Don't call me. I am on Vacation.
So I worked in Mumbai a couple of years ago. And the head of that Business Unit was a devout family man. He would religiously take a couple of long vacations a year, to spend time with his family, travelling to far away places and sometimes just to spend time with his family playing and teaching music to his daughter and son. He made sure that during these breaks, he was totally and completely unavailable. If we rang him, he would not take calls, if we texted him, he would not reply. Before leaving for these sojourns, he would tell the administrative heads, " Don't call me when I'm away, its disturbing to be disturbed when I am on leave".
He also practiced this principle with his subordinates and abstained from making official calls to employees on leave. This is just one of the many extraordinary things I left behind when I moved into my current posting. People in that BU did many things that set the place apart. They worked in cross functional teams, this equipped them to step into each others shoes when needed, it drove them to respect one another since they understood each others limitations and the limitations of the roles that they were required to perform, there was great camaraderie and bonhomie among the employees that is difficult to find in an otherwise hyper competitive work-world. This helped the BU to deliver on the expectations and excel.
Such was the setting of this place where I worked for 4 long years but having moved on from there and having spent 2 years in a place where the culture is turned 180 degrees on its head from my prior experience, I have a few takeaways that I have come to believe help in making the work space a happy place and here they are for everybody's consumption, especially for the would-be leaders:
- Value the Janitor as much as you value the leaders - Be unrelenting in your pursuit to evolve a culture of magnanimity and respect. You will be delighted to see what this can do for your business. To be valued for what one does is simply the least one desires and deserves and the results can have a magical effect on the way each person delivers on his assignments.
- Pat the backs - Allow your employees to go ahead and try something new. They will succeed sometimes, sometimes they will fail. Pat their backs when they succeed and do it openly. Encourage them to taken longer strides. But when they fail, be there and watch their backs. Don't turn on them for making mistakes. Help them in dusting themselves off and in making fresh starts. It will inspire innovation and confidence in your employees and in this age of disruption these traits can help you stand apart from your competitors.
- Celebrate and mourn together - When a bunch of people come together and spend 8-9 hours a day under the same roof aspiring to work towards a single goal - the success of your company, they are nothing but a family bound together by shared values and common culture. As a leader, take part in celebrating personal milestones, be happy and available in celebrating them with your employees. At the same time, be there to give those warm hugs to those mourning the loss of some dear ones. It will tell your employees that you care and that you truly value them.
- Invest in your people - Richard Branson once said, "Train your people well enough so they can leave and treat them well enough so they don't." Invest in this idea and you will see magic unfold before your eyes. Employees who want to learn are a great asset and their need and desire to learn has to be satiated through valid means. Through their acquired knowledge of concepts and understanding of business, they can take your business to another level.
- Be Vacation friendly - As a leader, it is for you to set the tone for your subordinates to follow. Remember, we work to live not the other way round. Value the time you spend with your family and take vacations. The world is truly beautiful and it deserves to be traveled and explored. So, make plans and be out under the sun on as many occasions as your schedule allows you to. Encourage the same to your employees. Happy and content people make for the best employees as per many surveys.
6. No late night emails - We often fall for the trap of looking hard working by sending emails during late hours or on the weekends. On 20th Jan, 2019, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, sent an email to his employees at 01:21 AM retrenching 7% of its full time employee headcount and asking only the ones who are ready to put absolutely everything on line for Tesla's survival to stay back. This is not a sustainable mechanism to run any kind of business for the simple reason that this level of expectation will not meet the desired end in the long term. Also, when we make these strategies a habit, we risk ourselves to be looked at as someone who has no respect for family time, not of ours nor of our employees. It does the morale more damage than good. Refrain from indulging in such tactics and strictly abstain from making them a habit.
Its imperative that we value the hands that work with us in our pursuits and appraise them from time to time and be generous with positive feedbacks and discrete with disapproval and reprimands. It is the people, real flesh and blood, with all their potential, that will either help us win the battle this generation of disruptive entrepreneurs are throwing at us or break it due to our silence and ignorance towards the need to evolve ourselves into a more forward looking workspace.
Let me hear your voices on this ..what do you think?
Deputy Manager at BHEL | PGDM-IMT GZB | B-Tech, CSE, NIT Warangal | 13+ Work EXP | Gold Certified by GEM | CISP Certified | CCNA Certified | Research Fellowship by DST, GOI | Research Associate at ISRO,DRDO.
2 周Sonia, it's great to see you prioritizing time for yourself. Enjoy your vacation and come back recharged!
AGM (retired) at BHEL
6 年Well written.? Well articulated.
mobilizing capital for nation building
6 年Gd one. Hope u r trying to implement some of these ideas at yr new place.
Govt. of India | IIM Lucknow | NIT Nagpur | ADB-JSP Scholarship Awardee| Corporate Strategy, Policy & Planning, Sales & Marketing, Operations | Metals & Mining
6 年Hi Sonia, I must say this is a splendid account of what precisely the PSUs need to practise today – in the ever changing – ever evolving domain of workspace dynamics. Just to set a perspective on this comment and for the sake of introductions - I am taking the liberty of commenting on this post – pardon me forbearingly for the intentional nudge. Gone are the days when talented workers had limited career options and they would inevitably fall into the trap of so called “sarkari naukri”. The perilous resolve to join one of these “sarkari” jobs – early in one’s career - has deep-rooted ramifications (I have my own set of cynical idiosyncrasies). These jobs raise you to a pedestal higher than any other (read private organizations), they provide wide exposure, excellent remuneration, great learning opportunities and responsibility structure initially, but as you move higher up in the hierarchy, there is a certain “un-learning” that is expected of you. It takes a lot of hard-work and courage to keep the zeal to perform and contribute alive in you. Rewards and recognition, vacations, good interpersonal-relations among team-members irrespective of their designation etc - are good motivators for teams achieving their limited goal over the shorter term but are perhaps often limited to a small section of employees – a department – a unit or maybe an entire building. The prime movers for large organizations like yours or mine lie somewhere else, as the hierarchy (Maslow’s) has already been breached for all the employees and further the recruits these days are smarter than what they used to be. Their needs are intertwined and intermingled and far too complex to be met by these simple peripheral niceties/ endeavors of empathy. Today’s Managers and their subordinates are both suspicious of each other’s actions. The drivers of change have to be introduced at a macro-level – for any real improvement. Hope you are aware about the Peter Principle. PS : Did I mention about the 4 work-day week people have subscribed to, in some other parts of the World? :P
International Project Management, Business Development, Strategic Management
6 年Fabulous, Sonia! The beginning of the article was so spontaneous that I was led into the rest of it still being intoxicated of the start. This is an HR trick, Never mind! With that janitor thing… couldn’t agree more… The equality of all people… and sharing and caring… matters—matters a lot, actually. It kinda gives meaning to the otherwise mundane professional existence. Ain’t all the attendants in my office my brethren? Together, we share so much of the workload, so much of the emotions, and we trust them with so much of information, that it makes me believe they deserve more love and respect than we could ever give them. The same goes for all the other unsung colleagues. Now that you have set the tone for the year, you gotta churn out at least an article a month.? And, I, having written so much in a day, need a vacation so long, that I forget all my passwords!