Thanks V.Narayan Sir for sharing your perspective as an employer and entrepreneur.
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Originally Posted by V.Narayan
This is a sanguine view of the employee. This does not reflect the view of the employer regardless of B.S. the likes of TCS tried putting out in 2020. On the whole productivity fell, security compromises sky rocketed, fraud by employees, your very own colleagues, would surprise you and employers tolerated WFH because of the global crises of the pandemic and not because it was a panacea of the way forward. Some like TCS did the industry a disfavour by newspaper headlines that were divorced from reality.
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Will focus on the '
fraud' thing by employees. I won't deny or pretend to deny that people didn't misuse the WFH. There were news about employees getting fired for moonlighting. To me, this was a very extreme and serious case.
There would be other
not-so-serious scenarios where employees shirked work by using alibi like power cuts (A father boosted how his WFH son uses alibi to take a break or run some personal errands. The 'son' is in in non IT field). Sometimes, these things boil down to the work culture of the organization. E.g. If I need a break or need to run an errand, I just have to drop an email to my stakeholders about my unavailability and no questions asked. So, we were transparent about our 'away times'.
Now, any privilege or benefit or policy has a potential of being misused. There will be a percentage of people who will misuse, bring bad name to the policy/privilege and cause a larger harm. E.g. it's an open secret how LTA/LTC policy is misused or what type of medical bills would be submitted to save tax.
Misuse is not the critical part but how do we prevent the misuse is critical. However, our Indian
bureaucratic mindset will find the easiest way to counter misuse i.e. scrap the policy/privilege/benefit. Few noteworthy instances:
- A stampede three decades ago at a monument resulted in closure rather than implementing crowd control measure. This is in contrast with how things are handled at London's Monument To Great Fire. Both are tall structures with narrow stair case
- We cannot segregate and manage waste, so we will ban single use plastic
- We cannot enforce the opacity or transparency of sun films in vehicles, so we will ban the sun film
Similarly, we want to ban WFH just because few employees misuse it. The misuse can be easily eliminated by leveraging processes and technology.
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Originally Posted by V.Narayan For employees who yell now about commute time my only comment is - you knew of the commute before you took the job, you took it for whatever reason {despite usually a choice} so please own your decision. |
I am one of those employees who knew that I will have to commute 60-70 KMs a day when I bought a house couple of decades back. There are many people like me across all industry verticals and not just in IT.
However, as the business leaders say that
Change is the only Constant. E.g. With recession, mergers and acquisitions the business scenarios and priorities change. Employees are told to move out. They are supposed to adjust to the changes in their role/profiles and org structures.
Similarly, the employers and businesses need to embrace the WFH model as a change in working model rather than resist it.
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Originally Posted by Jaguar Thanks for explaining your POV. As you said it is the culture in Berlin and probably the EU rather than the firm's culture. And that is why it works for you.
I have first-hand experience with only India and the US. And a regular 2-hour lunch break would not be considered normal in either of these places. Being in the IT industry, some might still pull this off once in a while but what about the majority? |
You reminded me of a discussion that I had during a course of interview long time back. I was being interviewed by a gentleman in a senior position who had recently returned to India after a long overseas stint.
He asked me to share my thoughts about the work culture. I told him look at a daily routine of employees in a typical IT company:
- People arrive around 9 AM,
- check their mails, both office and personal. The interview happened in pre-social media era
- wait for their buddies to arrive
- morning tea and breakfast break
- It's already 10-11 AM by this time
- Some work and/or meetings
- By 12:30 preparations for lunch start
- Back at desk by 1:30 - 2 after lunch and walk
- Some work and/or meetings
- Return Home: No fixed time, primarily depends on meetings with overseas stakeholders
and he was laughing in splits.