Changing Times..

I want to write this blog post to pen down my experience of changing work culture in the Indian (IT) Industry.  8 years back I joined a french multinational IT company based out of Mumbai , India. My experience about the culture, work environment and overall employee satisfaction was very good. Employees used to get good salary hikes, lot of benefits, high value rewards for their good work and organizations used to make lot of effort to keep employees happy.

Then came the economic crisis in 2007-2008 and Indian Organizations reacted in a very Desperate way to deal with the situation. A lot of Organizations increased their daily working hours from 8 to 9 without giving any extra compensation for this additional 5 Hrs/week. Forced employees who were not assigned to a project to go on a sabbatical leaves. This fever of cutting down expenses rose to an extent where organizations were not ready to leave a single opportunity to save a rupee and started cutting down even smallest of expenses like coffee machines, office stationary, office courier, etc etc. Like this is going to fill up for the thousands of dollars of business they were loosing.

This did not even stop here and recently few organizations started Tracking the time of their employees not by their daily In and Out punch but by actually monitoring the access doors installed in the various places like production area, cafeteria etc. So this has come down to doubting the integrity of their own employees where they generate reports about how much time an employee was at his desk or in cafeteria, or somewhere else in the campus. I assume they have left places like washrooms :) where they don't track the time spent! Not heard about it yet but if it goes like this the day is not far when this will be a reality.

Organizations market themselves by putting tag line about how "people matter" to them or how they are "driven by values" and on the other hand  they doubt the integrity of their own employees by tracking the time spent by them in the office premises and questioning their integrity. One organization I know mandates employees to be on the production area for 9 Hrs/day. That means if you want to take a lunch break or tea break it doesn't count in your time spent in office and either you fill it up or face consequences.

In my opinion this is just a failure of the Management of any organization to deal with economic crisis and just because they are the policy makers, they have tried to find an easy (more of a stupid) way of dealing with the situation. Target of becoming leaner, cost effective is going to be there. Always. But dealing with it by implementing cheap policies like these is not going to help for sure.

It is a high time to have some kind of a regulation by government or any sort of labor law to come into picture soon.