Turnover and turnover (or the mental health of temps)

What if it was discovered that a high turnover was associated with a
high turnover. What I mean is what if a high turnover of money (or
whatever the measure of success is) was also associated with a high
turnover of staff?

This might be true in the call centre industry. From my experience call
centre roles offer little reason for people to stay. There is little
staff loyalty and the management are only interested in meeting targets,
which were the number and quality of calls. This experience was over a
decade ago and before laws about the length of temporary contracts were
introduced. British Telecom's internet support call centres employed
very few staff on BT contracts. Out of 700 staff nationwide only a
handful would have permanent contracts. It meant they scored very well
on a measure of performance - something like number of customers divided
by the number of long term employees. They could hire and fire most of
their staff and offered them minimal benefits.

This is a poor way to treat people. It is dehumanising. It forgets that
people are human and have needs. It treats people as if they were
robots. I think if the managers had the opportunity they'd have gotten
robots in.

But that old type of environment was cheap. New staff could be trained
quickly. Even the trainers were temporary staff. Every 6-8 weeks they
could train a new batch of staff to replace the ones who had left and
meet increasing demand.

The system provided a high 'turnover, which meant a high number of calls
answered at a reasonable quality, and a high turnover of staff with the
added cost of training. It was a model that worked very well in the call
centre industry. People were unhappy but that wasn't important to the
organisation - they weren't BT employees.