This year, no salary hikes. No bonus.

Feb was news and thoughts. March is real and panic. April will be restoration and pain. What about May-March’21? Let's look at what may happen.

We will have a huge impact on our physical health, mental health, personal finances, salaries and our lifestyle will get revised. True, we will get adjusted to our new normal very soon and here is an opportunity to look at it and know, think about it and plan, we must. Someone has to give you this news and I am doing that for you.

Our Salaries

I am assuming that most of the readers are salaried. March-April always brings hope from 2 definite quarters - salary increase and bonuses. 

Our companies lost 3 months of productivity.With varied intensity and depending on the businesses your company is in, the loss could be upwards of 25% 

Yes, most of our organisations are tech driven but we are also heavily dependent on sales. Sales cycles will never be the same and it takes time to come back. If you are in financial services, e-commerce, edu-tech, retail, travel or if you are dependent on any of these industries, the impact is high.

From management’s perspective, it’s 25% loss and they will scramble to save that 25% from somewhere else. Where can they find that missing 25% to survive? 

• Many surveys which came out in Jan this year spoke about an 8-10% increment budget for employees. 
• Many of our salaries also carry 5-15% as bonuses. 

These two add up to 25%.

 If your company spoke about IPO plans, if you were thinking about that secondary sale of your stock options or if you were planning to lay your hands on that next promotion, I am sorry. These may not happen for another 12 months. Look around you. It's evident.

As of today, few companies are already asking employees to go on leave without pay and few are deferring increments. And I am not even going in the direction of lay-offs and salary cuts. That threat is very real.

Personal finances

Many of you would have planned to 

• top-up and pay more on your housing loans, 
• some of you might have thought about buying a new car and 
• some of our vacation plans were centred around traveling to Europe. 

That’s most probably not going to happen. Our companies may give us a thin bonus, a deferred bonus or may postpone the same. And I believe the same applies to our increments too. With inflation and an increasingly alarming global trade market situation, we will have to live with the same salaries for one more year. Period.

Mental and physical health

With 6-8 hours of sleep, 8-10 hours of work, 1-2 hours of commute and 1-2 hours of getting ready to work, we have hardly spent any time at home during working days. 

Not now, not today. Working from home translates to working when your family is around. Many challenges surface due to mismatch of expectations. Our kids, our partners, our maintenance and our upkeep has always been some else’s responsibility. Not now. Not today.

Our partners and parents had a relatively relaxed routine without us during working days. Not now. Not today. 

The “all seeing” and the “omnipresent” manager is missing. But our thoughts on her or him remain the same. We strive harder to show our manager that we are working from home and not for home. 

FB for work brings joy only when we see most of our friends and colleagues, physically. We are not used to not seeing them on a regular basis.

At home, we tend to eat a lot. Some of us are also stress eaters. Home food, three times a day and with love is a definite recipe for some overweight. With gyms, parks and apartment swimming pools closed, overweight stays put.  

We are currently sipping a cocktail made of the above ingredients. Our mental and physical health takes a beating. 

Lifestyle changes

If you are in a start-up, funding is going to be a challenge for some. If you are a freelancer, there is going to be more competition. If you want to look for a new job, the cycle will be longer. 

With not much change in our salaries, increasing concerns about mental & physical health and a stress on our personal finances, our lifestyle is headed for a change. At surface level nothing changes but deep inside, everything changes.

How could we overcome it?

Step 1 - Acknowledge - this is not panic. This article is a probable prediction of the near future. If we can acknowledge that these things may happen, that’s the first step.

Step 2 - I am part of it - we tend to think that “this will not happen to me”. No. Not true. Let’s accept that all of us are in for a bumpy ride.

Step 3 - how long - good news is that this will not last for long. The World bank says the average life expectancy of Indians is 68.6 years and we are talking about just one bumpy year. That’s about 1.4%of our lifetime. 

Step 4 - tweaking our plans - relook at all our plans and let’s tweak it. 

Step 5 - communicate - let us communicate to all folks around us. Everyone understands that tough periods do come by and they don’t last forever. I wrote this article and asked my family to do edits. That's one way of communicating!

Good health and happy thinking! Stay safe and stay real!