ANNA’S DEATH – TIME FOR THE MANAGERS TO HAVE HEALTH CONVERSATIONS

The death of an Ernst & Young (EY) employee, Anna Sebastian Perayil at 26 , ?allegedly due to a gruelling workload, has triggered a conversation about the taxing work culture in India’s biggest firms. Certainly it was not an age to go for Anna.

This brings us to the fundamental question, “ As adults, who is responsible for our physical and mental health?”

The Indian culture places ?the implicit responsibility of our physical and mental health on our parents while we are growing up and on our spouse after we get married. However, work-life and consequently societal ?mores are changing rapidly in the new age India. Parents are increasingly having their own lives to manage and marriages are happening late with couples often having to live apart even after marriage in order to save their jobs. This places the onus of one’s health on ourselves - ?a daunting ask.

Anna’s death reminds me of a similar tragic incident in our organization about a decade ago. A newly joined employee died of a cardiac arrest while on an outbound training in Himachal Pradesh, which was part of their induction training. At that time, the parents of the deceased, who was their only child, moved pillar and post seeking retribution and the officials in charge of the outbound programme were placed under suspension for some period.

So, are these cases in isolation or pointers to a dangerous trend. I wish I had the data to make a deduction.

Hard work is essentially becoming a pre-requisite for youngsters as they move from campus to corporate. But aren’t we aware that our youngsters have to put in harrowingly long hours even to crack competitive exams and get ?little respite even after securing admission in A- list colleges and universities.

What is critical is your ability to assess your own capacity to work-hard and ability handle the consequential stress and schedule your workday accordingly . If it is in the Corporate world, it is imperative for all managers to assess the appetite of their employees to take hard work on? their platter and assign them tasks accordingly. Its nothing new that some employees will have the capacity and appetite work harder than others and handle stress better. Others may be able to give the same output by working smarter, delegating or collaborating. But while managers are told to engage in performance conversations with their employees ?on a regular basis, their HR must tell them to also engage in conversations about the mental and physical well being of their employees.

These health conversations should not be perfunctory or forced and should be recorded on a quarterly basis in the performance monitoring system of the organization. Any distress reported by the employee in these conversations should be acted upon by the Manager with active support of HR. They should symbolize the ?responsibility of your Company towards its most precious asset – its employees. A manager’s commitment to these conversations should be assessed by his employees and rated upon in the annual appraisal.

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