The Engagement Tamasha

Last Saturday, when I tuned into one of the FM radio channels, the RJ was talking to a lady listener over phone. The lady informed the RJ that her company had arranged some team-building camp and she was participating in the same. The RJ quipped immediately –"why do these team-building camps are organized on Saturdays, why not on a weekday! Better give Saturday as an off-day. Who likes to be in a team-building camp on Saturday”. The lady listener just managed to chuckle a bit (what more can you expect when she is on-air!). But the sound of her expression told very clearly that she agreed with the RJ’s every word, every bit of it. A lazy Saturday would have engaged her and her team members more than the ‘team-building’ camp.

A global survey by The Workforce Institute at Kronos has revealed that many employees call in sick from work just to watch television or stay in bed when they are not suffering from any illness, with those in India and China leading the charts. China led all other surveyed regions with 71% of employees admitting to pretending to be sick, followed by India with 62%, Australia (58%), Canada (52%), the US (52%), Great Britain (43%) and Mexico (38%). Such unscheduled leaves affect the co-workers and organization negatively.

Of the surveyed, 44% employees in India said they called in sick because they felt stressed or needed a day off. In India and Mexico staying home and watching TV was the top choice followed by meeting up with friends and relatives. When asked what their employers could do to prevent this practice, most employees around the world felt that the opportunity to work from home and to take unpaid leave could help reduce this practice.

Moral of the story is very clear, employees all over the world highly value  some time-off from work more than anything occasionally. Repeated research studies like American Wellness survey, Audrey Tsui’s Asia Wellness Survey, MDRA & Outlook Indian study etc. have shown that the cost of prosperity has come in the form of long hours of work, extended commute hours, heightened levels of work stress and poor work-life balance. In times like these, a day-off could be far more engaging then all other weekend tamasha. Instead of a Fun-Friday afternoons, give that noon off, at least sometimes. And, encroaching weekends is the last thing companies can do…

Engagement like marketing is all about understanding the real needs of the target group and also it most productive that way. Anyone listening….??????

Do we need a President?

The week that went by saw furious parleys amongst the various parties for a consensus on the Presidential candidate. Political game was being played overtime in the corridors of the national capital. Sonia, Mamta, Mulayam, Jaya and the likes, playing their cards carefully, with the usual twists and turns in the game. Who will ally with whom was a million dollar question and perhaps still remains one. Each one wants their own president and more than a question of who is going to be the next occupant of the Raisina Hill, it was a more an issue of scoring political points and political mileage. All this at a time when the GDP growth rate has plummeted to 5.3%, industrial output is at an all-time low in the recent times and investors are shirking away from India. If this entire frantic search was for a Finance minister who can do something to change the course, then it would have been still some worth.


Ask the common man on the road, ask the small & big entrepreneurs, ask the corporate honchos, ask just about anybody… do we need a president or growth? I am sure that the answer will be latter, in majority of the cases. Yet, our entire political machinery is busy searching the new president. Growth is hit, businesses are hit, and that means less output, less consumer purchases, less money and more misery. How can the new President alter all of this? No clue… Yet our country seems to have only one national priority at this moment, negotiating the next president.

But should we be surprised? This is not the first time that we have been fooled by our political leaders in to believing non-issues as real issues and vice-versa, after all. Frankly I don’t care who shall be the next president…nor do many others in this nation I am sure. I want the GDP growth rate to improve because I know that my and my family’s welfare is in letting businesses & economy flourish. The best that government can do is to stay away from business and not waste tax-payer money in useless hunting.

Engagement stems from growth. So do everything possible to fuel the same. President can wait!

Transform HR or Perish

Another train accident, few people dead, many more injured and a dozen enquiry committees to do a post-mortem of what wrong. Months of wait before the report comes and then the usual finger-pointing, some token compensation to the injured or to the next kin of the deceased and more departmental enquiry based on the earlier enquiry report...the process just keeps becoming longer...and soon public interest is lost...as is everything else. If you live in India then getting used to such things doesn't take too long.

Anyways that's not the point. Some recent independent reports points to the fact that the human error is behind most rail accidents and even more shockingly the fact that most train drivers areoverworked & underslept. Some stats on how most train drivers are being given night duties at a stretch without the requisite break, much against the norms, to a large extent explains the increasing probability of human error. Putting employees and public life to risk consciously, is unacceptable.

Recently, the apex central bank of India RBI's data showed that for the first time the cost per employee of publicsector banks have exceeded that of private sector banks. On the other hand, it is a common knowledge that in the past less than a decade the private banks have long overtaken the public sector banks in terms of efficiency, performance and customer service. What does all that mean? Very simply, in the past couple of years whereas public sector banks have added more employee costs,, the private banks have added more customer & revenues. Despite the fact that public sector banks spent more per employee why did they did not do as well as the private banks?

So what is the point? Most Indian organizations especially the governmental instutions are in serious need for HR transformation. It has reached to a stage of transform or perish. For organizations like railways, PSU banks, the latter may be staring at their face soon, unfortunately. Air India, currently on life-support system, is already in that mode. Transforming HR is preceeded by understanding the new business imperatives, which in turn is preceeded by a firm's ability to appreciate the changes in the environmental context that includes political, economic, social, technological, legal etc.

My pessimism for the likes of railways, PSU banks comes from the fact that they are still ignorantly unperceptive about the drastic changes in the environment  Hence their chances of progressing further on the value-chain is negligible. Engagement of the internal and external stakeholders is only possible through transforming human resource function in such organizations. HR transformation requires organizational structures to alter.   

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