, with the global pandemic, the fact that we have 8 billion people in the world, we know that the coming years life is going to be more and more digital. Work is going to be more and more digital. Entertainment is going to be more and more digital. Social interaction is going to be more and more digital. So this needs moderation. I just want you to think 1 second about what is coming in 1 way or another, which is the metaverse. And the metaverse is going to be a kind of digital world in which people are going to work, make business, meet people and so on. In this metaverse, people need to be protected. Of course, exactly like in the real world, in the police, there are a lot of tools that help. And this is the artificial intelligence. But still, there is always need for first responders who are able to contextualize a situation and help. So we think that it's an essential positive service for the society.

Our final question comes from the line of Nicole Manion from UBS.

I want to follow up, first of all, on the -- the one about the egregious content and how that's reviewed. Given the kind of articles that we're reading, and obviously, I think how many able to understand the Internet and online space in general, it just seems -- I mean, a bit unfathomable but somebody would only screen content that was highly offensive even if it is prefilled by AI bot once in 5 years. And if that was the case, it's difficult to see how that would have led the kind of coverage and concerns about this business that we've seen, not just when it's been done by you, but when it's being done by other firms as well, people have reported that it was a very challenging and difficult role. And if you're only seeing something awful once every 5 years, I assume that wouldn't be that challenging compared to what people are reporting. So that's the first question, if you can just sort of clarify that? Are we talking here then about particular types of content rather than content in general is offensive? And then the second question would be just to drill down about liability between you and your client. So obviously, when you have these outsourced contracts, I assume they define quite clearly the kind of activities that you're doing on behalf of clients. But when things like the investigations in the U.S., which you launched are up and running or potential future investigations, where does the liability if somebody was to come in and visit your site and the kind of things that they will be looking at. So I guess they look at your systems or the client systems. So where is the liability and the risks sit there between you and the clients that you work with? Yes, those 2 questions would be great.

Yes. I'll answer the second question, which is more of a commercial question. On the first one, I'll defer it to Akash, who heads Trust and Safety operations for us. So in terms of the liability, firstly, in an outsourcing business, there is always certain element of risk. We process activities. You work for a very big bank. We have lots of banks in our clients. And we process financial transactions on behalf of our banking customers and they may be errors, they may be sometimes deliberate errors there. And so there is that risk there too. And it's not that we have certain degree of balance if the error is on account of client systems, processes, procedures and we have something called SRA, which is an upfront risk assessment with the customers. And we define upfront what is their liability, what is our liability in terms of processes, system, et cetera. And if it's some error on our side, it's going to -- it's on our side. So it's not that way hugely different from any other process that we have. And we also have on the call here, I can see her Leigh Ryan, who is our Chief Legal Officer. So first, we'll let Akash, talk about the question that you raised. And then later on, we'll have Leigh quickly touch upon commercial liability issue.

Sure. Thanks, Bhupe. So generally, I think content moderation, there is a perception about content moderators that they only look at egregious content throughout the day, right? If you have to break down content moderation, there are several different queues within content moderations or you can call them policies. Policies could be related to hate and harassment work that you are looking at. Policies can relate to bullying activities. Policies can relate to sexual activity, nudity. Policies can relate to violent extremism. Policies can relate to CSAM work, right? Within each of those policies, there are different type of content. So you can have text, you can have images, you can have videos, you can have live streaming. So a combination of all of those things put together comes into content moderation queues, which then goes through the AI and then it filters down into the content moderator. And hence when you look at the different type of content across the different policy types, across the different platforms that is where you get to see that the highly egregious content is what I quoted as 1 in 1 million or they don't get to see -- they wouldn't get to see highly egregious content. So that is how the content moderator queue is looked at by the moderators.

Yes, I understand that. It's just obviously, if we look at churn rates, most people who do this all wouldn't be around for 5 years. So that implies that they would never see something highly egregious while they're doing this role, which just doesn't seem to tally with the kind of statistics or commentary you might have. But it probably looks like it's based on a definition of content that you're using rather than anything else. I appreciate the kind of the steering around that. I guess, yes, would that be the case that it's really about how you define highly egregious versus kind of other forms of content which are inappropriate or unacceptable, I guess?

Bhupe, you can give your experience. .

Yes. So it's not -- firstly, yes, to some extent, you're right, Adri, there is a definition thing, but it's not our definition. This is -- and still no standards in this industry because this is an evolving industry, but close to the standards that one you can think of is that. And I know I'm taking time but let me just quickly give you 3 examples that came into a queue. I was as part of our reviews. I spent a lot of time and actually looked at it. So there was this queue. Example number 1 that came through was a model who was in her current -- in a bikini and also, there was one of those now and then pictures. Now and when she was a 2-year kid. The AI bot picked up a child and a lady in bikini in the same frame, send it to our agent. Kind of the guy said nothing wrong or the footballer, Ronaldo, taking his shirt off and a little girl watching that and doing like this, kind of she was shied or she was embarrassed. So obviously, there's nothing wrong about it. Or 2 kids watching an underwear ad because the AI picked up 2 kids and a semi-clad person, that's this. So there are lots and lots of those kind of things that happen. Look, I don't want to belittle it. Sometimes people do see really horrible stuff. And so they are doing an important job. But it's not that they're seeing bad images after bad images, bad videos after bad videos and this thing. And the 1 in 5 years, look there's also a bit of a lottery effect. If you just -- because the mathematics says, okay, kind of one in million, does not -- it may be that some person never sees it, 1% may see it, kind of someone may win a lottery in this case, in a wrong manner once in a month or once in 2 months. So there is that effect also comes in.

Maybe we can have Leigh now.

Yes. Thank you. I wanted to reiterate what Bhupe has stated, which is that in any client contract that we have, there's an alignment of liability that varies depending upon the alignment of responsibility under the contract. And our contracts in this area are not dissimilar from those. The types of liabilities that we undertake in any kind of an outsourced client contract.

And if I'm right, Leigh, the responsibly to notify the specific government agency in case of egregious content belongs to the client.

That is correct. In the case of the -- for example, in the United States, the responsibility for notifying what is a parent egregious content remains with the platform, which is operated by the client. So it's the client's responsibility.

Right. Just to sort of follow-up, though, on that. Surely, if your employees are the ones who sort of see the content, they would have to report after some internal mechanism. Is that correct?

That's correct. They flag it for -- and it goes back to the client for its review and determination as to whether to reported or not reported. But those determinations are made by the client. What our content moderators do is flag something that they think is inconsistent with the guidelines or the policies that Akash referred to that the client creates and asks us to flag for them.

Okay. So there will be consequences for missing that stuff or not reporting it, but the actual reporting falls at the clients, I guess.

That is correct.

Thank you very much. Just before the conclusion, because we have been speaking a lot about Teleperformance Colombia and really at the group top management, we feel sad for them because this is an outstanding team that has created so many positive jobs for the country that has been recognized multiple times by the authorities of the country. And that is also a benchmark not only for Teleperformance, but I think for the industry. So I would like you to be exposed 2 minutes to Andres Bernal, who is the CEO of Teleperformance Colombia and who is going to tell you from the deep of his heart, what is TP Columbia in 30 seconds or no more than 2 minutes.

Thank you, Daniel, and thank you for all the people who with us today. In 30 seconds, what I will say is my whole team really feels a deep commitment, not just with the country, but for the people that we relate. We really feel that we are a company that is all the time thinking which one is the next level that we will need to achieve and we will find the path to do so. We're a company that, of course, being in the servicing industry is really interested to offer a great possibility for the people that we live. I mean, in this brief time that I have, I just want to share 1 example of what I think that is the real D&E for the team. 1.5 years ago, I got an idea from one of the person that was getting into the company. And the idea that, that person had was to create a [indiscernible] a social responsibility group that could really impact the society in a different way from the one that we were delivering internally in the company. After 1.5 years, now we have more than 12,000 people. Clémentine mentioned that in her presentation. But all those people are all the time thinking on how we can return part of the success of the experience on the different things that we have live in life, but to the society. From that program, we can share many examples. As you mentioned, we have been impacting through this program in many different aspects that the United Nations have presented in her program in order to see really that we are heading to the right directions. With the short time, I will just end up saying, I'm so proud of the team that I have the pleasure to live. I'm so proud of the results that we have been able to achieve. But more important than that, I'm so proud of how we achieved those resources. We have plenty of external certifications. We have many external awards. But more important, we have a huge Colombian talent willing to keep impacting in a very positive way, the life of the people that we have the pleasure to live. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you, Andres. With that...

Yes, with that, we come to the end of the session.

And we would like to thank you very much. I'm just going to tell you something whether you have been convinced totally or you still need more information, please, please be attend tomorrow update -- Teleperformance update. This will not be presentation by the management team, but this will be a genuine candid answer from the Teleperformance employee representatives that have been elected at the Board of Teleperformance. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your lines.