Work Culture

People have different attitude towards their careers. Some are super-ambitious and serious workaholics, while some work just because they have to. No matter why you go to work, I am sure you will agree with me that the expectation is to have a good working environment with people whom you can respect. Personally speaking, I like a good work-life balance, wherein I work sincerely  8 hours a day and then want to go home to my family to spend quality time with them. I consider myself to be a responsible individual, who is aware of her professional commitments and would always keep them in mind, when making vacation plans. Imagine my shock when I discover that communicating my leave plans in advance gets my leave cancelled.

When I talk to other teams, I find out that this is pretty much the same in a lot of teams. We have company policies which say one thing and bosses who say another. On paper I am entitled to such and such benefits. In reality, it all depends on my boss's whims and fancies.

The IT industry in India mainly services clients abroad. In my years of working with Americans and Europeans, I have noticed that they maintain a strong work-life balance. Also, whenever I have worked with them, they have shown me the same courtesy. Why is it then that our Indian bosses act like slavedrivers, sometimes without rhyme or reason?

They make a huge hue and cry when you want some time off. Instead they want you to work day and night and on weekends and holidays. But these very same people take regular vacations and avail of every other benefit that the company offers them. These are the people who think that human resources can be replaced with machines or robots.

I suppose playing these petty games gives them a sense of power. When will we learn the right things from the Westerns? When will we realize that talking in an American accent or wearing short skirts or having casual affairs are not the things we should learn from them? Instead, what we should be following is their sense of discipline, their attiude towards life and their courteous ways.

Each of us needs to change that one little bit to bring about a larger change and have a healthy work culture. Let us all work towards great work environments of the future!

Sycophancy Takes You Places in the Corporate World

Born a Sagittarian, I have always had this childlike idealism within me. 14+ years in the IT industry have yet to rob me of this trait. Not only am I an idealist, I am also very naturally inclined to speaking my mind. When I was a child, my one desire in life was to grow up quickly and work in an office. I would be able to wear pretty sarees and have a desk and a telephone and tons of stationery. This was the picture in my mind.

Over the years I changed my ambition to becoming a dancer, something I loved passionately, but then fate made me turn back to my original ambition of getting a job somewhere. In the 1990s, during my college years I figured out that the quickest way of getting a job would be to study computers and then proceed accordingly. My love for the English language and a curiosity for learning new things led me to become an Instructional Designer - someone who designs online courses. Then after a few years I switched to Technical Writing. For those of you who don't know, to put it in a nutshell, I write  or edit the user manuals for an application or product. Kind of like the small booklets you get when you buy a cell phone or an AC.

In my 17 years of working, I have never ever gotten a job through any kind of reference. The first few jobs came through newspaper ads and then came the online job sites and head hunters who led me to the rest of my jobs. I do not know what this means about my friends' circles. Maybe I do not make the right kind of friends or do not know the right people.

Over the years I have been witness to a number of strange events in office. In one of the organizations, I had a Manager and a Lead who were such good friends that they would come to office together, go home together, take leave together and leave the donkey work to us poor team members. Professionally they would help and support each other and when the time for appraisals came, the Manager would give the Lead the best rating  and dole out the others to us. This continued for about 8-9 years after which the two of them decided that the IT industry was not the right place for them and opted for early retirement. Whew!

At another organization, there is this very senior lady who chooses to come to office only 2-3 days a week. While in office, she does very little work and spends most of the time on the phone with her married boyfriend or her children. When she works from home, she cannot be reached through chat and responds hours later (if at all) to any email written to her. If you call her, you discover that she is off doing some personal work.

Then there is this very senior level person who shows a work profile of having worked in some of the major IT giants in India. However, he does not have a clue about project management. He recruits senior-level people luring them with talks of building a team. However, he has no idea how to go about it - does not know or follow any process and talks big in front of customers. He has got jobs through referrals all his life and he is able to show zero results and get away with it due to the fact that he has the backing of some big shots in the organization. And wait that is not all! He also has the temerity to bring on board an equally incompetent and inefficient lady. This lady and he are as close as two peas and they feed off each other. The lady sweet talks everyone else into doing her work and uses the guy's influence to get people to agree to it! The two of them spend most of their time in office figuring out how to set up a business of their own and openly use company resources to do this. Talk about brazenness!

This kind of setup, I see, is very common. People go places by sucking up to someone in power or sleeping with the boss. They get away with having no knowledge, with being lazy, with all kinds of nonsense, only because they know the right people. My question is what happens to the few competent, honest and sincere people who go to work to make a living and do not want to get into sycophancy?