Work-Life Balance Is Not The Real Issue

When I started my journey, before two and half decades, the term work-life balance was rarely used in IT industry. The work-culture was value based and pretty mature. Delivery deadlines and pressures were part and parcel of work-life however no complaints and no seeking refuges in the terms like work-life balance. HR persons had individual connects and always ready to help and solve your issues. Employees were valued assets for the organizations.

As the businesses expanded, companies flourished and grew bigger, competition got tougher. I started seeing changes in all aspects and operational approaches. Sales guys tightened the noose, started throwing unrealistic promises at customers to crack the deal which in turn started manifesting in increased work hours and micro-management. Core values were allowed to be slowly diluted. Recruitment criteria was compromised to get more heads on board. Within a decade or so this resulted into work-culture change. The productivity figures dipped as expected and we saw the rise of Performance Appraisals. Although the focus was on dishonest people, it affected good people too for no good reasons. Until the honest to dishonest people ratio was greater, the productivity figures were stable as the slack from dishonest people were covered up by others. However as the percentage of dishonest(and incompetent) people in industry grew, this balance was no more possible. It started taking toll on good people whereas the baddies started creating fuss about the work pressure, workload and burdens. When Performance Appraisals failed, we saw another evil finding its way in IT called Timesheets. Everyone was now supposed to fill in the work they did hour-wise. Honest people started complaining it as waste of time whereas the timesheets of dishonest people were always submitted ahead of time. And then came the web monitors and screen monitors and lot of vigilance tools to try to get the productivity back on track but to no avail.

Even after 40 years of so called successful operations, the IT industry is still struggling to find a foolproof way of identifying and draining the dishonest workforce who are piggybacking like leeches on the honest people. Performance Appraisals are still far from transparent and influenced by managers-cum-politicians who would sacrifice a C bander to retain a D bander by giving him/her a B. The side-effects are going to manifest in various ways like productivity loss, aggressive targets, job-dissatisfaction, stress, talent drain etc. There has to be balance in every aspect of the life. Our existence here is a perfect example of mysterious balance in the universe. But balance had to be restored where we lost it. Balance is required in:

• Profits and Morality
• Politics and Authenticity
• Ill-power and Willpower
• Quantity and Quality
• Salaries and Productivity

The Biggest Blunder by IT industry is not appointing an Apex body to check the unethical, unilateral and self-destructive decisions. A strong governing body for the industry is long long due which can re-write and enforce the rules with the objective to restore the lost glory of the IT industry that once valued talented, honest and hardworking people.

Other blunders followed:

• Unruly lateral hiring by offering ridiculous packages which infused the job-jumping culture.
• Undermining important aspects of the HR function and limiting it to recruitment.
• Diluting the recruitment standards which opened the gates for incompetent workforce

We all know that headcount in isolation is a false growth indicator for the company. A simple mathematical calculation on our workforce will tell us that if everybody in the company work sincerely for the designated hours, no one is required to slog and we will have a relaxed workforce. We ought to defragment our company's hard-disk, throw away the bad sectors, release the slots for deserving candidates. Everyone knows that state of affairs demand course correction but no one wants to be in the bad books of equity market. We are suffering our own creation. Instead of fixing the productivity leaks, when the CXOs of the companies themselves are playing games with the customer, cheating them left, right and center to achieve their own targets how can we expect your workforce to be honest in their job. This is our situation when private sector is still well guarded from government policies. Imagine what a mess we would have been in, if we had stringent Labor Laws like Germany. If we keep beating around the bush to avoid biting the bullet, I think we can only hope for a management superhero from some animation studio to come to our rescue.