Around 14 years back, at a time when millennials had started entering the workforce in large number, an IT major in India, let’s call it ‘I’ well-known for its progressive HR policies, made a huge blunder that led to not only poor publicity of the company, but also damaged employee engagement and tarnished its reputation and employer brand. In the subsequent best employer surveys, the company dropped sharply from being the number one company to 5th or 6th rank. One of the prime reasons that came out of these surveys as the cause of this drop was poor internal communication and decisions of leaders that did not reflect contextual realities.
Cut to 2024, is it once again on the path to commit similar
blunder again? Have they and their contemporaries not learnt lessons from their
past mistakes? Let’s see.
It all started for this company around 2010 when they
started receiving lots of complaints about poor resolution client problems. The
company in turn hired an independent consultant to investigate into the matter.
The investigation revealed that many employees in client-facing role had been
promoted out of retention pressures, rather than merit and hence may not be well-prepared
to meet the demands of the role. Owing to this, their ability to understand client
needs and resolve their problems was not as efficient as it should be. To resolve
this issue the consultant developed a role-based assessment that would reassess
the competency of every member of the company in client-facing roles. The
implementation of this new role assessment led to around 5000 demotions in the
company.
The employees were angered by this approach of the company
and their anger burst on social media where they started venting their
frustration. The company fearing a serious backlash gave a knee-jerk response
to such protests and attempted to clamp-down the same by introducing a strict
social media policy. The obvious attempt to gag the employee voice led to such
expressions going ballistic on social media. Many employees created anonymous
accounts and started posting abusive content about the company on social media.
In short, it became bad to worse!
This also drew serious public criticism about the company.
Clearly the internal communication had not remained as efficient as it used to
when the company was smaller. The internal communication strategy had not been
able to keep-up the pace of its growth. Result, many leadership decisions had
not been communicated well down the ranks, resulting in misconstrued perceptions
and strong emptions against the company among the employees. The leadership
decisions, their response when faced with criticism and then backstepping revealed
that they had a poor understanding of the new generation, their life and their
media. Finally, after much damage had been done, sense seemed to prevail in the
company when they decided to introduce a Facebook equivalent within the company
(like an internal Facebook) for the employees to freely express their opinions.
They also introduced a company radio service for the employees to communicate
important decisions and the rationale behind those decisions.
Déjà vu Moment?
14 years later, at a time when now Gen Z entering the
workforce in hordes and are set to dominate workforce, along with younger
millennials, in years to come, the company’s leadership seems to be in similar conundrum.
Recently, it has started introducing policies to force employees to work-from-office
for most days of the week. Employees who choose to work remotely would face repercussions
if they do not work from office. This is seen mostly as an arm-twisting
technique by the Gen Z employees and younger millennials who would like to have
greater autonomy in choosing their work approach – remote, in-person or hybrid,
depending on their choice, rather then being forced to come to office for work.
As long as the work gets done and the productivity is maintained they see no
reason why companies must arm-twist them into physically attending work. The
Covid era has clearly thrashed-out the myths propagated about remote working. Besides,
high rental cost, higher commute cost and time considering the clogged roads of
most metros, have encouraged younger generation employees to work remotely more
often than not.
Other contemporary company have followed suit. Another IT company let’s call it ‘W’ has reportedly sent emails to their employees giving them an ultimatum that if they fail to report physically in the office for a minimum of 3 days in a week, they will lose their paid leaves. Another company let’s call it ‘T’ has linked variable pay to presence of employees in office. If their attendance in office falls below a particular percentage, they would lose all of their variable pay and as their attendance in office would improve, so would their chances of getting a higher variable pay. And all these years we thought variable pay was linked to performance, but now it seems it is linked to attendance!!!
The logic behind such arm-twisting seems hazy and not linked
to their performance. It’s either poor HR or poor leadership thinking who
continue to poorly understand the Gen Zs and younger millennial generations and
impose irrational arbitrary policies on them. Such decisions are once again
reflective that the leaders of these companies have poor understanding of new
generation’s life realties and expectation from work. Gen Z employees who value
work but value life equally, flexibility at work goes a long way in engaging
them. Rather than losing 3 hours in commute every day, Gen Z would rather
prefer to use that time to finish their work early and get on with their life.
Work-from-office cannot be simply imposed if there is no evidence that it leads
to better performance or productivity.
The signs of growing opposition from the employees are
already evident. For instance, ‘Coffee
Badging’ is becoming commonplace thing where employees are coming to work
to show their faces and then leaving after they have a coffee. This rise in
tokenism to thwart the forced office attendance will only erode productivity, lead
to higher loss of work time, poor engagement and in the medium run might lead
to rise in attrition and losses.
Are these companies committing the same mistake that ‘I’
committed 14 years back? Have they and their contemporaries learnt from those
mistakes? Is it time for leadership to reflect on their decisions and accept
the new direction in which the future of work is heading?
